Word: beria
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...many details, Beria's official origins run parallel with those of Stalin, a coincidence historians regard with suspicion, for it was as a faker of history that Beria first came to Stalin's favorable notice. In 1935, Beria wrote a pamphlet glorifying Stalin as the hero of the Bolshevik struggle in Transcaucasia. False in almost all of its particulars, it made Stalin a hero without fear and without reproach, provided many phony arguments against Trotsky and other factions opposed to Stalin's extension of personal power...
...Beria's benefactor, Kirov, had been sensationally murdered about this time, and the Soviet Union was on the verge of a political bloodbath. The instrument of the purge set off by the Kirov assassination was Genrikh Yagoda, a leather-capped roughneck who was then head of NKVD (successor to the Cheka). Yagoda did a thorough job and, in due time, he got his reward: he was charged, like thousands of his victims, with being an enemy of the people, imperialist spy, etc. Yagoda was the third of the great cops, following Felix Dzerzhinsky, the lean, cat-eyed Polish aristocrat...
...point where millions of Russians were dead or jailed. Yezhov, often styled "the beloved pupil of our leader and teacher Stalin," had his own group of pupils, among them a fat, pallid young man named Georgy Malenkov. After two years in office, Yezhov disappeared. His successor: Lavrenty Beria...
Benevolent Exterior. With his pince-nez and some carefully cultivated propaganda about his being a pianist and a profound student of architecture, Beria brought an air of respectability to the secret police, which had become almost unmentionable, so greatly was it feared. The whole apparatus of the NKVD was reorganized. Thousands were released from the prisons and the story put about that this was Stalin's (and Beria's) clemency, and that the real instigators of the purge had been Yagoda and Yezhov. Beneath this relatively benevolent exterior, Beria turned the NKVD into the most ruthless and extensive...
...Beria who expanded the slave camps and exploited the labor of prisoners in the interest of the state, a system which developed to the point where, cautious students of Russia estimate, not less than 15 million people are forcibly engaged. He also developed the military arm of the NKVD, creating a force of something like 15 divisions of elite troops, resembling Hitler's SS. He extended the system of informers to embrace every institution, factory, farm and, indeed, every building in the Soviet Union. Within the party itself he had spies watching spies, reporting back to the NKVD...