Beria

Rating:
Summary: A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma....
Review: Amy Knight's biography of Beria deserves a place in the pantheon of post-Soviet analysis of the Soviet Union. Knight is a serious scholar and doesn't suffer from the excesses seen in other works about the Soviet Union written in the last ten year. Unfortunately, this serious approach also has a limiting factor in discussing somebody so thoroughly reviled like Beria. Unlike Stalin, who even Knight admits still maintained his followers even after he was denounced in Khrushchev's 1956 speech, Beria became a complete non-person. As a result, one has the impression there is very little actual 'original' source information left by and regarding him. Knight says that Beria kept very few papers, but one has the impression that even if he had they would have disappeared in 1953 as quickly as their author did.
Knight does a good job in showing Beria's rise from simple roots in Georgia to almost the top of Soviet politics. Beria is portrayed as the ultimate opportunist, ruthlessly undercutting everybody in his path to further his ambition. In the process, Beria built up his own 'personality cult' and network of cronies to do his bidding. Indeed, Beria is portrayed as being the ultimate Stalinist politician, a born survivor with an ambition to reach the top (unlike other people, such as Molotov, who were content just to survive). In the end, its Beria's ambition and his own arrogance that prove to be his undoing. According to Knight, Beria was taken down by an amateurish coup by Khrushchev, who Beria consistently underestimated.
The greatest weakness of this book is its own serious nature. So little actually unbiased or original information is left that a lot of the early parts of the book are pure history with very little analysis or new information. Beria supposedly was a vicious pedophile, a serial rapist of young women, but very little mention is given of that or other sins. Knight does give some examples from witnesses of Beria's cruelty, but not enough to really give a feel for the man. Reading this book, I never felt like I had a real appreciation of who this man was. Beria was supposed to be a monster, as brutal as Ezhov and Yagoda but much more intelligent. With a few exceptions, Knight gives the reader very few glimpses of this brutality.
The big irony of the book, and its greatest strength, is the coverage Knight gives to Beria's 100 days in power after Stalin's death. This man, so reviled for unrestrained brutality, shown to be a complete opportunist with Stalin, spent his last days in a quest to completely reform and overhaul the Soviet system. As with everything, Beria's personal arrogance and inability to restrain himself in his reforms proved to be his undoing. After some bungled liberalization in East Germany that resulted in riots and Soviet military intervention, Beria was 'removed' in a coup instigated by Khrushchev. The book's real impact is in these final chapters. Much detail is given to the wholesale reforms instigated by Beria; taken in context of a speech Beria gave the previous year criticizing Russian chauvinism (at the expense of minorities) one can really see the enigma of the situation: Beria, so reviled for his brutality, in the end is a reformer... a man, despite all his flaws, who is before his time. Knight does a good job of showing how Khrushchev, despite his recent rehabilitation, was as compromised as everybody else, and how Beria, has been reviled without a second thought by history. Knight's biography makes you wonder how accurate this view is.

Rating:
Summary: Don't like office politics? Read this book, then!
Review: Having just read this, the only book-length biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's most powerful henchman, I wondered if I would have survived in Beria's world. Office politics in the Stalinist USSR was not just about bitching by the water cooler and trying to suck up to the boss (although such elements were also present, writ large). Even surviving in such an environment required degrees of political acumen and sheer nastiness that very few people need to demonstrate in our herbivorous times. Even as an apparatchik reached his goal of near-absolute power (say, Yagoda, Ezhov or Zhdanov) he would find himself subtly undermined. Even as someone was appointed to the Central Committee he would find that key associates carefully placed across the state and party apparatus were being removed to the coziness of the Lubianka or Kolyma.

In this world, which was described quite well by Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, in a chapter titled "Why the Worst Get on Top", Beria was almost bound to rise (although, for political reasons, Hayek was describing Nazi Germany rather than the USSR). He was a Mingrelian, a minority ethnic group in Georgia, and, like Stalin, he was brought up by his mother after his father's early death. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the political police and eventually managed to become Georgian and then Transcaucasian party boss (he even killed a few competitors in the way). Ezhov's "Great Terror" of 1936-1937 paved the way for a takeover by Beria, who consolidated his position during the war and then by heading the nuclear weapons project. A brilliant manager, who was able to get on well with those he worked with (but who had no compunction about delivering them to their deaths if it served his purposes) he always delivered. Unlike Stalin, he was not interested in praises (although he organised his own personality cult for practical reasons) and was reasonable enough to tell the difference between real enemies and loyal followers. Women were his weakness. Ms Knight, a serious historian, does not indulge her readers with lurid stories about girls picked up in Moscow streets and then killed in the basement of Beria's town house, but she does mention that Beria was treated for siphilis during the War. As Stalin aged, be became more and more deranged and eventually wanted to be rid of Beria and his Mingrelians. Unlike other historians, such as Edvard Radzinsky, the author does not speculate about Beria's possible role in Stalin's demise in March 1953, although she concludes that only this saved Beria from the destiny of many of his predecessors. While Beria's energetic attempts at de-Stalinisation were already known (Beria's lieutenant Pavel Sudoplatov had already mentioned them in his book "Special Operations"), Ms Knight elaborates on how wide-ranging they would have been had Beria succeeded in consolidating his grip on power. Indeed, it is quite possible that glasnost might have come more than 30 years before Gorbachov came to power, and that it would have been implemented from a position of strength rather than one of weakness (in 1953 the Soviet Union was at the top of its power, having succeeded in launching a Hydrogen bomb and having established control over North Korea). German re-unification might have happened in the 1950s rather than the early 1990s, and would have been much less costly and disruptive. On the other hand, it's also possible that Beria might have backtracked after attaining his goal, which was only power for himself. As Ms Knight shows, Beria, like most Soviet politicians had only very slight concern about policies, reserving most of his time and effort for power politics. His downfall was swift, and to be frank, required significant courage from Kruschev and Malenkov. Kruschev comes out of this book (like he did in Volkogonov's Stalin) as a devious henchman who was no less guilty than Beria, but far less able.

It is interesting to see that the downfall of Soviet leaders in the period 1948-1990 was associated with failures to control events in their zones of influence. Beria's downfall started with the breakup of Soviet-Yugoslav relations in 1948 and concluded in 1953, due to demonstrations in Eastern Germany. Kruschev's downfall came in 1964, after he badly miscalculated the risk in transporting nuclear warheads to Cuba. Gorbachov's fall was associated with failure over Germany in 1989. As it was, Kruschov's de-Stalinisation was probably much less comprehensive than Beria's would have been. A nice complement to Ms Knight's book is Sergo Beria's recently published "Beria My Father". One last comment: Ms Knight's book is not for the casual reader. Even for someone who has read Conquest, Pipes, Volkogonov, Radzinsky, Bullock and Ulan it is sometimes difficult to keep straight all the unfamiliar names and party organisations, especially in Transcaucasia. The book would have gained from a few charts illustrating who worked when and where with Ezhov, Beria, Kruschev, Zhdanov or Malenkov. A "power map", with Stalin on top and the various top leaders and their key protegees would also have been useful. If you haven't read much Soviet history you should probably stay clear of this book, as it probably is not the most suitable one for a novice.

Stalin once famously introduced Beria to some Americans as "Our Himmler" (Ms Knight has ommitted this anecdote, and I wonder whether that was because she didn't believe it really happened). If one compares Ms Knight's Beria with, for example, Peter Padfield's Himmler (although his book is clearly much less scholarly than Ms Knight's) one can see that Beria was much more realistic and efficient than Himmler. The correct comparison is between Beria and Heydrich. Had the Third Reich truly been a totalitarian state, Himmler would have gone the way of Yagoda and Heydrich would have been Hitler's Beria. With Goering liquidated during the purges that would have followed, the entire foreign service culled for unreliable elements such as Ambassador Schulenburg and the Wermacht rid of likely conspirators such as Claus von Stauffenberg, it is possible that the War might have ended otherwise. But that's a different subject.

Rating:
Summary: INFORMATIVE AND WELL RESEARCHED BOOK
Review: I could not put this volume down. The most incredible discovery I made after reading this book was that it was the bloody monster Beria--of all the Stalin's henchmen in Kremlin-- who tried to De-Stalinize the Soviet system after Stalin's death. Khruschev's unforgetable reaction to that was an attempt to put brakes on this process. Eventually, he succeded in presenting himself as the man "who opened window to the West". Speaking about the truth in history...
This book deserves a much more popularuty due to its many unique qualities. Kudos to the author with such a wonderful name.

Rating:
Summary: Gripping, chilling and illuminating
Review: This is a really excellent piece of work. Amy Knight has produced what is billed as the first biography of Beria and one it will be hard for any future writer to outdo. The book is determinedly unsensational, meticulously researched and annotated, and well-written. We are given a rounded picture of a brutal opportunist who could be pragmatic when the occasion called for it. The book speculates interestingly and plausibly on what might have happened had Beria succeeded in his bid to succeed Stalin. Khrushchev, who got the job in the end, adopted many of Beria's policies. My only minor gripe is that the switch from looking at Beria's myriad bad points to his good ones jars sometimes. But if you want to know more about a key, but shadowy, figure from the Stalin era, read this book. They don't come much better.