Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph Stalin's secret police chiefs, serving as head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) from 1938 … See more

Beria and Joseph Stalin first met in summer 1931, when Stalin took a six-week rest in Tsqaltubo, and Beria took personal charge of his … See more

In August 1938, Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the NKVD. Under Yezhov, the NKVD carried out the Great Purge: the imprisonment or execution of a huge … See more

Stalin's aide, Vasili Lozgachev, reported that Beria and Malenkov were the first members of the Politburo to see Stalin's condition when he was found unconscious. They arrived at Stalin's dacha at Kuntsevo at 03:00 on 2 March 1953, after being … See more

Beria was born in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, in the Sukhum Okrug of the Kutais Governorate (now Gulripshi District, de facto Republic of Abkhazia, or Georgia, then part of the See more

In the first couple of years of mass arrests of members of the Communist Party and Soviet government that began after the assassination of See more

With Stalin nearing 70, a concealed struggle for succession amongst his entourage dominated Soviet politics. At the end of the war, Andrei Zhdanov, who had served as the Communist Party leader in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) during the war, … See more