Beria - My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin

For almost twenty years, two men from Georgia dominated the Russians and its empire: Stalin and Beria, as head of what was to become the KGB. This book is a memoir of the daily life of these two men who sent millions to their graves. It vividly paints Stalin’s increasingly psychotic nature, but also the incomprehensible loyalty that Stalin inspired among women including the author’s mother. It contains Sergo’s own fascinating anecdotes, among them, an account of the time he was chased by Svetlana, Stalin’s nymphomaniac daughter. Upon Stalin’s mysterious death, Beria dramatically lost the struggle for power with Khrushchev, a Russian, who murdered him with the aid of his fellow politburo members. More than any book currently available, this extraordinary document shows what it was like to grow up at the top in a duplicitous and increasingly violent atmosphere.

Life inside Stalin's Kremlin through the eyes of Beria, Stalin's closest collaborator and some say murderer, as told by his son.

Publishers Weekly

Lavrenti Beria has entered history's demonology as the last head of Stalin's secret police, the chosen heir to a long line of murderers and torturers. Nikita Khrushchev went further, constructing an image of a sadistic, sex-obsessed madman who sought to take advantage of Stalin's death to create his own personal dictatorship. Beria's son Sergio, it is evident here, loved his father and throughout his adult life has sought to defend him against at least the worst of the charges. Thom, a distinguished French scholar of Soviet Communism, worked closely with Sergio and added her own extensive archival research to produce a compelling account of Stalin's methods of rule in their developed form: ruthlessly pitting organizations and individuals against each other in a climate of terror that abated only slightly from its peak levels during the purges of the 1930s. Patterns of pathological suspicions and personal hatreds drove Stalin and the men around him. In Beria's case, according to Sergio, an increasingly open hatred for Stalin was fuelled by fear of the possible consequences of a megalomania that increased as the dictator aged. In addition to presenting family photos and reminiscences, this work makes a case for Beria as attempting, even while Stalin lived, to reduce the size and scope of the gulag system, to relax the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe and to blunt the anti-Western confrontation. The exact degree of Beria's support for these policies remains obscure as do his motivations. The most favorable interpretation is that Lavrenti Beria saw, more clearly than some of his counterparts, the limits of random savagery as a method of governance not least because he had tested and extended those limits in his own life and career. (Mar.) Forecast: The closeness of the relationship will make this an irresistible document for anyone with an interest in this terrible era in Soviet government, but it can, with its immediacy, if not its total objectivity, be recommended to anyone with an interest in 20th-century history. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Françoise Thom is a Professor at the Sorbonne. A staunch anti-Communist, she became interested in Sergo Beria as one of the last witnesses of Stalin’s excesses. Her notes and introduction provide a running commentary.

The late Sergo Beria grew up as first among the Kremlin’s elite where a deceptively jovial calm papered over total violence. He chose a neutral engineering career and was one of the people who briefed Stalin on the advantages of nuclear technology, a career that he was allowed to continue after his father's death at the hands of Khrushchev.