Lavrenty Beria
Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (Лавре́нтий Па́влович Бе́рия) (29 March, 1899 - 23 December, 1953) was a Soviet Communist functionary. He presided over the NKVD, the Soviet secret police and predecessor to the KGB, during much of Stalin's rule.
 Lavrenty Beria.  |
Like Stalin, Beria was an ethnic Georgian. Born in Merkheuli in Abkhazia (Georgia), Beria began his career in the Cheka (the early Soviet secret police) and became Party Secretary in his home country. In 1938, Stalin made him head of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police force, which organised the mass arrests and executions of suspected dissidents. Beria has also been held responsible for war crimes committed in World War Two. For example, Beria prepared an order of execution for 25,700 Polish intellectuals, including 14,700 Polish POWs (known as the Katyn massacre), signed by members of the Politburo on March 5, 1940. He was a member of the Politburo from 1946 to 1953.
On March 5, 1953, Stalin died four days after collapsing during the night following a dinner with Beria, Georgi Malenkov, Nikolay Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev. Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage. However, the political memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claim that Beria boasted to Molotov that he had poisoned Stalin, although no hard evidence was ever produced to support this assertion. There is hard evidence, however, that for many hours after Stalin was found unconscious, Beria denied medical help to Stalin, claiming that Stalin was "sleeping".
Beria considered himself to be the natural successor to Stalin, but three months after Stalin's death in 1953 Beria was ousted by Nikita Khrushchev, and arrested in June of 1953, tried, and shot in December of 1953. His trial was a closed affair, but evidence of his involvement in numerous rapes and tortures was unconvered. In March of 2000 the Supreme Court of Russia refused to rehabilitate him. The refusal was based on the grounds of his proven crimes against humanity.