Beria files released

From the Times of London:

Russian got a rare insight into one of the darkest periods of Soviet history yesterday when prosecutors presented a 47-volume criminal dossier on Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s hated secret police chief, which included a list of hundreds of women whom he raped.

The RTR state television network has been allowed to film small extracts from the secret files for the first time to counter accusations that they had been lost. Most of the files will remain closed to the public for another 25 years.

When Beria took over as head of the secret police in 1938, the Great Terror had already engulfed Lenin’s old revolutionary comrades. Beria supervised the wartime massacre of Polish officers at Katyn and the deportations from the Baltic States and Poland as well as of the Crimean Tartars.

The Soviet Armed Forces suffered terribly at the hands of Beria and the NKVD, later to become the KGB; it has been estimated that a third of all officers were arrested. Three out of five marshals and 14 out of 16 army commanders were executed, and Beria so terrified Red Army commanders that they coined a euphemism for being purged: “going to have coffee with Beria”.

After overseeing the Terror, he went on supervise the development of the Soviet nuclear bomb.

Beria has long been accused of luring hundreds of women to his apartment and raping them. Television footage of the dossier showed handwritten lists of dozens of women with their telephone numbers. . .

Beria took over the NKVD from Nikolai Yezhov — who, like his own predecessor, was himself swallowed up by the Terror over which he had presided. Beria oversaw the vast forced labour camp system in which millions died. . .

Unlike contemporary Germany, Russia has made little effort to come to terms with its own crimes of totalitarianism, under which more than 20 million people died. Yuri Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow, recently proposed that a statue to Felix Dzerzhinsky should again adorn the former KGB headquarters. Under Lenin, Dzerzhinsky founded the terror apparatus that Beria inherited.

Posted by David on January 18, 2003 5:56 PM