Word: beria
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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...
Repentance is set in Georgia, the southern republic that was home to both Stalin and his dreaded secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria. Stalin never appears in the movie, but the main character, a local tyrant, is easily recognizable as Beria. Under his rule, people are arbitrarily arrested and then disappear. In one flashback, a woman searching for news of her missing husband hears about a delivery of logs carved with the names and addresses of prisoners. The woman searches in vain for her husband's name. Nearby another woman finds her loved one's name and caresses...
...past must not be buried, and is threatened with incarceration in a mental hospital -- a not uncommon fate of Soviet dissidents. The film ends with the woman's awakening to find it was all a dream. Repentance is exceptional because it is the first Soviet film to deal with Beria and the horrors associated with the Stalin...
...previous novels. The cold is something he never had to come in out of. He knows that he works for the good guys. In his latest adventure, Blacky confronts the Evil Empire, circa 1954. Stalin is dead, Georgi Malenkov sits unsurely as party chief, and the ruthless Lavrenti Beria, head of the KGB, plots his own ascension. The monolith is in transition, and the U.S. and Britain launch a secret commando raid to overthrow the Soviet- dominated government of Albania. The assault fails because of traitors in high places...
...terrorists whose specialty is mokrie dela (wet affairs), from the so-called Department V, the KGB's Executive Action Department. I had naively assumed that political murders, kidnapings, sabotage targeted against Western civilian sectors had been pretty much abandoned by the U.S.S.R. by the mid-1950s, after the Stalin-Beria era. I was wrong. I met some of those operatives when I first lived in New York as a junior diplomat...