Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (29 March [O.S. 17 March] 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph Stalin's secret police chiefs, serving as head of the NKVD from 1938 to 1945 during the country's involvement in the Second World War.
An ethnic Georgian, Beria enlisted in the Cheka in 1920, and quickly rose through its ranks. He transferred to Communist Party work in the Caucasus in the 1930s, and in 1938 was appointed head of the NKVD by Stalin. Described by Stalin as his "own Himmler", his ascent marked the end of Stalin's Great Purge carried out by Nikolai Yezhov, whom Beria purged. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Beria organized the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia, and after the occupation of the Baltic states and parts of Romania in 1940, he oversaw the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians to remote areas or Gulag camps. In 1940, Beria began a new purge of the Red Army. After Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was appointed to the State Defense Committee, overseeing security.
Beria expanded the system of forced labour, mobilizing millions of Gulag prisoners into wartime production. He also was in charge of NKVD units responsible for barrier and partisan intelligence and sabotage operations on the Eastern Front. In 1943–44, Beria oversaw the mass deportations of millions of ethnic minorities from the Caucasus, actions which have been described by many scholars as ethnic cleansing or genocide. Beria was also responsible for supervising secret Gulag detention facilities for scientists and engineers, known as sharashkas. From 1945, he oversaw the Soviet atomic bomb project, to which Stalin gave priority; its first nuclear test was in 1949. After the war, Beria was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1945, and promoted to a full member of the Politburo in 1946. Throughout his career in politics, he was known for using his power in the Soviet government to sexually abuse dozens of women and girls.
After Stalin's death in March 1953, Beria became head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and a First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. He also formed a triumvirate (a.k.a. troika) alongside Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov which briefly led the country in Stalin's place. By June 1953, Beria was removed from power in a coup organized with the support of his colleagues in the Soviet leadership and Marshal Georgy Zhukov. He was arrested, tried for treason and other offenses, and ultimately executed on 23 December 1953.
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was born in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, in the Sukhum Okrug of the Kutais Governorate (now Gulripshi District, Abkhazia, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire). He grew up in a Georgian Orthodox family; his mother, Marta Jaqeli (1868–1955), was deeply religious and church-going. Marta was from the Guria region, descended from the House of Jaqeli, and was a widow before marrying Beria's father, Pavle Beria (1872–1922), a landowner in Sukhumi Okrug, from the Mingrelian ethnic group.
Beria attended a technical school in Sukhumi, and later claimed to have joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 while a student in the Baku Polytechnicum (subsequently known as the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy). According to Olga Shatunovskaya, he worked as a spy for the Dashnakists and for the Reds as power swung back and forth. The Bolsheviks arrested him for treason and planned to execute him. However, the fighting erupted and he was saved from execution because there was not enough time to arrange his shooting. While in prison, Beria formed a connection with Nina Gegechkori (1905–1991), his cellmate's niece, and they eloped on a train.
At that time, a Bolshevik revolt took place in the Menshevik-controlled Democratic Republic of Georgia, and the Red Army subsequently invaded. The Cheka became heavily involved in the conflict, which resulted in the defeat of the Mensheviks and the formation of the Georgian SSR. Between 1922 and 1924, Beria was deputy chairman of the Georgian OGPU (as Cheka had been renamed).
He then led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising in 1924, after which up to 10,000 people were executed. Between 1924 and 1927, he was head of the secret political department of the Transcaucasian SFSR OGPU. In December 1926, he was appointed Chairman of the Georgian OGPU, and deputy chairman for the Transcaucasian OGPU. In 1929-1930, he was enlisted in the Azerbaijani OGPU, the Bolshevik secret police, by Mir Jafar Baghirov.
Beria and Joseph Stalin first met in summer 1931, when Stalin took a six-week rest in Tsqaltubo, and Beria took personal charge of his security. Stalin was unimpressed by most of the local party leaders, chosen by the former Georgian party boss, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, but writing to Lazar Kaganovich in August 1932, Stalin commented that "Beria makes a good impression. He is a good organizer, an efficient, capable functionary." According to Stalin's daughter Svetlana:
He was a magnificent specimen of the artful courtier, the embodiment of Oriental perfidy, flattery and hypocrisy who had succeed[ed] in confounding even my father, a man whom it was ordinarily difficult to deceive. A good deal that this monster did is now a blot on my father's name.
Stalin had already encountered difficulties in the Transcaucasus in 1930, when the party chief Vissarion Lominadze was urging a more moderate policy toward collectivisation, making Stalin more receptive to Beria's claims of disloyal behaviour by several leading party officials in Georgia. In October 1931, when Stalin proposed to appoint Beria Second Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party Central Committee and Second Secretary of the Transcaucasian party, the First Secretary Lavrenty Kartvelishvili exclaimed: "I refuse to work with that charlatan!" Ordzhonikidze also objected to the promotion. Despite the objections, the appointment went through. Within a month, Beria rose to the position of First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party. Kartvelishvili was replaced by Mamia Orakhelashvili as the First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Party Committee, but wrote to Stalin and Ordzhonikidze in August 1932 asking to be allowed to resign because he could not work with Beria as his deputy. On 9 October 1932, Beria was appointed party leader for the whole Transcaucasian region. He also retained his post as First Secretary of the Georgian CP. In 1933, he promoted his old ally, Baghirov, to the head of the Azerbaijani communist party. He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1934.
During this time, he began to attack fellow members of the Georgian Communist Party, particularly Gaioz Devdariani, who served as Minister of Education of the Georgian SSR. Beria ordered the executions of Devdariani's brothers George and Shalva. In 1935, Beria cemented his place in Stalin's entourage with a lengthy oration titled, "On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia" (later published as a book), which emphasised Stalin's role. It quoted from what purported to be police reports from early in the century, which identified Stalin, under his real name Jugashvili, as the leader of the Social Democrats (Marxists) in Georgia and Azerbaijan, though as the historian Bertram Wolfe noted: "These new finds tell a different story and even speak another language from all police documents and Bolshevik reminiscences published [...] while Lenin was alive. The language sounds uncommonly like Beria's own."
In the first couple of years of mass arrests of members of the Communist Party and Soviet government that began after the assassination of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov (1 December 1934), Beria was one of the few regional party leaders considered ruthless enough to purge the region under his control, without outside interference. On 9 July 1936, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Armenian Communist Party, Aghasi Khanjian was found dead from a bullet wound. It was officially announced that he had committed suicide, and he was retrospectively denounced as an enemy of the people, but in 1961, the then head of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin reported that he had been murdered by Beria. In December 1936, Nikolai Yezhov, the newly appointed commissar of the NKVD, the ministry which oversaw the state security and police forces, reported that more than 300 people had been arrested in Georgia in the previous few weeks.