Lavrenti Beria

He grew up in a Georgian Orthodox family; his mother, Marta Jaqeli (1868–1955), was deeply religious and church-going.

Marta was from the Guria region, descended from a noble Georgian family, and was a widow before marrying Beria's father, Pavle Beria (1872–1922), a landowner in Sukhumi Okrug, from the Mingrelian ethnic subgroup.

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (Лаврентий Павлович Берия; ლავრენტი ბერია, ; 29 March 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Georgian Bolshevik and Soviet politician, Marshal of the Soviet Union and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security, and chief of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during the Second World War, and promoted to deputy premier under Stalin in 1941.

While in prison, Beria formed a connection with Nina Gegechkori (1905–1991), his cellmate's niece, and they eloped on a train.

Beria attended a technical school in Sukhumi, and later claimed to have joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 while a student in the Baku Polytechnicum (subsequently known as the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy).

As a student, Beria distinguished himself in mathematics and the sciences.

Beria had earlier worked for the anti-Bolshevik Mussavatists in Baku.

In 1919, at the age of 20, Beria started his career in state security when the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic hired him while he was still a student at the Polytechnicum.

After the Red Army captured the city on 28 April 1920, he was saved from execution because there was not enough time to arrange his shooting and replacement; it may also have been that Sergei Kirov intervened.

In 1920, he was enlisted in Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police by Mir Jafar Baghirov.

At that time, a Bolshevik revolt took place in the Menshevik-controlled Democratic Republic of Georgia, and the Red Army subsequently invaded.

The Cheka became heavily involved in the conflict, which resulted in the defeat of the Mensheviks and the formation of the Georgian SSR.

Between 1922 and 1924, Beria was deputy chairman of the Georgian OGPU (as Cheka had been renamed).

He then led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising in 1924, after which up to 10,000 people were executed.

Between 1924 and 1927, he was head of the secret political department of the Transcaucasian SFSR OGPU.

In December 1926, he was appointed Chairman of the Georgian OGPU, and deputy chairman for the Transcaucasian OGPU.

During his years at the helm of the Georgian OGPU, Beria effectively destroyed the intelligence networks that Turkey and Iran had developed in the Soviet Caucasus, while successfully penetrating the governments of these countries with his agents.

In March 1931, he was appointed head of the Transcaucasian OGPU.

Beria and Joseph Stalin first met in summer 1931, when Stalin took a six week rest in Tsqaltubo, and Beria took personal charge of his security.

In October 1931, when Stalin proposed to appoint Beria Second Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party Central Committee and Second Secretary of the Transcaucasian party, the First Secretary Lavrenty Kartvelishvili exclaimed: "I refuse to work with that charlatan!"

Ordzhonikidze also objected to the promotion.

Stalin was unimpressed by most of the local party leaders, chosen by the former Georgian party boss, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, but writing to Lazar Kaganovich in August 1932, Stalin commented that "Beria makes a good impression. He is a good organiser, an efficient, capable functionary."

But according to Stalin's daughter Svetlana:

"He was a magnificent specimen of the artful courtier, the embodiment of Oriental perfidy, flattery and hypocrisy who had succeed in confounding even my father, a man whom it was ordinarily difficult to deceive. A good deal that this monster did is now a blot on my father's name."

Kartvelishvili was replaced by Mamia Orakhelashvili, who wrote to Stalin and Ordzhonikidze in August 1932 asking to be allowed to resign because he could not work with Beria as his deputy.

On 9 October 1932, Beria was appointed party leader for the whole Transcaucasian region.

Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, he was responsible for organising purges such as the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and officials.

He officially joined the Politburo in 1946.

Beria was the longest-serving and most influential and brutal of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after the war.

After Stalin's death in March 1953, Beria became First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

In this dual capacity, he formed a troika with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov that briefly led the country in Stalin's place.

The Gulag system was transferred to the Ministry of Justice, and a mass release of over a million prisoners was announced.

That amnesty led to a substantial increase in crime.

A coup d'état by Nikita Khrushchev, with help from former Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov, removed Beria from power in June 1953.

After being arrested, he was tried for treason and other offences, sentenced to death, and executed on 23 December 1953.

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was born in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, in the Sukhum Okrug of the Kutais Governorate (now Gulripshi District, de facto Republic of Abkhazia, or Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire).

He would later also orchestrate the forced upheaval of minorities from the Caucasus as head of the NKVD, an act that was declared genocidal by various scholars and, as concerning Chechens, in 2004 by the European Parliament.

He simultaneously administered vast sections of the Soviet state, and acted as the de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of NKVD field units responsible for barrier troops and Soviet partisan intelligence and sabotage operations on the Eastern Front.

Beria administered the expansion of the Gulag labour camps, and was primarily responsible for overseeing the secret detention facilities for scientists and engineers known as sharashkas.

After the war, Beria oversaw the Soviet atomic bomb project, which Stalin gave absolute priority to, and the project was completed in under five years.