Lavrenti Beria

Founder of USSR Jewish Anti-Fascist League
Director of the Dreaded KGB
Killed Millions of Innocent Citizens
Kidnapped, Raped, and Murdered Young Girls for Sex in his Lubyanka Prison Office

 

Lavrenti Beria

Lavrenti Beria
Source: Jewish Russian Communists
Beria was Stalin's party associate and confidante from their native Georgia. In 1938 he was put in charge of the dreaded NKVD. Beria was responsible for the infamous Katyn massacre of captive Polish soldiers and intellectuals. Beria was also in charge of the Gulag prison system that sent millions to oblivion. Beria was noted for having his bodyguards kidnap young schoolgirls so that he could rape them in his Lubyanka office, which doubled as a torture chamber.

Lavrenti Beria
Source: Wikipedia
Beria, as a fellow Georgian, was an early ally of Joseph Stalin in his rise to power within the Communist Party and the Soviet regime. Disputed, Beria was not introduced to Stalin until 1926, and worked hard to further his own cause by wooing Stalin to get into the inner circles of the Soviet regime; and he was hardly an "ally", more that of a henchman. In 1924 he led the repression of nationalist disturbances in Tbilisi, after which it is said that up to 5,000 people were executed. For this display of "Bolshevik ruthlessness" Beria was appointed head of the "secret-political division" of the Transcaucasian OGPU and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. In 1926 he became head of the Georgian OGPU. He was appointed Party Secretary in Georgia in 1931, and for the whole Transcaucasian region in 1932. He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1934. Even after moving on from Georgia, he continued to effectively control the republic's Communist Party until it was purged in July 1953. By 1935 Beria was one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates. He cemented his place in Stalin's entourage with a lengthy oration "On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia" (later published as a book), which rewrote the history of Transcaucasian Bolshevism to show that Stalin had been its sole leader from the beginning. When Stalin's purge of the Communist Party and government began in 1934 after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Beria ran the purges in Transcaucasia, using the opportunity to settle many old scores in the politically turbulent Transcaucasian republics. In June 1937 he said in a speech: "Let our enemies know that anyone who attempts to raise a hand against the will of our people, against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed".

Lavrenti Beria
Source: PBS
Beria was born in the Georgian town of Mingrelia just before the turn of the century in 1899. His first career choice was to be an architect, and he worked as a building inspector in Azerbaijan after graduating from college. He later joined the Communist party and served in the secret police. Beria first met Stalin in 1931 while Stalin was on vacation. One popular story claims that Beria saved Stalin from an assassination attempt. Others suspect Beria staged the attempt he appeared to thwart. Stalin quickly brought Beria up through the ranks of the Communist party, and selected him to head the NKVD in 1938. Stalin used Beria to stage his purges. Under Beria, the NKVD was responsible for the deaths of millions of Russians. Beria had the reputation of getting things done, no matter what it cost. Stalin placed him in charge of many of his most important jobs, including the atomic bomb project. After Stalin died, Beria tried to change his public image and initiated reform in the Soviet Union and Communist Germany. However, Krushchev and the other Soviet leaders arranged to have Beria imprisoned and later executed as an enemy of the state.