BERIA, LAVRENTY PAVLOVICH (1899–1953).Born in the Min-
grelian region of Georgia, Beria spent the years of the Russian civil
warworking for various intelligence services in the Caucasus. He
joined theChekain 1921 and advanced quickly. He transferred to
Communist Partywork in the early 1930s, and in 1935 he was or-
dered by Joseph Stalinto oversee the editing of his autobiography.
In August 1938, Beria was brought to Moscow as deputy head of
the NKVDto counter Nikolai Yezhov’s power. Later that year he
was named NKVD commissar and on Stalin’s orders put the brakes
on the terror that had claimed more than a million victims in the
previous nine months. Over the next 15 years, Beria had manage-
rial responsibility for the Soviet security police and served as a
member of the Communist Party Central Committee, as well as the
GKO(State Defense Committee), which had overall responsibility
for running the Great Patriotic War. After 1943 he was also re-
sponsible for the Soviet nuclear program. Beria was made a full
member of the Politburo by Stalin, and in 1945 he was made a mar-
shal of the Soviet Union.
While Beria may have slowed the terror in 1938–1939, he and
Stalin saw good reason to maintain the capacity of the security ser-
vice to control, arrest, imprison, and execute. Under Beria, the ser-
vice became a more efficient but no less terrible instrument of re-
pression. The security service was used against Balts, Ukrainians,
and the peoples of the Caucasus who were seen as enemies of Soviet
power. Select executionsof members of the leadership continued as
well: terror was being redefined. Even during the Great Patriotic War
the security service had internal enemies to punish: more than 2 mil-
lion Soviet citizens were subject to deportationsor consigned to the
gulagand exilein Siberia between 1941 and 1945.
Beria, as chair of a special subcommittee within the GKO, over-
saw the Soviet’s nascent nuclear weapons program, from the collec-
tion of intelligence to the construction and management of scientific
laboratories. Under his direction, more than 250,000 slave laborers
were engaged in the building of secret cities, hundreds of German
scientists were kidnapped from postwar Germany, and Soviet nuclear
physicists built the country’s first nuclear weapons. Beria managed
with a combination of terror and friendly encouragement, rewarding
successful experiments and sending failed intelligence professionalsBERIA, LAVRENTY PAVLOVICH (1899–1953)•2706-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 27