Lavrentiy Beria

March 29, 1899 – December 23, 1953

Lavrentiy Beria was the longest-lived head of the Stalin secret police—the NKVD—no small feat in the early days of the Soviet Union. Like Stalin, Beria was Georgian. As a student at Baku Polytechnic in Azerbaijan, he excelled in math and science and initially worked for the anti-Bolshevik Azerbaijani political party and was arrested when the Red Army invaded the city. He narrowly avoided execution when the Red Army ran out of time to kill all their political prisoners. Beria soon felt the lure of state power and joined the Georgian branch of the Cheka, the secret police, a predecessor organization to the NKVD. After claiming to have thwarted a dangerous conspiracy theory that he had in fact faked, he became one of Stalin’s favorites and found himself summoned to Moscow. As deputy head of the NKVD under Nikolai Yezhov, he carried out the Great Purge—which eventually purged his boss Yezhov, who was executed in 1940. Beria took over the top job and continued a subsequent round of purges, including that of the Red Army and ethnic minorities supposedly conspiring with the Nazis. Beria’s comfort with violence was unsettling. His associates knew him to be a sexual predator who identified women he intended to target from the back of his limousine. Meanwhile, he was also married with a son, Sergo, an engineering student, who came to Stalin’s notice and was invited to join the Soviet security team at the Tehran Conference to eavesdrop on Roosevelt via strategically placed bugs. Sergo was asked to repeat this job at Yalta, where he once again joined his father in the shadows.

Photograph: Wikimedia commons, public domain