Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant - Hardcover

Knight, Amy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691032572 ISBN 13: 9780691032573

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1993

Synopsis

This is the first comprehensive biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant. Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been previously published about his long and tumultuous career.

About this title

About the Author

Amy Knight is a Senior Research Analyst at the Library of Congress and a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She is also the author of The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union.

From the Back Cover

"A milestone, an invaluable achievement, the natural heir to Leggett's history of the Cheka."--John le Carré

"This first full-scale scholarly biography of the clever, cruel, domineering security chief whom Stalin once called 'my Himmler' casts valuable new light on various events of the Stalin period and its early aftermath."--Robert Tucker, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

From the Inside Flap

"A milestone, an invaluable achievement, the natural heir to Leggett's history of the Cheka."--John le Carré

"This first full-scale scholarly biography of the clever, cruel, domineering security chief whom Stalin once called 'my Himmler' casts valuable new light on various events of the Stalin period and its early aftermath."--Robert Tucker, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

Reviews

As Stalin's police chief, right-hand man and commander of the Gulag slave-labor network, Lavrenty Beria (1899-1953) was a mass murderer whose weapons included torture, deportation and execution. Yet, after Stalin died in 1953, this devious, cold-blooded Bolshevik embarked on a short-lived liberalization program designed to curb the Communist Party apparatus and to give the non-Russian minorities more decision-making powers and limited recognition of their national and cultural identities. Arrested in a coup led by Khrushchev, Beria was executed. Critics view Beria's de-Stalinization proposals as mere tools in a succession struggle, but Knight, a Library of Congress scholar who did extensive research in the former Soviet Union, portrays the Georgian-born police chief as a would-be reformer who saw change as inevitable but was motivated above all by a desire to further his own power. A provocative biography of one of history's most evil men. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Scrupulous academic account that ultimately fails to do full justice to the chilling fascination of its subject. The bland subtitle that Knight (Senior Research Analyst/Library of Congress) chooses signals both the strengths and weaknesses of this first full-scale biography of Stalin's infamous police chief Laventrii Beria--``My Himmler,'' as Uncle Joe nicknamed him. Exploiting the mass of documentation newly available from former Soviet archives, Knight traces with forensic precision the sometime architectural student's rise, through the bloody ranks of Lenin's Cheka and its Stalinist successors in Georgia during the USSR's formative years, to oversee Stalin's massive edifice of organized state terror from 1938 until the dictator's death in 1953. Implicit in Knight's matter-of-fact account is the claim that Beria was singular less for his ruthless violence than for his adroit negotiation of Soviet internal politics and his canny currying of favor with Stalin. Yet the broader context of the culture of terror in which Beria's ghastly talents flourished remains hazy: Knight supplies no ethical or moral account of Stalinism, and few contemporary figures beyond Beria himself, his grim master, and familiar names such as Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Molotov emerge distinctly. Moreover, those new to the murderous intricacies of Stalinist infighting may find clarity retreating under a mass of initials, patronymics, and organizational acronyms. Knight readily acknowledges Beria's ``evil'' but does too little to help her readers understand it; hence her subsequent heavy stress on his unexpected emergence, in the frenzied power struggle that followed Stalin's death, as a pragmatic reformer--hardly absolution, most readers will feel, for a lifetime otherwise unblemished by loyalty, compassion, or common decency. In avoiding sensationalism or unbridled psychological speculation, Knight forgoes a full apprehension of the pathology of Beria and the system that bred him--without which many may choose not to endure the man's odious company. (Illustrations) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Like many of Stalin's executors, Lavrentii Beria was no neophyte at wreaking terror. He liquidated thousands in the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia in 1922-24, which service brought the ambitious man to the notice of the boss. More crafty than Stalin's other police chiefs, Beria survived until his own execution as an enemy of the people in 1953. Stalin's successors were anxious to deflect their own complicity in the regime's criminality, and so the archives were locked. No historically verifiable account of Beria's career as Stalin's "Himmler" has been possible--until now. Beria apparently had no life to speak of, aside from raping young girls outside his office, which, on occasion, doubled as a torture chamber. These sick details--and dramatic ones surrounding Khrushchev's coup--underwrite the deadly character of the author's main import: Kremlin politics following Beria's takeover of the NKVD in 1938. Knight has ably examined and coherently reassembled the slivers and shards of evidence, and future biographers (with strong stomachs) will surely build on her pioneering work. Gilbert Taylor

A strong entry in the wave of post-glasnost biographies, Knight's book is an accessible study of one of the most sinister members of Stalin's inner circle. Yet Knight, a senior research analyst in Soviet affairs at the Library of Congress, points out in her introduction that she is not attempting to "rehabilitate" Beria but to "challenge some basic assumptions, both about Beria and about the Stalinist system in general." Using recently released documents, Knight succeeds in describing the life of Lavrentii Beria, from his student days in Baku, to his role as Stalin's most powerful henchmen, chief of security, and head of the slave-labor network in the gulag, to his rapid fall after the death of Stalin in the power struggles that brought Khrushchev to power. This work is recommended for undergraduates and informed lay readers.
- John Sandstrom, Houston P.L., Tex.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0691032572
• ISBN 13: 9780691032573
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 338