Beria was not only a bolshevik mass murderer and torturer of the common kind. According to the memoirs of Khrushchev, Beria was also a serial killer. He would haunt the Moscow streets in his car at night, having his body guard pick up any girl he fancied. Those women would be taken to his house, where he'd drug them, rape them and sometimes kill them. Many times very young girls. The body guards would then be tasked with burying the corpses in his yard. Afterwards the bodyguard gave a list of more than a hundred women who had been raped by Beria.
This man almost became the Soviet leader after Stalin's death, but was outmanoeuvred and later executed. According to Khrushchev, even Stalin feared Beria at times.
From Khrushchev:
"When Rudenko began the interrogation of Beria, a monstrous person was revealed before our eyes, a dreadful beast for whom nothing was sacred."
On the other side of the story: Beria was promoting the reunification of Germany, during his short rule in 1953. His plan was to pull the Soviet army out of East Germany/German Democratic Republic. The motive was to get the Soviet Union out of the cold war with the west.
Some months later the uprising of the 17th of June 1953 happened in East Berlin, and the politburo got scared that something similar could happen with Russia.
While it might be true I think it's worth pointing out that Khrushchev and Beria were in rivalry for power.
And I would be surprised if in his memoirs he wouldn't have painted Beria as the bad guy.
So I think we should take all those memories with a grain of salt at best and understand that all those stories might be twisted or even completely false.
From the Beria wikipedia article:
In 1993, construction workers installing streetlights unearthed human bones near Beria's Moscow villa (now the Tunisian embassy). Skulls, pelvises and leg bones were found.[90] In 1998, the skeletal remains of five young women were discovered during work carried out on the water pipes in the garden of the same villa.[91] In 2011, building workers digging a ditch in Moscow city centre unearthed a common grave near the same residence containing a pile of human bones, including two children's skulls covered with lime or chlorine. The lack of articles of clothing and the condition of the remains indicate that these bodies were buried naked.
It does have a big QAnon "baby-eating" feel about it yes. Especially considering that even Soviet state leaders lived in pretty small houses by Western standards, it's pretty unlikely that they had the space to bury hundreds of corpses.
The Soviets were really big on rewriting history and they spent a lot of time editing photos of stalin with people that later fell out of grace.
But I'm sure he was a bad person indeed. I don't think you could rise to such a position without being one until the lighter age appeared that led to Gorbachev.
Yes but I'm talking more about the creepiness of the stalking of women, mass rape, personally torturing and killing for pleasure etc. It sounds a bit far-fetched. It may well be true but there was just so much history rewriting going on.
I know all the soviet leaders of that era were mass murderers but usually by delegation only.
Edit: I read up on it and it does indeed seem true. Wow..
Some people correct the opposite direction from ‘the office’ (say, spending time in nature after working at a computer all day). Some go whole hog - spending all their extra time working on hobby projects, for instance.
I guess the same thing applies if your job is being a manipulator, murderer, and genocidal maniac?
Indeed. It's always frustrating to encounter these "Well if your arguments are right then how come they sound false to me?" discussion of Soviet history, even on what are supposed to be more measured and thoughtful platforms like HN. Doubly so when the argument is just that the Stalin-era secret police committed an atrocity.
> It does have a big QAnon "baby-eating" feel about it yes. Especially considering that even Soviet state leaders lived in pretty small houses by Western standards, it's pretty unlikely that they had the space to bury hundreds of corpses.
You don't know what you're talking about, is probably the nicest thing I can say about your comment.
Khrushchev memoirs were not official Soviet history, they were recorded by him after he had fallen from grace and was living in house arrest as a retiree, later smuggled out to the West by his friends. You can read them and judge for yourself how candid they are. Of course he might paint himself in a more favourable light than somebody else would, that's expected. But your comment comes off as both rude and ignorant – unless I'm mistaken and you are of such a superior intellect that you can pass quick judgement on any historical happening without having to bother yourself with the sources.
I was just saying how it came across to me. It really sounds like something made-up in the times for political gain like the secret baby-eating clubs of Qanon :)
But I do see some corpses have actually been found and it was corroborated by multiple sources. I wouldn't consider Kruchchev a reliable source either though for the reasons mentioned. But some other one syes.
Like I said it was just my personal feelings on the subject and this is not an encyclopedia but a discussion forum. We don't always have the ability to do a full study on each subject. And I never said I was an authority on it.
>When Rudenko began the interrogation of Beria, a monstrous person was revealed before our eyes, a dreadful beast for whom nothing was sacred.
It's amusingly self-serving how Krushcev should imply that he and others in the top leadership only discovered this about Beria after the death of Stalin and Beria's arrest.
Krushcev himself, while not personally sadistic and cruel in the way Beria was, had rivers of blood pass over his hands while he worked for Stalin organizing vast purges and famine conditions.
He doesn't imply that, he knew before that how Beria was conducting his job as the secret police chief, but probably not about Beria's past time activities.
Khrushchev was far from a saint, and he is surprisingly quiet in his memoirs about his role as a judge in the troikas, and participation in purging innocent people. He was a murderer. According to himself, he was hypnotised like everyone else in the Stalin cult, unable to see anything wrong with what Stalin said or did.
This man almost became the Soviet leader after Stalin's death, but was outmanoeuvred and later executed. According to Khrushchev, even Stalin feared Beria at times.
From Khrushchev:
"When Rudenko began the interrogation of Beria, a monstrous person was revealed before our eyes, a dreadful beast for whom nothing was sacred."