Word: beria
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...Fiery Colchian. Beria, king of the cops, was born March 29, 1899, at Merkheuli, a village in Stalin's own Georgia. His family were poor peasants. He attended the polytechnic school at Baku and joined the Bolshevik Party before he received his degree in draftsmanship and engineering...
...Communist police work it was just the thing to commend him to his superiors. It was called On the History of the Bolshevik Organization in Trans-Caucasia. Largely through fictitious evidence it disputed Leon Trotsky's charge that Stalin never amounted to much as a pre-revolutionary theorist. Beria's Stalin is always right, always on the Leninist beam, always out in front of "the toiling masses." Why did this crass flattery matter to Stalin, who was already the world's most powerful autocrat? Precisely because the Communist regime had struck no real social roots, it attached...
...said that Stalin had always had the best ideas went the police power. It was pure balm to the aging dictator when Beria recalled that in the old days Stalin used to call Lenin "the mountain eagle," and that Lenin in return called Stalin "the fiery Colchian." The man who put that on paper was the man Stalin trusted. He who expressed the Leader's truth so baldly must be the Leader's chief hunter of heresy...
...Prison Is a Prison." Beria, of course, has an office in the Kremlin; but he does most of his work in Lyubyanka Prison,* not very far from the tomb of Lenin, who said he would make a state without crime, police or prisons. In the old hopeful days it was called the "Soviet Home for Those Who Have Lost Their Freedom." These days, it is frankly known as Lyubyanka Prison, for, as an eminent Soviet journal wrote in a campaign against squeamishness: "A prison is a prison." On his rare public appearances with other Soviet big shots, Beria usually seeks...
...Brief Glow. The horrors of Beria's camps and inquisitions have been told by David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky, by Victor Kravchenko and Vladimir Tchernavin. These atrocities are so vast that, like Himmler's corpse factories, they are almost unbelievable. Meanwhile, a smaller, gentler story gives a notion of life in the police state...