Word: beria
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shelter for the homeless until 1934 when Stalin turned it over to the recently formed Union of Soviet Writers (USW). The Oak Hall became the most coveted, élitist and inexpensive restaurant in the country. Stalin himself visited on occasion, but it was a regular haunt for Lavrenti Beria, his secret police henchman notoriously given to perfidy, cruelty and lust...
...U.S.S.R. and the USW, the restaurant went through several hands before being bought by entrepreneur Andrei Deloss, who refurbished the Oak Hall. Now the fireplace still blazes cozily, a quiet piano sounds by the entrance and the former bedroom-cum-committee-room is available for private parties. Beria's sinister apartment upstairs has become a cigar saloon. The restaurant is still called the Writers' Club, but as a friendly waiter explains: "Poor writers now stay at home; rich ones come to us." 50 Povarskaya Street...
...made policy, denounced colleagues and drank like fish to numb the fear of being led away at dawn. Often, Montefiore records, the dinner "sank to the level of a Neanderthal stag night." Stalin would get so drunk, Nikita Khrushchev remembered, that "he'd throw a tomato at you." Lavrenti Beria liked to slip tomatoes into the old Bolshevik Anastas Mikoyan's suit pockets and push Mikoyan against a wall so that they exploded...
...story of Utopian Marxist ideological dream turned into brutal, malevolent history becomes, in this telling, an exploration of personality. Here we have Victor Abakumov, Stalin's head of secret police: "Abakumov ... was another colorful, swaggering torturer, amoral condottiere and 'zoological careerist' who possessed all Beria's sadism but less of his intelligence. Abakumov unrolled a bloodstained carpet on his office floor before embarking on the torture of his victims in order not to stain his expensive Persian rugs...
Judging from the content of popular culture, one can safely say that if Harry had chosen to sport the hammer and the sickle of Stalin, Beria and Dzerzhinsky instead of the swastika of Hitler, Göring and Goebbels he would have attracted little notice. The widespread popularity of Che, Castro, Lenin, CCCP or Marx t-shirts, and the frequent usage of the Soviet five-pointed star or the crossed hammer and sickle, are only the most obvious examples of the curious double standard between our views on Nazism and Soviet Communism. Harvard’s own beloved...