Georgia (Republic) - History, Russia & Former Soviet Union - Political Biography, Communism - General & Miscellaneous, Stalinist Era (1928-1953), Soviet Union - Espionage, Communism by Region, 1917 - 1991 (Soviet Union) - History, Soviet History - Politic

Beria, Stalin's First Lieutenant

Name: Beria, Stalin's First Lieutenant
Author: Amy Knight
ISBN: 9780691032573

by Amy Knight

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Overview

This is the first comprehensive biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant. Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been known about his long and tumultuous career. Now, drawing on sources made available since glasnost, Amy Knight describes in chilling detail the story of Beria's climb to the top of the Stalinist system, his complex relationship with Stalin, and his bitter struggle with Khrushchev after Stalin's death. The myths that once circulated about Beria in the absence of factual information created an unbalanced picture of his career, and obscured, among other things, the immense influence that he exerted over Stalin. "Our Himmler," Stalin called him in an exchange with Roosevelt at Yalta, and Knight reveals that the astute and intelligent Beria was just as important to Stalin as Himmler was to Hitler, if not more so. Born in 1899, twenty years after Stalin, Beria was not part of Stalin's generation of revolutionaries who fought against the tsar. But he was, like Stalin, a Georgian, and as police chief and later party chief of Georgia and Transcaucasia, he won Stalin's confidence. Moving to Moscow in 1938 to head the dreaded NKVD, Beria became responsible for all intelligence, counterintelligence, and domestic security during the prewar and war years. He also commanded the vast slave labor network of the GULAG, oversaw the evacuation of defense industries as the Germans advanced, and eventually took charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Knight sees Beria's skill at psychological manipulation as the key to his relationship with Stalin. Insecure even among his closest associates, Stalin surrounded himself mostly with malleable bureaucrats who lacked the insight

The first comprehensive biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant. Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. 12 halftones. Map.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As Stalin's police chief, right-hand man and commander of the Gulag slave-labor network, Lavrenty Beria (1899-1953) was a mass murderer whose weapons included torture, deportation and execution. Yet, after Stalin died in 1953, this devious, cold-blooded Bolshevik embarked on a short-lived liberalization program designed to curb the Communist Party apparatus and to give the non-Russian minorities more decision-making powers and limited recognition of their national and cultural identities. Arrested in a coup led by Khrushchev, Beria was executed. Critics view Beria's de-Stalinization proposals as mere tools in a succession struggle, but Knight, a Library of Congress scholar who did extensive research in the former Soviet Union, portrays the Georgian-born police chief as a would-be reformer who saw change as inevitable but was motivated above all by a desire to further his own power. A provocative biography of one of history's most evil men. Photos. (Nov.)

Library Journal

A strong entry in the wave of post-glasnost biographies, Knight's book is an accessible study of one of the most sinister members of Stalin's inner circle. Yet Knight, a senior research analyst in Soviet affairs at the Library of Congress, points out in her introduction that she is not attempting to ``rehabilitate'' Beria but to ``challenge some basic assumptions, both about Beria and about the Stalinist system in general.'' Using recently released documents, Knight succeeds in describing the life of Lavrentii Beria, from his student days in Baku, to his role as Stalin's most powerful henchmen, chief of security, and head of the slave-labor network in the gulag, to his rapid fall after the death of Stalin in the power struggles that brought Khrushchev to power. This work is recommended for undergraduates and informed lay readers.-- John Sandstrom, Houston P.L., Tex.

Gilbert Taylor

Like many of Stalin's executors, Lavrentii Beria was no neophyte at wreaking terror. He liquidated thousands in the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia in 1922-24, which service brought the ambitious man to the notice of the boss. More crafty than Stalin's other police chiefs, Beria survived until his own execution as an enemy of the people in 1953. Stalin's successors were anxious to deflect their own complicity in the regime's criminality, and so the archives were locked. No historically verifiable account of Beria's career as Stalin's "Himmler" has been possible--until now. Beria apparently had no life to speak of, aside from raping young girls outside his office, which, on occasion, doubled as a torture chamber. These sick details--and dramatic ones surrounding Khrushchev's coup--underwrite the deadly character of the author's main import: Kremlin politics following Beria's takeover of the NKVD in 1938. Knight has ably examined and coherently reassembled the slivers and shards of evidence, and future biographers (with strong stomachs) will surely build on her pioneering work.

Newsweek (International Edition)

This smoothly written book is laudable, not just for its speculation on the Beria that might have been, but also for its naked portrait of the Beria that was.
— David Gordon

Newsweek, International Edition

This smoothly written book is laudable, not just for its speculation on the Beria that might have been, but also for its naked portrait of the Beria that was.

The Times Literary Supplement

The first serious book-length study of Beria's public career. . . . Knight's staidness and deliberation bring a refreshing change of approach. . . . A major contribution to our knowledge of Soviet politics.

The [London] Times

Beria is ripe for revisionism. The danger is that too much can be made of Beria's relative liberalism. . . . Amy Knight does not fall into this trap. Hers is a strictly political biography and a very good one.