Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

LAVRENTI BERIA WAS BORN on March 29, 1899, to Pavle and Marta Beria in Merkheuli, a village near Sukhum, the capital of Abkhazia. The Berias were peasants and Mingrelians, a people related to the Georgians, and lived in a three-walled hovel with a hole in the roof for a chimney. Lavrenti, like Stalin, was the third and only healthy child of the marriage.¹ Marta was by birth a Jaqeli, a family related to the Dadiani, feudal princes of Mingrelia. She was a fine seamstress, a talent which kept her family from starvation, while for a time the young Beria helped by working as a postman. Like Stalin’s mother, Marta Beria was pious and determined to educate her son; he studied at Sukhum City College. Beria became a hydraulic engineer, a trade he practiced when conscripted in the summer of 1917, and which then took him to the oil fields of Baku, where he enrolled in technical college in 1918.

Beria’s revolutionary credentials in Baku are murky. In 1919 and for part of 1920 he was an intelligence agent for the Azeri nationalist party, the Musavat, which collaborated with the British forces then occupying Baku and repressed Bolsheviks. Later Beria insisted, probably truthfully, that he was working in the Musavat as a double agent on behalf of the Bolsheviks. No conclusive proof is yet available, but suspicions never abated.² In 1920 Sergei Kirov proposed shooting Beria; in 1926 investigated him; in 1931 Georgian communists, and in December 1936 Lakoba’s widow, brought Orjonikidze in Moscow a dossier. Each time Beria thwarted his accusers with worse allegations against them.³

By mid-1920 Beria was in independent Georgia, where he was arrested in Kutaisi as a Soviet spy. Sergei Kirov, then ambassador to Georgia and preparing for the Soviet 11th Army’s invasion, bullied the Georgian government into releasing Beria, who returned to Baku. There he was detained by the new Azeri Cheka and then released by its head, the future satrap of Azerbaijan, Jafar Bagirov. Cheka headquarters in Moscow disliked the local organization. Mikhail Kedrov, fresh from ravaging Arkhangelsk, went to Baku to eradicate local nationalism and attacked both Beria and Bagirov for corruption. They were drinking with the local clergy, Christian and Muslim, oppressing Armenians and Russians, favoring Azeris and Georgians. Beria was saved from arrest on Anastas Mikoyan’s intervention.

By October 1922, eighteen months after the Soviets had invaded Georgia, Beria was head of secret operations in the Georgian Cheka. He married a girl of sixteen, Nina Gegechkori, whom the Cheka had arrested after an anti-Soviet demonstration. In Tbilisi, as in Moscow, the Cheka was staffed largely by outsiders: Latvians and Russians. Beria, speaking Georgian, Russian, Mingrelian, and a little Azeri, was invaluable in this polyglot city.⁴ His references from his seniors deplored his cowardice but praised his persistence, and Józef Unszlicht, deputy chairman of the GPU, was impressed enough to award Beria an inscribed Brauning revolver in 1923. Beria made his mark in 1924, stage-managing the bloody suppression of a Georgian national uprising, although he apparently had tried to warn the rebels.

That warning suggests the survival of vestiges of humanity in Beria, and in 1924 he applied to leave the Cheka. He wanted to resume his career as a hydraulic engineer and, hoping to be sent to Belgium for training, asked to move to the oil fields in Baku. But the Cheka could not do without him. Remaining in the organization, Beria advanced rapidly, disgracing and transferring his rivals. The dislike that Beria aroused made many Georgian chekisty seek work elsewhere in the USSR.

Beria’s rise was speeded by sudden deaths among his colleagues, and he acquired a reputation for murder and falsification. In 1925, in an accident that baffled three commissions of inquiry, a Junkers aircraft crashed near Tbilisi, killing Beria’s superiors, the chairman of the Transcaucasian GPU, Solomon Mogilevsky, and Stalin’s favorite killer of the Caucasus, Georgi Atarbekov. Beria composed an obituary for Mogilevsky: “I cannot believe, I don’t want to believe that I shall never hear again Solomon Grigorievich’s soft voice. . . . I remember his especially attentive concern for me and the Azeri Cheka’s work: ‘We here rely on you,’ he said in his friendly chats with me.”⁵