Beria Lavrentiy Pavlovich: a man in a pince-nez

Beria Lavrenty Pavlovich is a prominent Soviet politician. For the period of his reign, the peak of the NKVD is the peak of repression.

The future party leader, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Beria Lavrentii Pavlovich was born in a small mountain Abkhaz village on March 29, 1899 (March 17th according to the old calendar). Growing up in the family of a poor peasant, he strove to get out of poverty. Not sparing his strength, Lavrenti studied and was known as the best pupil of the school. In 1915, having graduated Sukhumi primary school with honors, he entered the secondary technical school of Baku for a mechanic. Young Beria had neither money nor recommendations. There was no question of any payments to the students. Therefore, he was forced to combine work and study. In Sukhumi, he worked part time, giving lessons, in Baku he changed a number of specialties, seeking the opportunity to feed not only himself, but also the mother and sister who moved to him.

In the spring of 1917, he joined the Bolsheviks, and in the summer he was sent to the Romanian Front. After the defeat of the army, returning to Azerbaijan, he enters the Bolshevik underground, headed by Mikoyan, and carries out various assignments (until the arrival of the Soviet power in the Caucasus in 1920).

In the fall of 1919, Beria Lavrentiy Pavlovich became a counterintelligence officer, created under the Committee of the State Defense of Azerbaijan, and in April 1920 was sent to work in Georgia, which at that time was under the control of the Mensheviks. During the organization of the uprising against the Georgian government, Beria was arrested, sent to the Kutaisi prison and deported to Baku.

Beria Lavrentii Pavlovich came to the Chekist work in the spring of 1921, becoming head of the secret section of the Baku Cheka, and in the late autumn of 1922 - deputy chairman of the Cheka of Georgia. In 1926, Lavrenti was appointed chairman of the GPU, and from April 1927, the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Since the spring of 1931, all operations to destroy the Mensheviks and members of other parties, kulaks, and the bourgeoisie were conducted only under the personal control of Beria, who at that time occupied the post of chairman of the Transcaucasian GPU. In the autumn of the same year, at the insistence of Stalin, he was appointed secretary of the regional committee of the party. The rapprochement between Beria and Stalin was facilitated not only by work, but also by joint rest in Sochi and Abkhazia. During one of them, the coast guard, not having understood the situation, opened fire on Stalin's pleasure boat. Beria shielded the leader from bullets with his body, which could not but become the starting point for the development of closer relations between two high-ranking officials.

Beria, whose biography is full of blank spots, was the cruelest head of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Since the late 1930s, he led mass repression among the state and party apparatus. According to numerous evidences, he personally participated in the beatings and torture of prisoners. Under the leadership of Beria, mass deportations from the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine were carried out, Polish officers were shot.

After the death of Stalin, members of the Presidium of the Central Committee, frightened by the increased authority of a man in a pince-nez, secretly decided to remove him from the leadership. On the falsified charge of June 26, 1953, he was taken to prison. The shooting of Beria took place on the day the verdict was pronounced by a court headed by Marshal Konev I. This happened on December 23, 1953.