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Beria and the cult of Stalin: Rewriting Transcaucasian party history

Abstract:

OF ALL STALIN'S DEPUTIES perhaps none earned more notoriety for his success in winning Stalin's favour and gaining a position of authority in Stalin's inner circle than Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria. Beria was chief of the Soviet political police from 1938 to 1946 and then served as a deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers until Stalin's death in March 1953, when he again took over the police, only to be arrested by his political opponents three months later. Although a relative latecomer to Stalin's entourage when he arrived in Moscow from his native Georgia in 1938, Beria soon became one of Stalin's closest confidants. That Stalin eventually came to distrust Beria and to intrigue against him in the early 1950s does not detract from Beria's remarkable ability not only to escape the fate of his predecessors in the police, Yagoda and Ezhov, but to achieve what was, by all accounts, a position of unparalleled …