Word: beria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...would say: "Look, here are the giblets, Nikita. Have you tried them yet?" Khrushchev, knowing that his host wanted some for himself but was afraid to be first, would reply, "Oh, I forgot." The only member of his circle exempt from this tasting ritual was NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria, who ate only food transported from his own dacha...
Hard Information. Her new book contains some bits of hard information in what many will regard as a large (444 pages) and shapeless piece of sentimentalism. For example, it dispels the myriad rumors about the fate of Stalin's infamous secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria. One persistent story has it that he was shot or strangled by his colleagues at a meeting of the Politburo right after Stalin's death. Setting the record straight, Svetlana repeats that General A. A. Vishnevsky, chief surgeon of the Soviet Army, told her that Beria was summarily tried in 1953, held...
Svetlana also provides some revealing new vignettes about her father. At the grisly gatherings he organized at his dachas, he loved to play practical jokes on his cronies and toadies, like putting a tomato on the chair of Anastas Mikoyan. Beria, mocked by Stalin as "the Prosecutor," was a favorite butt. Stalin used to goad the police chief into getting so drunk that he often had to be carried away insensible, sometimes after vomiting in the bathroom...
...mother, for which Stalin in rage and grief punished everyone she knew. Yet Svetlana concedes that Nadya could not have lived with Stalin through the years of terror that followed 1932. Svetlana's other explanation is still more doubtful. She finds a devil. His name is Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's last and most infamous secret policeman. "A good deal that this monster did is now a blot on my father's name," she says. She admits that Stalin and Beria were often "guilty together," but calls Stalin's support of Beria "inexplicable," due to Beria...
...Police Boss Svetislav Stefanović, 55, whose ubiquitous UDBA spy network had kept a tough, unrelenting grip on Yugoslavia since 1946. In one stroke, Tito had dismantled the entire upper echelon of his secret police-a move unparalleled in the Communist world since Khrushchev destroyed Soviet Top Cop Lavrenty Beria...