Beria - My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin

411 Pages·2003·17.483 MB·English

by  Sergo Beria, Françoise Thom (editor)

Beria,
My Father
Inside Stalin's Kremlin
SERGO BERIA
Edited by Fran~oise Thom
English translation by Brian Pearce
Duckworth
First published in 2001 by
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
61 Frith Street, London WlD 3.JL
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© 1999 Sergo Beria
© Editorial notes and comment 1999/2001 Franc;oise Thom
© Translation 2001 Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd
The moral right of Sergo Beria to be identified as the
Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance
With the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The right of Brian Pearce to be identified as the translator of
this Work has been asserted in accordance with Sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Originally published as BERIA mon pere © Pion/Criterion, Paris, France, 1999.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN O 7156 3062 8
Typeset by
Derek Doyle and Associates, Liverpool
Printed in Great Britain by
Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton, Avon
Contents
Editor's Preface Fran<;oise Thom vii
Editor's Note Francoise Thom xi
1. In Stalin's Shadow 1
2. The NKVD 33
3. Hitler 47
4. War 69
5. 'Peace' 103
6. Stalin 133
7. The People around Stalin: 150
8. The Bomb 172
9. Disillusionment 195
10. Stalin's Grand Design 223
11. The first de-Stalinisation 251
12. Fall 268
13. Who Was My Father? 279
Author's Epilogue Sergo Beria 297
Appendix 299
Notes 302
Bibliography and Sources Used for the Notes 374
Biographical Notes 379
Index of Names 386
Index of Places 394
Editor's Preface
After the collapse of Communism and the partial opening of the Soviet
archives, historians of the USSR and of Communism enjoyed a period of
euphoria. At last we were going to learn what had gone on in the entrails
of the sphinx, the jealously-guarded secrets of the Kremlin were to be
exposed to the gaze of outsiders ... These expectations were fulfilled only
in part. The Soviet archives made available were, in fact, far more
eloquent concerning the peripheral mechanisms of the regime and on the
working of the bureaucracies that flourished around the dark nucleus of
the Central Committee than they were on the actual heart of the totali
tarian machine, especially from the time when it reached perfection
towards the end of the 1930s. On the whole it has remained as mysterious
a creature as ever, an oyster which refuses to be prised open. We know very
little about the Politburo in the 1940s and 1950s, either through the
caprices of Russia's policy on the declassification of archives, or, more
probably, owing to the desire of the Soviet leaders themselves to hide from
posterity the innermost springs of their conduct, or else because of the
successive purges carried out in the archives by Stalin's heirs, anxious to
wipe away all traces of their crimes.
This is the context in which we must judge the value of a testimony
such as Sergo Beria's. The story told by the son of the man whom people
called Stalin's butcher takes us, over many years, right inside the narrow
circle within which everything in the USSR and a large part of the world
was decided. As Stalin's right-hand man for a long time, Beria holds the
keys to many secrets of the Politburo. Like Eichmann and Mengele for the
Nazis, he symbolises the worst of the Communist excesses within his own
country and beyond. His name still evokes a vitriolic hatred in the hearts
of many in the West and in Eastern Europe, and his popular image is that
of a sinister, sadistic spymaster with whips in his office and the habit of
driving down the windswept avenues of Moscow on the prowl for women.
It is this combination of an insatiable libido matched by ruthless ambition,
unspeakable cruelty and an explosive temper that set Beria truly apart
from other Politburo. Having - some say - poisoned Stalin when he
became infirm on 5 March 1953, Beria combined the internal and external
security services under his command the next day, in a move that made
him seem destined to take Stalin's chair. Had his colleagues not struck
him down a hundred days later by arresting, trying and executing him on
charges of being among other things a British spy, it would have appeared
viii Beria, My Father
at the time that the man considered Stalin's evil genius was well on his
way to replacing his former master and surpassing him in cruelty.
To be sure, Stalin had had no need of instigation from Beria in order to
launch collectivisation, deport the kulaks (peasants), starve the
Ukrainians to death, set up the trials and organise the 'great terror' of
1937. But Beria was no mean helper in implementing those horrors at a
local level when he was still a Party chief in Georgia. He had organised and
directed the terror in his own fiefdom, where the period 1937-1938 has left
a frightful memory. Torture was practised on a large scale and there are
several testimonies to torture sessions presided over by Beria in person in
Tbilisi and, later, in Moscow. When Beria replaced the Russian Yezhov at
the head of the NKVD at the end of 1938, he put an end to the 'great
terror' (evidently at Stalin's behest) and released a large number of pris
oners, but without ceasing to practise repression and torture. He
organised the massacre of the Polish officers at Katyn in the spring of
1940, the assassination of Trotsky, the deportation of the peoples and the
repressive measures taken during the war. He remained at the head of the
NKVD until January 1946, when perhaps even Stalin had started to fear
the man he had created and ordered him to devote himself to building the
atomic bomb and administering some vital sectors of the Soviet economy.
The testimonies also confirm the kidnapping of women and what people in
Tbilisi called Beria's 'Sultan's habits'.
But what constitutes the excitement of these memoirs is also why we
should exercise care while reading them. Sergo Beria grew up in a world
of lies and of half-truths, lies that were all the more inextricable because
the truth was unbearable. Like all of his generation, he was exposed to
surreal ideological beliefs. Added to this was the position of his father,
whose activities were barely mentioned in the family but echoes of which
must have reached his son's ears. Above all there was the ambiguity of
Lavrenti Beria himself: outwardly an efficient servant of the Soviet
regime, but one whose dominant passion seems to have been a deep hatred
of his fellow Georgian, Stalin. Plunged since his earliest years into a world
of pretences, young Sergo himself took refuge in the certainties of the
heart. Between his mother, who still idolised Stalin, and tried to protect
Sergo from cruel reality and his father, who succeeded less and less in
hiding from him his execration of the dictator, this model son was torn in
two, and this ambivalence still marks the work that we have before us.
The trial and execution of his father at the hands of Khrushchev, in 1953,
months after Stalin's death, and the subsequent blackening of his father's
name, was a body blow from which Sergo Beria never truly recovered. In
this book he speaks as before an imaginary jury, poised to pass judgment.
Throughout his life he has sought to act the witness for the defence - first
by becoming an exemplary Soviet citizen who made Red Army missiles for
the man who had caused his father's downfall, then, after the perestroika,
by publishing his own version, sometimes a very subjective one, of the
facts, and particularly of those things of which his father was accused. It
Editor's Preface ix
is one reason why an integral part of this book is the extensive apparatus
of notes corroborating Sergo Beria's testimony, or contradicting it, as the
case may be.
Sergo Beria's testimony is also part of those endless, bickering feuds of
Communists - or for that matter participants of any failed totalitarian
regime - apportioning blame on one another by revealing choice sections
of the truth. Both Stalin's daughter Svetlana Allilueva and Khrushchev
wrote their memoirs. Sergo's is the third (and probably last) to appear
from someone within Stalin's circle. Beria is today perceived in accordance
with history as written by Khrushchev. It was Khrushchev who, for
obvious reasons, first styled the chief of Stalin's police a cold-blooded
monster, a primitive brute, a sadistic torturer, a diabolical intriguer, a sex
maniac crouched on the lookout in his black limousine as he drove about
Moscow, grabbing women off the streets. To the end of his life Khrushchev
remained very proud of having liquidated Beria. After all, it was thanks to
the coup d'etat that he organised against Beria that Khrushchev took
power and managed to establish, to some degree, the legitimacy of his posi
tion within the Party's ruling elite. In order that his exploit might be
properly appreciated, Beria's image had to be painted as black as possible.
This was one of the reasons for the trial of Beria and his accomplices
being held in camera in 1953, ending in their death sentences in December
of that year. Another reason for that trial was acknowledged later by
Khrushchev - it was a first attempt at taking account of Stalin's crimes
without accusing Stalin himself, putting responsibility for them on to 'the
Beria gang' and presenting Beria as 'Stalin's evil genius'. This version was
taken up by Svetlana Allilueva, for understandable reasons. She had
already been encouraged to take this line by Stalin himself. In its most
brilliant passages this book shows that Stalin knew the art of making out
his wicked actions to be initiatives forced on him by those around him, and
he loved making Beria play the role of 'the bad man' (for example, when
he presented him to Roosevelt as 'our Himmler', a joke which greatly
embarrassed the American president). At Stalin's court Khrushchev
survived by playing the buffoon, Beria by playing the executioner. Each
had the right physique for the job.
It is on the mentality of the Soviet leaders that this book offers the most
interesting revelations. The deep-seated hatred of Russia and the far
reaching importance of nationality in the power balance comes as a
surprise (see more about this in the Editor's Note). As we read, we find
that they are all aware that they are participating in a criminal regime and
committing infamous deeds. Some of them, at least, know that they will
have accounts to render to posterity. Every apparatchik of a certain rank
begins to compile dossiers that compromise his rivals and potential oppo
nents. These dossiers concern crimes committed by order of higher
authority. Like a Mafia 'godfather', Stalin takes care to compromise his
confederates in systematic fashion, and any attempt to get out of this duty
to murder, collectively or individually, brings down his suspicion and his
X Beria, My Father
vengeance. The Soviet regime emerges as a regime of blackmailers, a
supremely hypocritical regime in which vice never stops paying homage to
virtue and in which baseness disguises itself as duty, cowardice as
altruism, treason as charity, sadism as efficiency, stupidity as patriotism.
Yet the great historical interest of this book extends far beyond Kremlin
gossip. This is most of all a document about daily life at the Kremlin.
Khrushchev's memoirs are full of gaps, self-justifications and even just
plain lies, yet they constitute, in spite of that, a fascinating and irreplace
able document for the historian. This book, too, adds to our knowledge, in
particular to the role of anti-Russian sentiment and Beria's surprising
part in this. To be sure, Beria confided little to his son regarding his activ
ities and plans. But the young man had the gift of observation, a delicate
sensibility and the sharp memory characteristic of all who live in the midst
of what is left unspoken. He frequented the company of his father's
helpers, high-ranking military men, some members of the Politburo and
their wives. He looked on Stalin with the adoring eyes of a teenager, then
observed him through his father's implacable gaze. Time has stood still for
him. Moreover, Sergo Beria significantly chose a career that was very
different from his father, an unassuming job as an engineer. However
much he may fail, his struggle to come to terms with a horrendous and
painful past is a serious one, as serious as the system and the family he
grew up in allowed.
Franc;oise Thom
Editor's Note
Sergo Beria's book can be approached in two distinct ways. The first
consists of 'neutral' parts, those in which his father was not directly
involved and where the author's will to construct an apologia does not
entail the risk of Sergo distorting the truth. Even with this restricted
approach the reader will find a wealth of material about the Stalin period
and the causes of the Terror. His opening chapters reveal everything from
the mentality of the leaders of the republics of the USSR, their relations
with Moscow, the extent and limits of their power within their respective
fiefs, to their ways of life, the way in which local intrigues were interwoven
with the struggle for power at the top, Moscow's instruments of control
and the role played by the republics in the aims of the foreign policy
a
worked out in Moscow. After Beria's arrival in the capital we find vivid
picture of Stalin's immediate entourage, of groups tearing each other
apart and of the byzantine forms assumed by this perpetual fight to the
death, including an analysis of Stalin's policy on the eve of the war.
But Sergo Beria's story is also a unique testimony of the war as experi
enced by a son of the nomenklatura and of how he saw relations with the
Western allies. There are colourful portraits of the members of the
Politburo and their wives after the war, a breathtaking description of
Stalin's strategy for controlling his world and calling the country to heel
after the relatively 'liberal' period of the war, and his insistence on the
priority to be given to the nuclear project in a USSR in ruins. Sergo Beria
vividly captures the exacerbation of the struggle for the succession at the
time when Stalin's physical decline became obvious. Finally, we can follow
him in his evocative description of the madness of Stalin's last months,
which is fully corroborated by the accounts left by other witnesses and by
what the archives have revealed. Moreover, Sergo's narrative must be read
throughout against the salient fact that Stalin and Beria were two
Georgians ruling the vast Russian empire and its dominions, and that
Stalin's death must have upset the delicate balance that existed.
The second approach concerns itself directly with the question of what
we are to believe in the testimony of a son about a father whom he clearly
worshipped. Should we reject everything because of the evident partiality
of the writer and of what we know of Beria from other sources? To what
extent do these descriptions of Beria by Stalin and Khrushchev correspond
to reality?
What this enquiry amounts to is granting Sergo Beria his wish of
xii Beria, My Father
allowing history to pass judgement on his father. There is obviously no
question here of rehabilitating Beria - even his son is not attempting that
- but of putting together all the evidence in his case. Beria committed
many crimes, but the same can be said of his colleagues in the Politburo
who sent thousands to their deaths. Khrushchev, for example, distin
guished himself by his zeal in the purges carried out in Moscow and then
in the Ukraine, and certainly had no less blood on his conscience than
Beria. But he beat Beria in the fight for the succession to Stalin and there
fore was able to put his hands on the archives, destroying documents that
incriminated him, concocting for posterity his own version of the past, and
showing more concern to put himself in a good light and 'compromise' his
rivals than to serve the cause of truth. But the indisputable truth is that
they both took an active part in a deeply criminal regime.
Khrushchev's version remained almost intact until the declassification
in 1991 of the minutes of the July 1953 Plenum, which was devoted to
condemning Beria after his arrest on 26 June 1953 and until statements
were made by some pioneers of perestroika such as the Russian A.
Yakovlev, who did not hesitate to name Beria as the only real reformer
among Stalin's successors. It was the minutes of the July 1953 Plenum
which led the author of these lines to take an interest in Beria as an indi
vidual and to record the testimony offered by his son.
Research in newly declassified archives has led to remarkable discov
eries. They have raised rather than answered questions about this
character who was the most powerful man in the USSR for such a short
period of time.
As said before, Beria did not resume direction of the police and state
security services (now also including the precursor of the KGB) until 6
March 1953, the day after Stalin's death. Yet, instead of consolidating his
mammoth power and deploying his newly regained control over the secu
rity files on his colleagues, Beria started bombarding them with an array
of initiatives to de-Stalinise the USSR.
To be sure, there was a widely shared consensus about the need for de
Stalinisation. But this did not extend to all the matters Beria put forward
in rapid succession. From 6 March he reduced the economic jurisdiction of
the police and announced that he wanted to pass responsibility for the
Gulag on to the Ministry of Justice. On 13 March he charged four NKVD
committees with re-examining some notorious show trials, including the
trial of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, and persecution of the Jews
ended forthwith. On 14 March, the State and Party apparatus were sepa
rated, with Malenkov becoming President and Khrushchev Leader of a
weakened Communist Party. On 15 March, Beria gained control over
censorship, the Glavlit, and expunged Stalin's name from the press in a
very short time, while anti-Western propaganda became muted. On 21
March, Beria attacked the Stalinised central state and proposed ending
the giant Socialist construction sites (which would in turn end the need for
the Gulag). Three days later he addressed a paper to the Presidium in
Editor's Note xiii
which he detailed that there were 2,526,402 people in the Gulag, of whom
221,435 were 'State criminals'. On 27 March, 1,178,422 prisoners were
freed and their numbers continued to swell under his stewardship until
his fall from power (from July the Gulag complement went up again). In a
secret memorandum circulated to the NKVD on 4 April, Beria forbade
torture in prisons and detention centres. On the same day, Pravda carried
an NKVD announcement which cleared Jewish doctors (accused by Stalin
in the previous year of wanting to poison Politburo members). It was the
first public attack against Stalin, it left the country reeling, and Beria had
imposed it on his reluctant colleagues. In order to soften their resistance
he had them listen to tapes of Stalin, in which he demanded the torture of
people accused of certain things and revealed the extent of his paranoia.
Famous writers like K. Simonov attended these sessions.
Curiously, many of the charges brought against Beria at his show trial
departed from the usual allegations formulated in this sort of Communist
ceremony. True, Beria was described as a British agent and was said to
have wished to organise a coup d'etat and to have put the security organs
above control by the Party. Alongside these ritual litanies (which included
the accusation that he had tried to undermine collective cattle breeding
and vegetable production programmes), however, there were other precise
accusations of an unfamiliar kind, the addition of which outlined a polit
ical project that was coherent and far-reaching. They implied overturning
Soviet foreign policy (Beria wanted to hand over the GDR to the German
Federal Republic), setting aside the Communist Party (Beria wanted to
deprive it of control over the economy), a reform of the empire (Beria
wanted to release the republics from Russian domination) and introducing
glasnost (Beria wanted to end the jamming of Western broadcasts).
The speakers at the Plenum took turns in declaring that 'Beria was no
Communist'. Strange as it may seem, a charge of that sort was not routine
in such circumstances. One would have expected to find that he was
accused of 'right deviationism' or 'Trotskyism'. It is enough to compare
the July 1953 Plenum with those of February 1955 and June 1957, when
Malenkov and the 'anti-Party group' were condemned, in order to appre
ciate the degree to which the Soviet leaders felt threatened by Beria.
Nothing came near the hatred that broke over their fallen Georgian
colleague. And this hatred is certainly not explained just by Beria's past
crimes. (In his memoirs Khrushchev writes a eulogy on the Russian
Yezhov, Beria's predecessor at the NKVD and the organiser of the 'great
terror'.) Looking at the archives, Beria launched his national policy in
April. He started by sending NKVD officers to the republics of the USSR,
charging them to find out what was happening there and, most of all, to
find compromising facts on Party dignitaries. Based on these reports of the
flagrant collapse of Party policies, Beria addressed a number of recom
mendations to his colleagues. They all pointed in the same direction:
ending the Russian tutelage of the republics. Beria, for example, proposed
to recall the Russian Party functionaries from the Baltic States, to cease