Lavrenty Beria Facts for Kids

Quick facts for kids Lavrenty Beria


First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union
In office 5 March 1953 – 26 June 1953
Premier	Georgy Malenkov
Preceded by	Vyacheslav Molotov
Succeeded by	Lazar Kaganovich
Minister of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union
In office 5 March 1953 – 26 June 1953
Preceded by	Sergei Kruglov
Succeeded by	Sergei Kruglov
In office 25 November 1938 – 29 December 1945
First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party
In office 15 January 1934 – 31 August 1938
In office 14 November 1931 – 18 October 1932

Personal details
Born	Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (1899-03-29)29 March 1899 Merkheuli, Kutaisi Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	23 December 1953(1953-12-23) (aged 54) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	Soviet, Georgian
Political party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Spouse	Nina Gegechkori
Awards	Hero of the Soviet Union
Signature
Military service
Rank	Marshal of the Soviet Union
Battles/wars	World War II

Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (or Lavrentiy Beria) (29 March 1899– 23 December 1953) was the leader of the secret police of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's regime. In 1953, Nikita Krushchev ordered Beria to be executed as a traitor.

Early life
Career
Trial and death
Images for kids
See also

Early life

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was born in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, in the Sukhum Okrug of the Kutais Governorate (now Gulripshi District, de facto Republic of Abkhazia, or Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire). He grew up in a Georgian Orthodox family; his mother, Marta Jaqeli (1868–1955), was deeply religious and church-going (she spent much time in church and died in a church building). Marta was from the Guria region, descended from a noble Georgian family, and was a widow before marrying Beria's father, Pavle Beria (1872–1922), a landowner in Abkhazia, from the Mingrelian ethnic subgroup.

Beria attended a technical school in Sukhumi, and later claimed to have joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 while a student in the Baku Polytechnicum (subsequently known as the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy). As a student, Beria distinguished himself in mathematics and the sciences.

Beria had earlier worked for the anti-Bolshevik Mussavatists in Baku. After the Red Army captured the city on 28 April 1920, he was saved from execution; it may also have been that Sergei Kirov intervened. While in prison, Beria formed a connection with Nina Gegechkori (1905–1991), his cellmate's niece, and they eloped on a train.

In 1919, at the age of 20, Beria started his career in state security when the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic hired him while he was still a student at the Polytechnicum. In 1920 or 1921 (accounts vary) he joined the Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police. At that time, a Bolshevik revolt took place in the Menshevik-controlled Democratic Republic of Georgia, and the Red Army subsequently invaded. The Cheka became heavily involved in the conflict, which resulted in the defeat of the Mensheviks and the formation of the Georgian SSR. Beria led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising in 1924, after which up to 10,000 people were executed. In 1926, Beria took control of the Georgian OGPU; Sergo Ordzhonikidze, head of the Transcaucasian party, introduced him to fellow-Georgian Joseph Stalin. As a result, Beria became an ally in Stalin's rise to power.

Career

Beria was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia in 1931, and party leader for the whole Transcaucasian region in 1932. He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1934.

By 1935, Beria had become one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates. He cemented his place in Stalin's entourage with a lengthy oration titled, "On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia" (later published as a book), which emphasised Stalin's role.

In March 1939, Beria was appointed as a candidate member of the Communist Party's Politburo. Although he did not rise to full membership until 1946, he was by then one of the senior leaders of the Soviet state. In 1941, he was made a Commissar General of State Security, the highest quasi-military rank within the Soviet police system of that time.

He served as chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and First Deputy Premier in the postwar years (1946–53).

Beria administered vast sections of the Soviet state. He served as de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of the NKVD field units responsible for anti-partisan operations on the Eastern Front during World War II. His troops also were a barrier against thousands of "turncoats, deserters, cowards and suspected malingerers". Beria administered the vast expansion of the Gulag labor camps and was responsible for overseeing the secret defense institutions known as sharashkas, critical to the war effort.

Beria also played the decisive role in coordinating the Soviet partisans, developing an impressive intelligence and sabotage network behind German lines. He attended the Yalta Conference with Stalin, who introduced him to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "our Himmler". After the war, he organized the communist takeover of the countries of Central Europe and Eastern Europe.

Beria's uncompromising ruthlessness in his duties and skill at producing results led to his overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project. Stalin gave it absolute priority and the project was completed in under five years in no small part due to Soviet espionage against the West organized by Beria's NKVD.

Beria was promoted to First Deputy Premier, where he carried out a brief campaign of liberalization. He was briefly a part of the ruling "troika" with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov. Beria's overconfidence in his position after Stalin's death led him to misjudge other Politburo members. During the coup d'état led by Nikita Khrushchev and assisted by the military forces of Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Beria was arrested on charges of treason during a meeting in which the full Politburo condemned him.

Trial and death

Beria and his men were tried by a "special session" (специальное судебное присутствие) of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union on 23 December 1953 with no defense counsel and no right of appeal.

Beria was found guilty of: