Word: beria
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...police had consolidated his control over the party's social-affairs department, which had a "liquidation" division: "So notorious was Kang's taste for inflicting pain . . . it earned him a title," the King of Hell. The authors compare him with Iago, Rasputin and Stalin's secret-police chief, Lavrenti Beria. In spite of the book's rather breathless style, the analogies seem...
Andrei Sakharov, first revered in the U.S.S.R. as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, then reviled as a traitor for his tireless defense of human rights, recounts his tumultuous life. -- A look at Lavrenti Beria, a "terrifying human being." -- The Oppenheimer-Teller feud. -- The man who poisoned Soviet science. -- Why Sakharov ranks as a world-class scientist...
When Stalin died in 1953, he was far gone in paranoia, convinced that a cabal of Jewish doctors was trying to poison him. Only after shooting Stalin's reptilian police chief, Lavrenty Beria, did the Kremlin survivors, notably the new Communist Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, try to shift to a new policy known as "the thaw." In a four-hour speech before the 20th Party Congress, supposedly secret but widely leaked, Khrushchev described to the faithful for the first time the full range of Stalin's crimes. ("But where were you during all those years?" one listener asked Khrushchev, according...