Beria Lavrenty Pavlovich is a prominent Soviet politician. During his reign as head of the NKVD, repression peaked.
The future party leader, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Beria Lavrenty Pavlovich was born in a small mountainous Abkhazian village on March 29, 1899 (March 17 according to the old calendar). Growing up in the family of a poor peasant, he sought to get out of poverty. Sparing no effort, Lavrentiya studied and was known as the best student of the school. In 1915, after graduating with honors from the Sukhumi Primary School, he entered the Baku Secondary Technical School as a mechanic. Young Beria had neither money nor recommendations. There was no question of any payments to students then. Therefore, he was forced to combine work and study. In Sukhumi, he worked part-time, giving lessons, in Baku he changed a number of speci alties, looking for an opportunity to feed not only himself, but also his mother and sister, who moved in with him.
In the spring of 1917, he joined the Bolsheviks, and in the summer he was sent to the Romanian front. After the defeat of the army, returning to Azerbaijan, he joins the Bolshevik underground, headed by Mikoyan, and performs various assignments (up to joiningCaucasus of Soviet power in 1920).
In the autumn of 1919, Beria Lavrenty Pavlovich became an employee of the counterintelligence department created under the State Defense Committee of Azerbaijan, and in April 1920 he was sent to work in Georgia, which at that time was under the control of the Mensheviks. In the course of organizing an uprising against the Georgian government, Beria was arrested, sent to a Kutaisi prison and deported to Baku.
Beria Lavrenty Pavlovich came to work as a Cheka in the spring of 1921, becoming the head of the secret part of the Baku Cheka, and in the late autumn of 1922 - deputy chairman of the Cheka of Georgia.
In 1926, Lavrentiy was appointed chairman of the GPU, and from April 1927 People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Since the spring of 1931, all operations to destroy the Mensheviks and members of other parties, kulaks, the bourgeoisie were carried out only under the personal control of Beria, who by that time had taken the post of chairman of the Transcaucasian GPU. In the autumn of the same year, at the insistence of Stalin, he was appointed secretary of the regional party committee. The rapprochement between Beria and Stalin was facilitated not only by work, but also by a joint vacation in Sochi and Abkhazia. During one of them, the coast guard, not understanding the situation, opened fire on Stalin's pleasure boat. Beria shielded the leader from bullets with his body, which could not but become the starting point for the development of closer relations between the two high-ranking officials.
Beria, whose biography is full of white spots, was the most cruel leader of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. From the late 1930s, he led mass repressions among the state and party apparatus. According to numerous testimonies, he personally participated in the beatings and torture of prisoners. Under the leadership of Beria, mass deportations from the B altic states, Belarus and Ukraine were carried out, Polish officers were shot.
After Stalin's death, the members of the Presidium of the Central Committee, frightened by the increased authority of the man in the pince-nez, secretly decided to remove him from the leadership. On trumped-up charges, on June 26, 1953, he was taken to prison. The execution of Beria took place on the day of the verdict by the court headed by Marshal I. S. Konev. This happened on December 23, 1953.
