Lavrentiy Beria

Biography

Lavrentiy Beria was born in 1899 in Merkheuli, in present-day Abkhazia, Georgia. An ethnic Georgian, he joined the Cheka in 1920 and rose quickly through the security service before moving into Communist Party work in the Caucasus, where he served as first secretary of the Georgian party in the 1930s.

In 1938 Stalin made him head of the NKVD. He purged his predecessor Nikolai Yezhov and brought the worst of the Great Purge to an end, but in 1940 he organised the Katyn massacre of Polish officers and intelligentsia and oversaw the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people from eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Romania. During the Second World War he sat on the State Defence Committee, expanded the Gulag forced-labour system, and in 1943-44 directed the mass deportation of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars and other peoples to Central Asia.

From 1945 he ran the Soviet atomic bomb project, which carried out its first test in 1949, and he became a Marshal of the Soviet Union and a full member of the Politburo. He also used his position to sexually abuse many women and girls.

After Stalin's death in March 1953 he took over the Ministry of Internal Affairs and briefly shared power with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov, freeing the defendants of the Doctors' Plot and amnestying more than a million prisoners. In June 1953 his colleagues, backed by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, had him arrested; he was tried for treason and shot in December 1953.