Beria, Stalin's First Lieutenant
Amy Knight. Princeton University Press, $55 (312pp) ISBN 978-0-691-03257-3
As Stalin's police chief, right-hand man and commander of the Gulag slave-labor network, Lavrenty Beria (1899-1953) was a mass murderer whose weapons included torture, deportation and execution. Yet, after Stalin died in 1953, this devious, cold-blooded Bolshevik embarked on a short-lived liberalization program designed to curb the Communist Party apparatus and to give the non-Russian minorities more decision-making powers and limited recognition of their national and cultural identities. Arrested in a coup led by Khrushchev, Beria was executed. Critics view Beria's de-Stalinization proposals as mere tools in a succession struggle, but Knight, a Library of Congress scholar who did extensive research in the former Soviet Union, portrays the Georgian-born police chief as a would-be reformer who saw change as inevitable but was motivated above all by a desire to further his own power. A provocative biography of one of history's most evil men. Photos. (Nov.)
Details
Reviewed on: 11/01/1993
Genre: Nonfiction
Open Ebook - 312 pages - 978-0-691-21424-5
Paperback - 344 pages - 978-0-691-01093-9