April 14, 2002

THE book Beria my father should interest the readers primarily for the inside view it gives of Stalin’s regime — specially its responses to the events in the Soviet Union and Europe. There were double-dealings all around — neither Russia nor the other Europeans powers were above Machiavellian tactics — and this ultimately led to a confrontation between them. “After the Munich agreement Stalin contemptuously remarked about Chamberlain ‘one day that mad man Hitler will grab his umbrella and hit him with it. And Chamberlain will take it without complaining’.”

And yet, Stalin himself proceeded to enter into a pact with Germany with the explanation that “war with Germany was inevitable but it was necessary to win time and not face Hitler alone.”

Zhadanov “had done all he could to sabotage the negotiations with the French and British as he thought that the Anglo-Saxons would always take steps to prevent Russia from having a real protagonist on the international scene”.

Sergo, Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria’s son and the author of this book, confesses in the epilogue, “I did not write this book in order to rehabilitate the memory of my father — or, at least, that was not my prime purpose. I am perfectly aware now that it was not possible to be one of the leaders of the USSR without soiling one’s hands. There was always a choice to be made.”

But in spite of this realization, he embarks upon a marathon defence of his father. The reader, prepared for a partial defence, fails to get a clear and objective picture of any event of those tumultuous times. Sergo emerges not as a credible defence lawyer, but as an enthusiastic young ideologue ready to whitewash his father’s guilt, through the process of rationalization.

He takes up a situation, brings in all the involved personalities in the discussion, and transfers the blame to one or the other character. On most occasions Stalin himself is identified as the villain of the piece with his mysterious manipulations. “My father was accused of responsibility of everything that went wrong” and is shown as “traitor, spy, rapist, ignoramus, and oaf” the author writes to demonstrate the unsustainable charges of all pervading evil brought against the older Beria. Francoise Thom, the editor, has tried to shed some light on reality which has been slurred by the confusing medley of charges and countercharges advanced by the author. Stalin obviously must bear responsibility for all the glaring evils generated by his policies of collectivization, deportation of kulaks, starvation of the Ukrainians, and setting up of the arbitrary trials that marked Stalin’s regime. But the implementation of Stalin’s policies was the responsibility of Lavrenti Beria and it was he who opened the way to the ruthlessness which characterized those times.

Thom feels that apart from half lies, Sergo Beria’s testimony is derived from those endless, bickering feuds which tore apart the ruling communist party — as it does the members of any failed totalitarian regime — and apportioned blame on one another by revealing choice sections of the truth.

Born in March 1899 in the Sukhiani district of Georgia into a peasant family, the elder Beria went to school and technical college at Baku in Azerbaijan, where he got involved in trade union activities while still a teenager. He was politically active both in Georgia and Azerbaijan. While in a Georgian prison, he met his future wife, who was visiting her uncle who was also in prison at the time. His wife-to-be emerged as an important force in his life, though it was her uncle, Sacha, who yielded tremendous influence on Lavrenty Beria.

After the 1917 revolution, he joined the intelligence department met his fellow Georgian, Stalin, a few years later. Thence began his rise to power. After the purges of the 1930s, Stalin summoned him to Moscow. First he was the Commissar of Internal Affairs and in 1941 he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and made a Marshal of the USSR. In the ensuing power struggle after Stalin’s death, Beria lost to Khrushchev and was executed in December 1953 after a summary trial.

The younger Beria was born in 1924 and brought up in a world of lies, half truths, and intrigues. Sergo plays innocent in his intimate reports of events. His main source of information happened to be his mother and the families of other protagonists amongst whom he grew. It is doubtful if they could have been the repositories of all confidential information in this world of cut-throat intrigues, manipulations, and mass liquidation.

For Sergo Beria, his mother’s whispering clarifications give an imprint of authenticity on what he writes. She was affectionate but domineering. But then there are rumours floating around in the families of the archrivals and contenders for power as well. Who is to be believed? Even post-facto testing of information is problematic as those coming to power restructure the archives.

In this biography, Levranti Beria appears to be an amorphous axis of events. In fact it is the short period of three months which separates the death of Stalin from the fall of Beria (March 5 to June 26, 1953), which allows a true assessment of the political physiognomy of this strange person. Within three months, the Gulag lost almost half of its inmates, the great construction works of socialism were closed down, the collective farm system came under scathing criticism in the republics, the Party apparatus was put on the sidelines, and Beria began to attack the countersiege regime on the frontier of the USSR.

What was Beria pursuing? Did he aim to achieve absolute power through this strategy of de-Stalinization as his enemies claimed? Was it a miscalculation of the force of the revolution on his part, such as was the case with Gorbachev, or was it merely a calculating but failed move to sideline the Russophiles in the Politburo? Did he want to paper over his own reputation as cold-blooded torturer and a sexual maniac, as has often been said?

When Stalin died, Beria tried to guide the power struggle, which survived him and ended by bringing about the fall of the system. He wanted to use the crimes of the past to neutralize his rivals. But did he really intend to go back as far as Lenin and expose publicly the defects of Bolshevism, as his son now claims? No document has proved that so far. In the absence of archival records, nothing can be proved or disproved. However, the loyal progeny rarely permits an objective view into these issues.

Another person who emerges as a powerful force in Sergo Beria’s life is his mother. She idolized Stalin and tried to protect Sergo from the cruel reality of his father. Hence the ambivalence in the model son.

In one of her early meetings with Levranti Beria, she saw through his ignorance of Georgia’s history. Instead of censoring him for it she attributed it to his being an internationalist “to the very marrow of his bones”. After committing excesses against the Georgians in 1937, the writer says, “My father showed himself sensitive to Georgian nationalism, if I can believe the testimony of my mother who had always been a nationalist.” The mother’s image remains supreme.

 

Beria, my father: inside Stalin’s Kremlin

By Sergo Beria

Edited by Francoise Thom English translation by Brian Pearce

Duckworth

ISBN 0-7156-3062-8

397pp

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