Beria - My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin [Paperback]

Sergo Beria (Author), Françoise Thom (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2003

For almost twenty years, two men from Georgia dominated the Russians and its empire: Stalin and Beria, as head of what was to become the KGB. This book is a memoir of the daily life of these two men who sent millions to their graves. It vividly paints Stalin’s increasingly psychotic nature, but also the incomprehensible loyalty that Stalin inspired among women including the author’s mother. It contains Sergo’s own fascinating anecdotes, among them, an account of the time he was chased by Svetlana, Stalin’s nymphomaniac daughter. Upon Stalin’s mysterious death, Beria dramatically lost the struggle for power with Khrushchev, a Russian, who murdered him with the aid of his fellow politburo members. More than any book currently available, this extraordinary document shows what it was like to grow up at the top in a duplicitous and increasingly violent atmosphere.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lavrenti Beria has entered history's demonology as the last head of Stalin's secret police, the chosen heir to a long line of murderers and torturers. Nikita Khrushchev went further, constructing an image of a sadistic, sex-obsessed madman who sought to take advantage of Stalin's death to create his own personal dictatorship. Beria's son Sergio, it is evident here, loved his father and throughout his adult life has sought to defend him against at least the worst of the charges. Thom, a distinguished French scholar of Soviet Communism, worked closely with Sergio and added her own extensive archival research to produce a compelling account of Stalin's methods of rule in their developed form: ruthlessly pitting organizations and individuals against each other in a climate of terror that abated only slightly from its peak levels during the purges of the 1930s. Patterns of pathological suspicions and personal hatreds drove Stalin and the men around him. In Beria's case, according to Sergio, an increasingly open hatred for Stalin was fuelled by fear of the possible consequences of a megalomania that increased as the dictator aged. In addition to presenting family photos and reminiscences, this work makes a case for Beria as attempting, even while Stalin lived, to reduce the size and scope of the gulag system, to relax the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe and to blunt the anti-Western confrontation. The exact degree of Beria's support for these policies remains obscure as do his motivations. The most favorable interpretation is that Lavrenti Beria saw, more clearly than some of his counterparts, the limits of random savagery as a method of governance not least because he had tested and extended those limits in his own life and career. (Mar.)Forecast: The closeness of the relationship will make this an irresistible document for anyone with an interest in this terrible era in Soviet government, but it can, with its immediacy, if not its total objectivity, be recommended to anyone with an interest in 20th-century history.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Sergo Beria has a daunting task. He seeks not to rehabilitate his notorious father but to redress the balance so that he is not remembered solely as Stalin's sinister, perverted killer-in-chief. This was Khrushchev's version. Here we meet the senior Beria, a devoted family man who quite naturally loathed Stalin and despised most of his colleagues. We read that he tried to mitigate the dictator's more murderous impulses (deportations, terror) and was brought down by the Kremlin mediocrities terrified as to where his plans for radical liberalized reforms might lead. The son, who chose a career in nuclear technology, was on the periphery of the top Soviet elite and met all the notables. His comments on them are mostly venomous. A battery of editorial notes from Thom (Sorbonne), who also wrote the introduction, question some of the author's more benign judgments. An exercise in filial devotion, this account partly amplifies Amy Knight's biography, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (Princeton Univ., 1993), which remains the best treatment in English. For specialized collections. Robert Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ontario
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Duckworth Publishers (November 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0715632051
• ISBN-13: 978-0715632055
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #417,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fiction, February 4, 2008

By 

Col.Oleg Penkovski "Ivan" (Moscov, CCCP) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beria - My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin (Paperback)

Most sons will only remember what a good man his father was. It is a pity any man has to go through life knowing that his father had no morals at all, and had so many people tortured and murdered. As sad as it is, this is one case where no amount of cleaning up behind his father can remove the blood. The author has no reason to even attempt this clean up, but he does. Would we want to read a book by a son of Hitler's that tells us that "Dad was just misunderstood?" Beria made Hitler look like an amateur. This son is not guilty of anything, other than writing this book. He should go through life with his head held up just as any other man. However, the book should never have been written. The only purpose of remembering Beria at all is to remember what pure evil, the devil and Hell is, and how the Russian people got there. At best, the book is fiction, and it made me angry at Sergo for writing it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dirty minds and dirty hands, August 25, 2011

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beria - My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin (Paperback)

The son of `Stalin's evil genius' tries in these memoirs to whitewash his father from his responsibility in the terrible fate of the USSR population under Stalin, by presenting the latter as `Satan incarnate' and his father as a (would-be) reformer. Thereby, however, he gives a revealing insight into the core of the soviet oligarchy, together with outspoken portraits of its main members, their tactics and deadly intrigues, as well as an `unofficial' characterization of the Party and the USSR economy.

Lavrenti Beria

As F. Thom states in her introduction, L. Beria was `a combination of an insatiable libido, ruthless ambition and unspeakable cruelty'.

After being co-responsible for the fate of millions of victims (executions, deportations, concentration camps, famine), the liberation of one million of Gulag inmates or the stopping of the jamming of Western broadcasts after Stalin's death outweigh in no way his evil doings.

L. Beria wanted a more efficient economy free from the Party tutelage (`All we have is a Gosplan, a sewer incapable of even assembling statistics'). But, that was a part of his master plan for becoming the new Tsar: break the influence of the Party by shunting its power to the State bureaucracy and the secret services.

For his son, L. Beria simply wanted to free the soviet people from feudalism. Under Stalin, three-quarters of the people were firmly bound to their collective farms.

Stalin

As a person, Stalin was `Satan incarnate' taking a wicked pleasure in destroying whatever resisted him.

Nationally, he left the USSR on the verge on collapse and insurrection just before WW II, with a ruined peasantry, an exterminated elite and intelligentsia and a devastated arms industry.

Internationally, Stalin never wanted peaceful existence. For him, democratic States were incapable of a rapid and concerted reaction because they needed the support of public opinion. With his atom bomb, he was convinced that the USSR would achieve world dominance.

The Party

For L. Beria, `the Party had become a superstructure that accomplished nothing concrete, yet controlled and involved itself in everything without being responsible for anything.'

The members of the Politburo were nothing more than a bunch of opportunists and blackmailers. At the highest level, `there were only two exits - one straight into the other world, the other one into prison until they sent you into the other world.'

The USSR, its population and communism

These memoirs stress astonishingly a big USSR nationality problem: the struggle of the populations of the republics against `Russian chauvinism'. For S. Beria, communism was only a pretext for the interfering of Russia in the affairs of other countries and ideology was a mere instrument for claiming hegemony.

The USSR economy was pure State capitalism where people were exploited in an incredible degree and where the State grabbed absolutely everything.

Overall, those in power didn't give a damn for the fate of their citizens. More, these citizens were so terrorized that they even were afraid of their own shadow.

This book, with essential annotations and corrections by Françoise Thom, is a kind of hagiography of one of the masters of the USSR with very dirty hands. A must read for all those interested in the history of the Left.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificently..., November 6, 2010

By 

Sergey Aparin - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beria - My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin (Paperback)

This is a very good book about a very interesting and controversial man. I advise all smart people!