Lavrentiy Beria

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (29 March [O . 17 March] 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph Stalin's secret police chiefs, serving as head of the NKVD from 1938 to 1945 during the country's involvement in the Second World War. He was also a serial rapist and had killed some of his victims. His victims were primarily young women and girls. An ethnic Georgian, Beria enlisted in the Cheka in 1920, and quickly rose through its ranks. He transferred to Communist Party work in the Caucasus in the 1930s, and in 1938 was appointed head of the NKVD by Stalin. His ascent marked the end of Stalin's Great Purge carried out by Nikolai Yezhov, whom Beria purged. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Beria organized the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia, and after the occupation of the Baltic states and parts of Romania in 1940, he oversaw the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians to remote areas or Gulag camps. In 1940, Beria began a new purge of the Red Army. After Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was appointed to the State Defense Committee, overseeing security. Beria expanded the system of forced labour, mobilizing millions of Gulag prisoners into wartime production. He also was in charge of NKVD units responsible for barrier and partisan intelligence and sabotage operations on the Eastern Front. In 1943–44, Beria oversaw the mass deportations of millions of ethnic minorities from the Caucasus, actions which have been described by many scholars as ethnic cleansing or genocide. Beria was also responsible for supervising secret Gulag detention facilities for scientists and engineers, known as sharashkas. From 1945, he oversaw the Soviet atomic bomb project, to which Stalin gave priority; the project's first nuclear device was completed in 1949. After the war, Beria was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1945, and promoted to a full member of the Politburo in 1946. After Stalin's death in March 1953, Beria became head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and a First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. He also formed a triumvirate (a . troika) alongside Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov which briefly led the country in Stalin's place. During the three months in which he had a free hand, the embodiment of Stalinist police terror paradoxically emerged as a reformer of the regime. As early as April 4, he released the victims of the Doctors’ Plot. He had an amnesty promulgated that freed nearly half of the Gulag’s inmates (1,200,000 people out of 2,750,000, mostly petty offenders sentenced to terms of less than five years) and ordered the closure of part of the camp system. He returned the Gulag to the Ministry of Justice, thereby partially curbing the arbitrariness that had prevailed there. He had the Politburo vote to remove portraits of leaders from parades and demonstrations and advocated domestically for better treatment of national minorities, and externally for a resolute policy of détente with the West. By June 1953, Beria was removed from power in a coup organized with the support of his colleagues in the Soviet leadership and Marshal Georgy Zhukov. He was arrested, tried for treason and other offenses, and ultimately executed on 23 December 1953.