Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant

This month, we’re taking a look at the sort of sociopath that’s drawn to socialism, making this week’s book of the week, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant by Amy Knight.

Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria was born March 29, 1899, in Merkheuli, Sukhumi district of Georgia, the country not the state, and was a member of the Mingrelian ethnic group, which was predominantly the peasant population of Georgia and Beria himself was from a poor peasant family, and he sort of struggled with this Mingrelian ethnic accent his whole life. Being from Georgia was a heritage he shared with Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili aka Joseph Stalin.

By October 1915 he had discovered Marxism and in March 1917 Beria joined the Bolsheviks, and he remained a staunch Bolshevik for the rest of his life. By the fall of 1919 the Bolsheviks had Beria conducting counterintelligence operations against the Musavat government which was then in charge of Georgia. So by 20, Beria was set on his course of spy vs spy, which eventually led to his future career paths. However, this also came back to bite in the in the ass, as the charge of spying FOR the Musavat, rather than on the Musavat, would haunt Beria virtually all his life.

By 1920 Beria was assigned to work as a deputy chairman of the Military Tribunal of the Eleventh Army, where he began to pick up the punitive measures he would use to great effect as his career progressed. It was during this time that he met M D Bagirov who would be a lifelong friend and compatriot, who would also fall at the same time Beria did.

It was during the 1920’s that Beria really got his start as the master of torture that would become his legacy and what he was known for.

In 1921 he married Nino Gegechkori and they had a son together, Sergo Beria, in 1924. By 1926 Beria was made chairman of the Georgian GPU, which is the state political directorate, basically, in charge of the Socialist party in Georgia. And the political party was over the state actors. And he just keeps moving up the party ranks, taking charge of progressively bigger projects, ultimately being in charge of party purges in Georgia, before being transferred to Lubianka Prison in Moscow, which was THE prison intake for The Gulag Archipelago.

Throughout all of this, Beria started getting a reputation as a vigorous rapist, and this reputation would be well known throughout his life. NO ONE objected to this…I mean his victims I’m sure objected, but the party was A-OK with this, because rape achieves results. It’s an effective form of torture against women and can be used to bring men into line because hey…confess your sins or I’ll rape your daughter in front of you. This activity was documented in full in both The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and in The White Pill by Michael Malice.

At one point the author posits that Stalin might not have known about Beria’s reputation as a rapist or might not have sanctioned it. And I think she’s basing this off of this picture of Beria with Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, with Stalin in the background, and if Stalin knew about Beria’s reputation, why would he let Beria hold his daughter like that.

Well, first off, Stalin is THERE. He’s literally right there. So, Beria is probably not going to through a what, 7-year-old child, down on the ground with the literal head of the socialist party sitting right there. But, from The White Pill, we learned that Stalin warned his adult daughter to NEVER be alone with Beria. So, Stalin knew. Most likely it was understood that Beria would only play his games with inmates and “enemies of the state.”

Also…LOOK at this picture.

Svetlana Stalin and Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria

Close up

Svetlana is NOT comfortable. Her arms are braced to get away and the look on her face. Fucking haunting man.

So, after more purges and being in charge of Lubyanka Prison, Beria was put in charge of the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, at the start of WWII, and he would hold this position until the end of the war. So, he’s the guy that determined that if any Soviet soldiers were captured by Germans, then they were automatically state traitors and would then be sent to the Gulags when they returned to Russia. He was also put in charge of the Soviet atomic project during the war, and after the war, he was finally granted full politburo membership and was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Now, during all of this, Beria works his way closer and closer to Stalin, and I think the western world assumed Beria was the heir apparent to Stalin’s position; however, Stalin was paranoid about being overthrown before his time and never named any heir apparent, keeping his inner circle.

Beria was instrumental in sending millions to the Gulags across all the Soviet States. He did, interestingly, try to minimize the damage in his native Georgia. But the damage and loss of life was still tremendous, in the several thousand range culled from Georgia.

In addition to being a sadist, and a skilled game master in the political arena, building up his own reputation in Stalin’s eyes and working his way up to third in the country, behind Stalin and Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 that was the Russian/German treaty that split Poland between the two.  And Beria had a lot to make up for with that treaty, as he fully backed Molotov and the treaty and when Hitler violates the treaty, Beria had to induce a new round of purges to kind of demonstrate his own party loyalty and kind of bury his support of that pact under more atrocities.

He did all this, rising through the ranks and becoming Stalin’s confidante, by feeding Stalin’s insecurities. He recognized someone who was paranoid, and he fed Stalin’s paranoia, playing the game masterfully and always positioning himself next to the master. And while it worked to a certain degree, Stalin’s paranoia was so great, that some part of him recognized Beria as a snake in the grass and he refused to name any successor, and certainly not Beria. Stalin was quite concerned that if he named a successor, he would shortly after being assassinated by the named successor.

Now, where everything went downhill, and I mean FAST, was on March 5, 1953, when Stalin died. NO ONE believed Beria was actually grieving over this, and in fact he acted fast to try and liberalize and roll back some of Stalin’s more draconian policies, that Beria had actively enforced as recently as six months prior. And his policies had widespread popular support with the people. What they did not have was the support of the politburo and other political leaders.

At the time of Stalin’s death, you had Beria and his team on one side, and Nikita Kruschev and his team on the other. Molotov, while still nominally second in command, was more or less retired and only a figurehead. So Kruschev saw Beria moving publicly to take over, and Kruschev moved privately to form coalitions that would take Beria out, and on June 25, 1953, they did exactly that, by placing Beria under arrest for being a spy…that OLD story about being a spy for the Musavat’s back during the Bolshevic revolution, and that he was an enemy of the state. And literally all the same tactics that he used to torture and jail that were reported in full in The Gulag Archipelago, were used to prove his own guilt. There was a very neat rounding out and sort of synchronicity in Beria’s story and that of Herman Goering. One of the judges who sat at Goering’s trial at Nuremburg was Roman Andreyevich Rudenko. Rudenko was the prosecuting attorney at Beria’s trial. Author Amy Knight pointed out that Goering was the creator of the Gestapo and was the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe. Beria was in charge of the internal affairs bureau and in charge of military operations of the NKVD during WWII. Both were looked down on by their respective leaders and not trusted to take over. Goering escaped death at Hitler’s order, but ultimately died at the outcome of the Nuremburg trials. And Beria outlived Stalin, but by no more than six to nine months. There is actually some question as to WHEN Beria was executed. It has been speculated that he was executed at the time of his arrest in June 1953. But officially, he was tried in camera, meaning behind closed doors, in December 1953 and officially executed on December 23, 1953.

Russian’s do things with extreme efficiency. If he did live to December, he was found guilty of all crimes on December 23 and immediately executed.

This book is not quite what I was expecting. I was expecting a deep foray into all the evil, twisted, torturous things Beria did.  And that is NOT what this book is about, the tortures that Beria used and enforced. This book is just a straight biography of Beria, which shocked the hell out of me. I was expecting a depressing foray into hell, akin to The Gulag Archipelago. The book does cover that Beria was, essentially, a sadist. And it was that sadism that brought him high favor with Stalin. And whether or not he had anti-social personality disorder, he was widely viewed with fear. Even foreign diplomats who visited the Soviet Union knew there was something severely off about Beria. But overall, if you want to know about WHAT Beria did, this is not the book. There are other books that cover that, starting most definitely with Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Michael Malice. And you can also read Elinor Lippor, who was an Englishwoman imprisoned in the Gulag system and escaped, writing about her experiences in Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps.

But if you want to understand the political rise of Beria and how he came to be the number three man in the USSR, this book lays out how a sociopath social climbs his way to the top.

This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on June 4, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.