Customer Reviews

Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having just read this, the only book-length biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's most powerful henchman, I wondered if I would have survived in Beria's world. Office politics in the Stalinist USSR was not just about bitching by the water cooler and trying to suck up to the boss (although such elements were also present, writ large). Even surviving in such an environment required degrees of political acumen and sheer nastiness that very few people need to demonstrate in our herbivorous times. Even as an apparatchik reached his goal of near-absolute power (say, Yagoda, Ezhov or Zhdanov) he would find himself subtly undermined. Even as someone was appointed to the Central Committee he would find that key associates carefully placed across the state and party apparatus were being removed to the coziness of the Lubianka or Kolyma.

In this world, which was described quite well by Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, in a chapter titled "Why the Worst Get on Top", Beria was almost bound to rise (although, for political reasons, Hayek was describing Nazi Germany rather than the USSR). He was a Mingrelian, a minority ethnic group in Georgia, and, like Stalin, he was brought up by his mother after his father's early death. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the political police and eventually managed to become Georgian and then Transcaucasian party boss (he even killed a few competitors in the way). Ezhov's "Great Terror" of 1936-1937 paved the way for a takeover by Beria, who consolidated his position during the war and then by heading the nuclear weapons project. A brilliant manager, who was able to get on well with those he worked with (but who had no compunction about delivering them to their deaths if it served his purposes) he always delivered. Unlike Stalin, he was not interested in praises (although he organised his own personality cult for practical reasons) and was reasonable enough to tell the difference between real enemies and loyal followers. Women were his weakness. Ms Knight, a serious historian, does not indulge her readers with lurid stories about girls picked up in Moscow streets and then killed in the basement of Beria's town house, but she does mention that Beria was treated for siphilis during the War. As Stalin aged, be became more and more deranged and eventually wanted to be rid of Beria and his Mingrelians. Unlike other historians, such as Edvard Radzinsky, the author does not speculate about Beria's possible role in Stalin's demise in March 1953, although she concludes that only this saved Beria from the destiny of many of his predecessors. While Beria's energetic attempts at de-Stalinisation were already known (Beria's lieutenant Pavel Sudoplatov had already mentioned them in his book "Special Operations"), Ms Knight elaborates on how wide-ranging they would have been had Beria succeeded in consolidating his grip on power. Indeed, it is quite possible that glasnost might have come more than 30 years before Gorbachov came to power, and that it would have been implemented from a position of strength rather than one of weakness (in 1953 the Soviet Union was at the top of its power, having succeeded in launching a Hydrogen bomb and having established control over North Korea). German re-unification might have happened in the 1950s rather than the early 1990s, and would have been much less costly and disruptive. On the other hand, it's also possible that Beria might have backtracked after attaining his goal, which was only power for himself. As Ms Knight shows, Beria, like most Soviet politicians had only very slight concern about policies, reserving most of his time and effort for power politics. His downfall was swift, and to be frank, required significant courage from Kruschev and Malenkov. Kruschev comes out of this book (like he did in Volkogonov's Stalin) as a devious henchman who was no less guilty than Beria, but far less able.

It is interesting to see that the downfall of Soviet leaders in the period 1948-1990 was associated with failures to control events in their zones of influence. Beria's downfall started with the breakup of Soviet-Yugoslav relations in 1948 and concluded in 1953, due to demonstrations in Eastern Germany. Kruschev's downfall came in 1964, after he badly miscalculated the risk in transporting nuclear warheads to Cuba. Gorbachov's fall was associated with failure over Germany in 1989. As it was, Kruschov's de-Stalinisation was probably much less comprehensive than Beria's would have been. A nice complement to Ms Knight's book is Sergo Beria's recently published "Beria My Father". One last comment: Ms Knight's book is not for the casual reader. Even for someone who has read Conquest, Pipes, Volkogonov, Radzinsky, Bullock and Ulan it is sometimes difficult to keep straight all the unfamiliar names and party organisations, especially in Transcaucasia. The book would have gained from a few charts illustrating who worked when and where with Ezhov, Beria, Kruschev, Zhdanov or Malenkov. A "power map", with Stalin on top and the various top leaders and their key protegees would also have been useful. If you haven't read much Soviet history you should probably stay clear of this book, as it probably is not the most suitable one for a novice.

Stalin once famously introduced Beria to some Americans as "Our Himmler" (Ms Knight has ommitted this anecdote, and I wonder whether that was because she didn't believe it really happened). If one compares Ms Knight's Beria with, for example, Peter Padfield's Himmler (although his book is clearly much less scholarly than Ms Knight's) one can see that Beria was much more realistic and efficient than Himmler. The correct comparison is between Beria and Heydrich. Had the Third Reich truly been a totalitarian state, Himmler would have gone the way of Yagoda and Heydrich would have been Hitler's Beria. With Goering liquidated during the purges that would have followed, the entire foreign service culled for unreliable elements such as Ambassador Schulenburg and the Wermacht rid of likely conspirators such as Claus von Stauffenberg, it is possible that the War might have ended otherwise. But that's a different subject.

Amy Knight's biography of Beria deserves a place in the pantheon of post-Soviet analysis of the Soviet Union. Knight is a serious scholar and doesn't suffer from the excesses seen in other works about the Soviet Union written in the last ten year. Unfortunately, this serious approach also has a limiting factor in discussing somebody so thoroughly reviled like Beria. Unlike Stalin, who even Knight admits still maintained his followers even after he was denounced in Khrushchev's 1956 speech, Beria became a complete non-person. As a result, one has the impression there is very little actual 'original' source information left by and regarding him. Knight says that Beria kept very few papers, but one has the impression that even if he had they would have disappeared in 1953 as quickly as their author did.
Knight does a good job in showing Beria's rise from simple roots in Georgia to almost the top of Soviet politics. Beria is portrayed as the ultimate opportunist, ruthlessly undercutting everybody in his path to further his ambition. In the process, Beria built up his own 'personality cult' and network of cronies to do his bidding. Indeed, Beria is portrayed as being the ultimate Stalinist politician, a born survivor with an ambition to reach the top (unlike other people, such as Molotov, who were content just to survive). In the end, its Beria's ambition and his own arrogance that prove to be his undoing. According to Knight, Beria was taken down by an amateurish coup by Khrushchev, who Beria consistently underestimated.
The greatest weakness of this book is its own serious nature. So little actually unbiased or original information is left that a lot of the early parts of the book are pure history with very little analysis or new information. Beria supposedly was a vicious pedophile, a serial rapist of young women, but very little mention is given of that or other sins. Knight does give some examples from witnesses of Beria's cruelty, but not enough to really give a feel for the man. Reading this book, I never felt like I had a real appreciation of who this man was. Beria was supposed to be a monster, as brutal as Ezhov and Yagoda but much more intelligent. With a few exceptions, Knight gives the reader very few glimpses of this brutality.
The big irony of the book, and its greatest strength, is the coverage Knight gives to Beria's 100 days in power after Stalin's death. This man, so reviled for unrestrained brutality, shown to be a complete opportunist with Stalin, spent his last days in a quest to completely reform and overhaul the Soviet system. As with everything, Beria's personal arrogance and inability to restrain himself in his reforms proved to be his undoing. After some bungled liberalization in East Germany that resulted in riots and Soviet military intervention, Beria was 'removed' in a coup instigated by Khrushchev. The book's real impact is in these final chapters. Much detail is given to the wholesale reforms instigated by Beria; taken in context of a speech Beria gave the previous year criticizing Russian chauvinism (at the expense of minorities) one can really see the enigma of the situation: Beria, so reviled for his brutality, in the end is a reformer... a man, despite all his flaws, who is before his time. Knight does a good job of showing how Khrushchev, despite his recent rehabilitation, was as compromised as everybody else, and how Beria, has been reviled without a second thought by history. Knight's biography makes you wonder how accurate this view is.

This is a really excellent piece of work. Amy Knight has produced what is billed as the first biography of Beria and one it will be hard for any future writer to outdo. The book is determinedly unsensational, meticulously researched and annotated, and well-written. We are given a rounded picture of a brutal opportunist who could be pragmatic when the occasion called for it. The book speculates interestingly and plausibly on what might have happened had Beria succeeded in his bid to succeed Stalin. Khrushchev, who got the job in the end, adopted many of Beria's policies. My only minor gripe is that the switch from looking at Beria's myriad bad points to his good ones jars sometimes. But if you want to know more about a key, but shadowy, figure from the Stalin era, read this book. They don't come much better.

I could not put this volume down. The most incredible discovery I made after reading this book was that it was the bloody monster Beria--of all the Stalin's henchmen in Kremlin-- who tried to De-Stalinize the Soviet system after Stalin's death. Khruschev's unforgetable reaction to that was an attempt to put brakes on this process. Eventually, he succeded in presenting himself as the man "who opened window to the West". Speaking about the truth in history...
This book deserves a much more popularuty due to its many unique qualities. Kudos to the author with such a wonderful name.

Amy Knight has done an excellent job of unmasking the evil Lavrenty Beria, for many years Stalin's head of secret police. But the book veers off course towards the end, after Stalin's death, when Knight tries to persuade us that the mass murderer was in fact a closet reformer who proposed freeing many of the prisoners he himself had incarcerated and wanted a more relaxed line with East Germany. An intriguing book, nevertheless

A concise biography of Stalin's most intelligent henchman, Laventii Beria. Beria left little in the way of personal papers like letters or diaries and this book is essentially a record and analysis of his career as a Soviet official. This is the strength of the book, as it provides an insightful look into the functioning of the Stalinist state. Beria belonged to the second generation of Soviet leaders; his formative experiences were the Revolution and the ensuing Civil War. Beria's calculating and ruthless personality appears to have fitted him well to thrive in the Leninist-Stalinist state. Politically shrewd and a very capable administrator, he played a significant role in establishing the Soviet state in his native Georgia and the surrounding Caucausian nations. Once established as an important figure in the Soviet-Party bureaucracy, Beria used his considerable political skills to rise to a predominant position in the Caucausian republics, often over the bodies of real or potential rivals. He seems to have been particularly good at accomodating the wishes of powerful figures in Moscow, particularly of course, his fellow Georgian Stalin. Knight suggests that Beria's Georgian background provided him with some insight into Stalin's psyche, coupled with shameless sycophancy, allowed him to prosper under Stalin's rule.

As a description of the Hobbesian world of Soviet-Stalinist politics and how the almost incredible crimes of the Stalinist period were prepetrated, this book is very useful. Sycophancy towards powerful leaders and an often brutal form of patron-client politics were the norm. This book is useful also in understanding how Stalin came to dominate the Communist Party and the Soviet state, and how the Soviet leadership functioned during WWII. Knight has a particularly good description of the events following Stalin's death. Beria's brief period of predominance and the coup which toppled him are described well. Surprisingly, while almost all of Stalin's potential heirs realized that the Soviet state needed substantial reforms, Beria proved to be the most radical reformer. He attempted to shrink the GULAG, moderate policy towards national minorities, soften foreign policy, and even start to move the state away from the dominance of the Communist Party. Quite a few of these moves alarmed other members of the leadership, providing the basis for the risky but successful coup against him.

Based on a careful analysis of the available literature, Beria is written well and documented very well. This is the standard biography of Beria and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

It's hard to believe this cold-blooded murderer could have been the Soviet Union's much needed true reformer if given the chance, but the author makes her case quite convincingly! The book dispells much of Lavrenti Beria's black legend, but the man it portrays is far more brutal and chilling precisely because he was nothing but a human being.

Beria -- Stalin's First Lieutenant by Amy Knight is a well-written, exemplary biography that attempts to "challenge some basic assumptions" about Lavrenti Beria and his role in Stalinism and terror from the time of the October Revolution of 1917 to his execution in 1953.

Amy Knight, a Senior Research Analyst at the Library of Congress, has a gift for elegant writing and turning revealing phrases, as well as for having a keen understanding of the psychopathology of Soviet leaders, particularly Nikita Khrushchev, Joseph Stalin, and the subject of this biography, Lavrenti Beria.

Stalin surrounded himself with malleable bureaucrats and communist minions to whom he applied the effective strategy of "divide and conquer," so as to threaten their own existence with physical annihilation in a climate of suspicion that deterred disloyalty on the part of his lieutenants.
But Lavrenti Beria was not the typical unimaginative follower. As an astute operative and a fellow Georgian steeped in Georgia's ideals of loyalty, betrayal, even fears of death, he quickly divined his compatriot's psychopathology. Beria could penetrate Stalin's mind and by nurturing Stalin's fears and paranoia and his unquenchable need for praise, Beria was able to use that for his own purposes not only to effect his survival but also to accumulate power.

Stalin and Beria were both from Georgia, however from different regions of Georgia. Beria was 20 years Stalin's junior. A member of the next generation of Soviet leaders, Beria had no qualms about helping Stalin exterminate the old Bolsheviks who could challenge Stalin's power or his version of Revolutionary history, particularly when "the Great Leader" had set out to re-write and correct history, so as to fit with his unfolding, grandiose cult of personality and historical revisionism.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Beria was police chief (NKVD) and party leader in Georgia and Transcaucasia. He won Stalin's confidence by enforcing his repressive measures, including the great leader's rapid industrialization of urban areas at the expense of the compulsory requisitioning of crops and foodstuff from the peasantry, while forcing collectivization of their farms (kolkhozes).

Beria also promoted and furthered Stalin's personality cult to dizzying heights. Beria managed to survive the "Yezhevina," the Great Terror of 1936-38, even though he came close to becoming one of its victims. In 1938, Nikolai Yezhev (photo, left), NKVD chief in Moscow, ordered the arrest of Beria who was party chief in Georgia, but Georgian NKVD chief Sergei Goglidze, one of Beria's trusted protégés (later dubbed the "Georgia Gang"), warned him.

Beria bid goodbye to his family at the airport, expecting to be arrested and executed; but rather than accepting that fate, upon arrival in Moscow, he convinced Stalin that his life should be spared, reminding the vozhd ("the Great Leader") what a loyal and useful lieutenant he had been and how exact and efficiently he had carried out party orders in Georgia and Transcaucasia. Shortly thereafter, Yezhev was himself purged and Beria became the new NKVD chief!
Beria quickly insinuated himself into Stalin's inner circle and became the most powerful security chief in the Kremlin virtually until his fall in 1953.

Timely testing and production of the atomic bomb were Beria's first priorities between 1945 and 1949, and he completed these tasks with incredible success, leaving the West astounded at the Soviet achievement, several years ahead of the time line expected from American intelligence. He achieved full politburo membership in 1946 and was awarded the Order of Lenin for his success in 1949.

After the war with Hitler had been won, from 1950 to 1953, Stalin was once again ready to stoke his system of repression and re-implement terror on a grand scale, this time designed to include the repression of Russian Jews, the purging of his security apparatus and even members of his inner circle. Toward this end, Stalin concocted a series of conspiracies; some were even interrelated, and only he, the master conductor, knew as to where they led and his ultimate objective. These concocted plots included the "Leningrad Affair," the anti-Semitic, anti-Cosmopolitan campaign, and "the Jewish Doctors' Plot" that enmeshed Jewish intellectuals, communist party members, state security organs, Kremlin doctors, and even his loyal and long-time chief of his personal bodyguards, General N. S. Vlasik.

Stalin even began to mistrust Beria, and toward this end, he concocted the so-called "Mingrelian conspiracy," that in Stalin's paranoid mind involved corruption of political leaders in Georgia (allies and protégés of Beria) and a treasonous separatist "bourgeois nationalist" movement with ties to Turkey.

In his inner circle only Georgi Malenkov and the newer members Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin still enjoyed Stalin's "confidence," but this trust hung capriciously over their heads like the Sword of Damocles. Suspicion had fallen already over his former comrades V. Molotov, K. E. Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan, and Lavrenti Beria. It seems that the turmoil of the Jewish Doctors' Plot and the Mingrelian affair were the final strokes for Beria, who, perhaps with the connivance of Malenkov and Khrushchev, decided to act to protect their lives.

Immediately after Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, Beria moved rapidly to seize power. And almost as suddenly, he became a liberal political reformer. He defended the rights of non-Russian nationalities, such as the Ukrainians and Georgians, vis-à-vis the former Russification policy of Stalin. He admitted that both the Jewish Doctors' Plot and the Mingrelian affair were concocted by Stalin's underlings, and had those involved arrested.

Beria then began to decentralize and dismantle the secret police and the Gulag system as part of his broader program of liberalization. He granted amnesty to a large category of Gulag political prisoners. With the repudiation of the Doctors' Plot, the doctors were released from prison, and the campaign of anti-Semitism was ended. Under Beria, de-Stalinization had begun at a faster pace than would be reestablished later under Khrushchev.

The crisis in East Germany, though, provided the pretext that Nikita Khrushchev needed to challenge Beria's power in the Kremlin. Malenkov, who had been Beria's ally, was won over by Khrushchev's intrigues, as were some important segments of the Russian military, which had come to resent the prominence of Beria and his secret police.

Beria had made a mistake. He had moved too fast in the liberalization of East Germany. The iron-fisted East German Chancellor Walter Ulbricht (photo, left) opposed the reforms, and the contradictory statements confused the issue, creating instability and fueling public
discontent. Influenced by Beria's intended reforms, East German protestors, whose objectives now included not only economic liberalization but also the removal of the hard-line, communist Chancellor Ulbricht, took to the streets. By June 17, 1953, Soviet tanks were rolling into East Germany to crush the rebellion.

Georgi Malenkov, who now supported Khrushchev, along with Nikolai Bulganin and V. Molotov, blamed Beria for the crisis in East Germany.

Amy Knight correctly asserts that "the East German crisis provided Khrushchev with the pretext for rallying opposition against Beria," and that Khrushchev and Molotov would later denounce Beria's program at the July 1953 Central Committee Plenum, "accusing him of turning against socialism and playing into the hands of the West by trying to create a united, neutral bourgeois Germany."
Perhaps the most intriguing portion of this book is the plot that Khrushchev successfully instigated and how it was carried out against Beria. Stalin's first Lieutenant had greatly underestimated Khrushchev, the former Ukrainian operative who fairly recently had been brought to Moscow by Stalin, and as the current head of the Secretariat had become Beria's chief opponent in the Kremlin power struggle.

Khrushchev had persuaded Malenkov, Molotov, and Bulganin to take an active role in the coup, while Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan assumed more passive roles, believing it to be more politically expedient not to interfere until the coup had been carried out.

Beria was arrested by military men at a hastily convened meeting of the Presidium on June 23, 1953, only nine days after the East German insurrection was squelched by Russian troops. Khrushchev had been moving feverishly within the Politburo and the military to undermine and gather forces against Beria. Beria was uncharacteristically caught off guard and entered the Presidium without suspecting the plot and the coup that awaited him. Once inside the Presidium, MVD guards (security apparatus successors to the NKVD) who had been posted outside were dismissed by Defense Minister Bulganin and replaced with military troops loyal to General K. S. Moskalenko (photo, above) and Soviet Marshall Georgi Zhukov (photo, below), who had been brought into the plot. Beria's fate was sealed.

The trials of Beria and his lieutenants were conducted in camera, in secret from December 18-23, 1953. To this day, controversy exists as to whether Beria participated in the proceedings or had already been executed along with his comrades by the time of the trial, six months after their arrest. Among the many charges levied against them, they were accused of attempting "to seize power and liquidate the Soviet worker-peasant system for the purpose of restoring capitalism and the domination of the bourgeoisie."

Beria's life in contrast to Stalin's other sycophantic lieutenants can be summarized by the author's following words: "If Beria was an exception, it was not because he was amoral, sadistic, and cruel. Rather it was because he was intelligent, astute, and devoted to achieving power. He was also adept at the kind of court politics that prevailed in the Kremlin and below. His deviousness and two-faced behavior was an asset in this environment, particularly in dealing with Stalin."

This book is highly recommended and deserves a 5-star rating. A longer, illustrated version of this review appears at [...]

Dr. Miguel A. Faria is the author of Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002).

What a well written book. The theme has possibilities for being boring, but the author is gifted in her writing style. There is rich detail, a wonderful notes section to back up her research, yet it reads like a novel. This book is one of the best i've read about kremlin politics.

To many Russians, Stalin still epitomizes every thing that was good about Soviet society; such as a sense of brotherhood with their fellow man, a strong sense of national identity, and a feeling that the greatest man alive was looking out for their interests. They lay the blame for collectivization, and the purges, on misleading advice, by Stalin's accomplices, such as Malenkov, Beria, and Bulganin. When asked, they honestly believe, that were it not for Beria, Nikolai Bukharin, "Lenin's favorite", would never have been executed. So there obviously needed to be some sort of accessible reappraisal (accessible in the sense, that it must be written so non-Leninists could understand it)of Lavrentii Beria; and Amy Knight's biography of Beria does an adequate job, of such a "reappraisal." A Russian curious about their own past, or an American with curiosity in regard to Sovietology, will find this book immensely interesting.

Lavrentii Beria, like Joseph Stalin, was born in the country of Georgia. However, unlike Stalin, Beria was a minority in his own country; he was mingrelian, which is, for reasons this reviewer does not know, different from other Georgians. He joined the Bolsheviks, much like 95% of their membership in 1924 (a product of Stalin's ill thought out idea the "Lenin Levy", where anybody, regardless of their past, could join the Communist Party), after the Bolshevik revolution. He had no prior knowledge of Trotsky's relations with Lenin, which is why he bought into Zinoviev and Stalin's polemic, "Leninism or Trotskyism"; and quickly took the side of Leninism (or Stalinism; which it was in reality). He quickly formed a relationship with one of Stalin's cronies, Sergo Ordzhonkidze. This relationship soon blossomed into a sort of protege/teacher, type of relationship, and Beria quickly rose up the bureaucratic ladder. And strangely enough, this rise up the bureacratic ladder led to a protege/teacher relationship with Stalin. By 1938, Stalin appointed Beria head of the NKVD (precursor to the KGB), and typical of Russian politics, he murdered his predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov. During his term as leader of the NKVD, Beria enacted many positive reforms, in conjunction with unparalleled acts of brutality, such as overseeing the assasination of Trotsky, and sending Red Army troops to GULAG. By the late 1940's, he fell out of favor in Stalin's eyes; and were it not for Stalin's premature death in 1953, he would undoubtedly have recieved the same treatment his two successors, Yagoda and Yezhov, recieved (liquidation!). The true value of Amy Knight's superb biography lies in it's description of Russia after Stalin's death. Knight, with extensive documentation, has shown that Beria would have enacted most of the reforms that Khrushchev enacted; such as de-Stalinization, amnesty of all GULAG prisoners, and an attempt at de-bureaucratization of the entire country. So really, paradoxically, one could say that Beria is one of Russia's great reformers, in the tradition of Peter the Great, Alexander II, Pyotr Stolypin, and Lenin; because he, not Khrushchev, laid the basis for de-Stalinization, which in turn, led to the collapse of the Soviet system (one can not deny that it was de-Stalinization, and not the intellectual bantam-weight Ronald Reagan, that caused the collapse of the USSR). This is just a remarkably fascinating book, that provides a lot of "food for thought", and I would recommend it to anybody.