BERIA: My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin

Lavrenti Beria has entered history's demonology as the last head of Stalin's secret police, the chosen heir to a long line of murderers and torturers. Nikita Khrushchev went further, constructing an image of a sadistic, sex-obsessed madman who sought to take advantage of Stalin's death to create his own personal dictatorship. Beria's son Sergio, it is evident here, loved his father and throughout his adult life has sought to defend him against at least the worst of the charges. Thom, a distinguished French scholar of Soviet Communism, worked closely with Sergio and added her own extensive archival research to produce a compelling account of Stalin's methods of rule in their developed form: ruthlessly pitting organizations and individuals against each other in a climate of terror that abated only slightly from its peak levels during the purges of the 1930s. Patterns of pathological suspicions and personal hatreds drove Stalin and the men around him. In Beria's case, according to Sergio, an increasingly open hatred for Stalin was fuelled by fear of the possible consequences of a megalomania that increased as the dictator aged. In addition to presenting family photos and reminiscences, this work makes a case for Beria as attempting, even while Stalin lived, to reduce the size and scope of the gulag system, to relax the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe and to blunt the anti-Western confrontation. The exact degree of Beria's support for these policies remains obscure as do his motivations. The most favorable interpretation is that Lavrenti Beria saw, more clearly than some of his counterparts, the limits of random savagery as a method of governance—not least because he had tested and extended those limits in his own life and career. (Mar.)

Forecast:The closeness of the relationship will make this an irresistible document for anyone with an interest in this terrible era in Soviet government, but it can, with its immediacy, if not its total objectivity, be recommended to anyone with an interest in 20th-century history.