Word: beria
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...appearances. Stalin has the limo stop alongside a drunk, rolls down the window and lets the drunk see...twin Stalins! "Drink a little less," Uncle Joe advises, and the limo roars off. This Stalin takes in the world with a savage candor. At a meeting with his hatchetman Lavrenty Beria, "I caught a whiff of that hideous cologne that Beria favored, the cologne of an unctuous headwaiter, the cologne of a rapist...
...these contentious hearings: "How do these guys do it?" How do they sit there, hour after hour, and listen to the congressional gasbags without blowing their tops? Here is Mr. Starr, placidly gazing at a legislator who has just spent five minutes comparing him to Soviet thug Lavrenti Beria, and then responding, "Congressman, with all due respect...
...carried out one murder with his own hands, planned at least one more, speaks with repellent offhandedness about still other assassinations. He is capable of warmth, though -- for his old boss, Lavrenti Beria, and for Beria's boss, Joseph Stalin; he still admires both even while acknowledging their "criminal activities." None of which by itself discredits Pavel Sudoplatov's sensational tales of Soviet espionage; in fact his closeness to Beria, Stalin's last secret-police chief (1938-53), whom he served as a spy master, put him in a position to know. But Sudoplatov's most stunning charge -- that world...
...Moscow the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service -- a successor to the agency that Beria once headed and Sudoplatov worked for -- put out a rare public disclaimer. Sudoplatov's "allegations ((about)) Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Robert Oppenheimer," it said, "do not correspond to reality." Oleg Tsarev of the same agency, an in-house expert on atomic spying, says, "Having seen the summary file ((on nuclear espionage)), I can tell you there are no such names as Sudoplatov mentions in it." He makes one tiny exception: "One of our sources had a discussion with someone who knew Oppenheimer in 1945." But the report...
...Schecters argue that simply presenting Sudoplatov's account -- not corroborating it -- was all they set out to do. "One of the reasons we left it in the first person and let him say some outrageous things was that this is his story," says Leona Schecter. After his boss Beria was purged and shot in 1953, Sudoplatov was accused of mass murders by the victorious Nikita Khrushchev and jailed for 15 years. He was eventually rehabilitated after addressing a 1982 plea to the Communist Party Central Committee mentioning his exploits in obtaining atomic information from Oppenheimer, Fermi and Bohr, among others...