Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Bolshevik and Soviet politician. He was the longest-lived and most influential of Stalin’s secret police chiefs. Beria oversaw the Soviet atomic bomb project and was responsible for organising the Katyn massacre. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Beria became First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. A coup d’état by Nikita Khrushchev, with help from Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov, removed Beria from power. In 1953, he was arrested on charges of 357 counts of rape and treason, and was sentenced to death and was executed on 23 December 1953.
About Lavrentiy Beria in brief
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Bolshevik and Soviet politician. He was the longest-lived and most influential of Stalin’s secret police chiefs. Beria oversaw the Soviet atomic bomb project and was responsible for organising the Katyn massacre. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Beria became First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. A coup d’état by Nikita Khrushchev, with help from Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov in June 1953, removed Beria from power. In 1953, he was arrested on charges of 357 counts of rape and treason, and was sentenced to death and was executed on 23 December 1953. He died in prison in Tbilisi, Georgia, on December 23, 1953, at the age of 48. He had a deaf sister and a sister-in-law who he did not mention in his autobiography. He claimed to have joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 while a student in the Baku Polytechnicum. He also worked for the anti-Bolshevik Mussavatists in Baku. In 1919 he joined the Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police. In 1921 he led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising, which resulted in the formation of the SSR. In 1922 he was deputy of the Georgian branch of Cheka’s successor, the OGPU. In 1924 he was head of OGPU’s Georgian branch, which led to the death of 10,000 people after the Menshevik Mensheviks were defeated by the Red Army.
He later became a member of the Politburo of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, and later of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He is credited with helping to organise the Soviet takeover of central and eastern Europe after the Second World War. His death in 1953 was followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of the Warsaw Pact. He left a legacy of political and military power in the Caucasus and the Black Sea region of Russia. He has been remembered as one of the most influential figures in the history of the Russian state. He wrote a biography of Stalin, titled “Stalin’s Secret Police: A Biography of a Great Leader” (Stalin: The Autobiography of Lavrentiy Beria). Beria died on December 23, 1953 at age 48, and is survived by his sister and his niece, Nina Gegechkori, who was 17 at the time of his death. His last words to Nina were: “I love you, Nina. I love you very much.” He was also known as the “father of the Caucasus” and “the father of the Azerbaijani people” (Beria: “Beria” means “brother” or “uncle” in Georgian). He died of a heart attack on December 27, 1953 in prison, aged 48, in what is believed to have been his last visit to his native Georgia.
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