Lavrentiy Beria (29 March 1899-23 December 1953) was the Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs from 25 November 1938 to 29 December 1945 (succeeding Nikolai Yezhov and preceding Sergei Kruglov) and from 5 March to 26 June 1953 (succeeding Semyon Ignatyev and preceding Sergei Kruglov). As the Interior Minister of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, he was the man responsible for many of the executions during the Great Purge, finding crimes to fit the reasons for many people's deaths. They would be avenged when Beria was tortured to death during Nikita Khrushchev's 1953 coup in the USSR.
Biography[]
Lavrentiy Beria was born on 29 March 1899 in Merkheuli, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Merkheuli, Abkhazia). Beria was a member of an anti-Bolshevik group in Baku during the Russian Civil War, and he was spared at the behest of Sergey Kirov when Baku fell to the Red Army on 28 April 1920. That same year, he joined the Cheka secret police of the Russian SFSR, and he had 10,000 people executed after putting down the Georgian national uprising of 1924.
In August 1938, Joseph Stalin made him chief of the NKVD, and he then had him appointed Interior Minister on 25 November 1938. In this position, he was responsible for executing anti-Stalinist elements of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, including the "Old Bolsheviks" who were anti-revisionist Marxists and Leninists. Beria also had 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, and other refugees massacred in the 1940 Katyn massacre during World War II, and he purged the Red Army and related industries from October 1940 to February 1942. In 1944, Beria was tasked with rooting out perceived anti-Soviet and collaborationist ethnic groups such as Chechens, Ingushes, Tatars, Greeks, and Germans, and they were deported to Central Asia, with many dying along the way.
Beria in 1953
Beria was also useful in espionage, and he was responsible for overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project from 1944 to 29 August 1949. He ran a successful espionage campaign against the United States at the start of the Cold War, and he used 330,000 gulag prisoners to work on the project. In July 1945, Beria was promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union, although he never held a traditional military command. Beria began to fall from power during the years after the war, resigning from his NKVD command in January 1946. Nevertheless, he was still responsible for Stalin's state security, and he organized the destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which he had ironically helped to form in 1942. Stalin, who was increasing his anti-Semitism after the end of World War II, had the NKVD murder Solomon Mikhoels and have his body run over to make it look like a traffic accident.
Beria's body being dragged away
Beria and men such as Vsevolod Merkulov ran the new KGB as the "Georgian mafia", and Beria allied with Georgy Malenkov, a senior CPSU official who was to succeed Stalin on his death, and his troika. Beria, Malenkov, and Vyacheslav Molotov emerged as the three leaders of the USSR after Stalin's death in 1953. His misjudgment of other Soviet leaders led to his doom when Marshal Georgy Zhukov led a 1953 coup to install Nikita Khrushchev as the new Soviet premier, and Beria was tortured before Pavel Batitsky executed Beria, his protege Vsevolod Merkulov, and five associates on 23 December 1953.