Beria, My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin

431 Pages·2003·25.423 MB·English

by  Sergo Beria

BERIA
MY FATHER
Inside Stalin’s Kremlin
SERGO BERIA
Beria, My Father
Inside Stalin’s Kremlin
Sergo Beria
Despite the steady declassification of
secret archives, Stalin’s Kremlin has
remained riddled with questions. What
justified the ceaseless bloodshed? How
did the megalomaniac Georgian
maintain his power? Was Stalin about to
unleash World War III? In this
controversial memoir, Sergo Beria, son
of the man Stalin called ‘Our Himmler’,
at last offers a vivid eye-witness account
of life at the heart of the ‘Evil Empire’.
Lavrenti Beria, easily the most
shadowy character of the Politburo,
stands at the heart of his son’s tale.
Arrogant, given to tempestuous moods
and an insatiable libido, he was feared
as a sadistic spymaster who prowled
Moscow’s wind-swept avenues for
women in his blacked-out Volga. Yet at
home he played the family man who
commanded the respect of his wife and
child. This book chronicles Beria’s
increasing hatred of Stalin, a fellow
Georgian, and the sweeping anti-Stalinist
reforms which he pushed through after
Stalin’s death.
In addition to vivid portraits of Stalin
and his father, Sergo Beria’s story
includes many details of the
claustrophobic atmosphere surrounding
the nomenklatura, his pursuit by Stalin’s
daughter Svedana, and the fall of his
father at the hands of the amiable
Khrushchev - who had Beria arrested
and shot. Contrasting sharply with
Svedana’s and Khrushchevas accounts,
this gripping book offers proof why,
even today, Russia is unable to untangle
its twisted past.
Lavrenti Berta and his son
Sergo Beria was born in Georgia on 28
November 1924. Stalin - friendly with
his mother - frequently visited the Beria
household, as did Stalin’s daughter
Svetlana. Arrested after the execution of
his father, he was released a year and a
half later from his confinement. Banned
from Moscow and forced to change his
name, he continued to work for
Khrushchev as an engineer on missiles
while his wife, a granddaughter of
Gorki, and children remained in
Moscow.
Framjoise Thom is a specialist in
Communist history of the period and
teaches at the Sorbonne. A large part of
the book is based on interviews she had
with the author. Her notes provide a
comprehensive commentary on his
testimony and are based on exhaustive
research of existing and declassified
archives.
Brian Pearce taught English to Russian
Embassy staff in the 1950s and was in
Russia at the time of Lavrenti Beria’s
fall. He is one of Britain’s most
experienced translators of Communist
history. He has translated over forty
books from French and Russian.
Beria,
My Father
Inside Stalin’s Kremlin
SERGO BERIA
Edited by Frangoise Thom
English translation by Brian Pearce
Duckworth
First published in 2001 by
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
61 Frith Street, London W1D 3JL
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [email protected]
www. ducknet. co .uk
© 1999 Sergo Beria
© Editorial notes and comment 1999/2001 Frangoise 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 © Plon/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 0 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 Franqoi.se Thom vii
Editor’s Note Franqoise 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.
Franqoise Thom