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Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant Tapa blanda – 11 Diciembre 1995
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This is the first comprehensive biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant. Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been previously published about his long and tumultuous career.
- Número de páginas338 páginas
- IdiomaInglés
- EditorialPrinceton University Press
- Fecha de publicación11 Diciembre 1995
- Dimensiones6 x 0.86 x 9 pulgadas
- ISBN-100691010935
- ISBN-13978-0691010939
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"The first serious book-length study of Beria's public career. . . . Knight's staidness and deliberation bring a refreshing change of approach. . . . A major contribution to our knowledge of Soviet politics."---Robert Service, The Times Literary Supplement
"Beria is ripe for revisionism. The danger is that too much can be made of Beria's relative liberalism. . . . Amy Knight does not fall into this trap. Hers is a strictly political biography and a very good one."---Simon Sebag Montefiore, The [London] Times
Críticas
"This first full-scale scholarly biography of the clever, cruel, domineering security chief whom Stalin once called 'my Himmler' casts valuable new light on various events of the Stalin period and its early aftermath."―Robert Tucker, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
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"A milestone, an invaluable achievement, the natural heir to Leggett's history of the Cheka."--John le Carré
"This first full-scale scholarly biography of the clever, cruel, domineering security chief whom Stalin once called 'my Himmler' casts valuable new light on various events of the Stalin period and its early aftermath."--Robert Tucker, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
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Detalles del producto
- Editorial : Princeton University Press (11 Diciembre 1995)
- Idioma : Inglés
- Tapa blanda : 338 páginas
- ISBN-10 : 0691010935
- ISBN-13 : 978-0691010939
- Dimensiones : 6 x 0.86 x 9 pulgadas
- Clasificación en los más vendidos de Amazon: nº1,587,929 en Libros (Ver el Top 100 en Libros)
- nº736 en Biografías Históricas de Rusia (Libros)
- nº1,527 en Biografías de Fuerzas Policiales (Libros)
- nº3,782 en Historia de Rusia (Libros)
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Amy Knight, a Senior Research Analyst at the Library of Congress, has a gift for elegant writing and turning revealing phrases, as well as for having a keen understanding of the psychopathology of Soviet leaders, particularly Nikita Khrushchev, Joseph Stalin, and the subject of this biography, Lavrenti Beria.
Stalin surrounded himself with malleable bureaucrats and communist minions to whom he applied the effective strategy of "divide and conquer," so as to threaten their own existence with physical annihilation in a climate of suspicion that deterred disloyalty on the part of his lieutenants.
But Lavrenti Beria was not the typical unimaginative follower. As an astute operative and a fellow Georgian steeped in Georgia's ideals of loyalty, betrayal, even fears of death, he quickly divined his compatriot's psychopathology. Beria could penetrate Stalin's mind and by nurturing Stalin's fears and paranoia and his unquenchable need for praise, Beria was able to use that for his own purposes not only to effect his survival but also to accumulate power.
Stalin and Beria were both from Georgia, however from different regions of Georgia. Beria was 20 years Stalin's junior. A member of the next generation of Soviet leaders, Beria had no qualms about helping Stalin exterminate the old Bolsheviks who could challenge Stalin's power or his version of Revolutionary history, particularly when "the Great Leader" had set out to re-write and correct history, so as to fit with his unfolding, grandiose cult of personality and historical revisionism.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Beria was police chief (NKVD) and party leader in Georgia and Transcaucasia. He won Stalin's confidence by enforcing his repressive measures, including the great leader's rapid industrialization of urban areas at the expense of the compulsory requisitioning of crops and foodstuff from the peasantry, while forcing collectivization of their farms (kolkhozes).
Beria also promoted and furthered Stalin's personality cult to dizzying heights. Beria managed to survive the "Yezhevina," the Great Terror of 1936-38, even though he came close to becoming one of its victims. In 1938, Nikolai Yezhev (photo, left), NKVD chief in Moscow, ordered the arrest of Beria who was party chief in Georgia, but Georgian NKVD chief Sergei Goglidze, one of Beria's trusted protégés (later dubbed the "Georgia Gang"), warned him.
Beria bid goodbye to his family at the airport, expecting to be arrested and executed; but rather than accepting that fate, upon arrival in Moscow, he convinced Stalin that his life should be spared, reminding the vozhd ("the Great Leader") what a loyal and useful lieutenant he had been and how exact and efficiently he had carried out party orders in Georgia and Transcaucasia. Shortly thereafter, Yezhev was himself purged and Beria became the new NKVD chief!
Beria quickly insinuated himself into Stalin's inner circle and became the most powerful security chief in the Kremlin virtually until his fall in 1953.
Timely testing and production of the atomic bomb were Beria's first priorities between 1945 and 1949, and he completed these tasks with incredible success, leaving the West astounded at the Soviet achievement, several years ahead of the time line expected from American intelligence. He achieved full politburo membership in 1946 and was awarded the Order of Lenin for his success in 1949.
After the war with Hitler had been won, from 1950 to 1953, Stalin was once again ready to stoke his system of repression and re-implement terror on a grand scale, this time designed to include the repression of Russian Jews, the purging of his security apparatus and even members of his inner circle. Toward this end, Stalin concocted a series of conspiracies; some were even interrelated, and only he, the master conductor, knew as to where they led and his ultimate objective. These concocted plots included the "Leningrad Affair," the anti-Semitic, anti-Cosmopolitan campaign, and "the Jewish Doctors' Plot" that enmeshed Jewish intellectuals, communist party members, state security organs, Kremlin doctors, and even his loyal and long-time chief of his personal bodyguards, General N. S. Vlasik.
Stalin even began to mistrust Beria, and toward this end, he concocted the so-called "Mingrelian conspiracy," that in Stalin's paranoid mind involved corruption of political leaders in Georgia (allies and protégés of Beria) and a treasonous separatist "bourgeois nationalist" movement with ties to Turkey.
In his inner circle only Georgi Malenkov and the newer members Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin still enjoyed Stalin's "confidence," but this trust hung capriciously over their heads like the Sword of Damocles. Suspicion had fallen already over his former comrades V. Molotov, K. E. Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan, and Lavrenti Beria. It seems that the turmoil of the Jewish Doctors' Plot and the Mingrelian affair were the final strokes for Beria, who, perhaps with the connivance of Malenkov and Khrushchev, decided to act to protect their lives.
Immediately after Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, Beria moved rapidly to seize power. And almost as suddenly, he became a liberal political reformer. He defended the rights of non-Russian nationalities, such as the Ukrainians and Georgians, vis-à-vis the former Russification policy of Stalin. He admitted that both the Jewish Doctors' Plot and the Mingrelian affair were concocted by Stalin's underlings, and had those involved arrested.
Beria then began to decentralize and dismantle the secret police and the Gulag system as part of his broader program of liberalization. He granted amnesty to a large category of Gulag political prisoners. With the repudiation of the Doctors' Plot, the doctors were released from prison, and the campaign of anti-Semitism was ended. Under Beria, de-Stalinization had begun at a faster pace than would be reestablished later under Khrushchev.
The crisis in East Germany, though, provided the pretext that Nikita Khrushchev needed to challenge Beria's power in the Kremlin. Malenkov, who had been Beria's ally, was won over by Khrushchev's intrigues, as were some important segments of the Russian military, which had come to resent the prominence of Beria and his secret police.
Beria had made a mistake. He had moved too fast in the liberalization of East Germany. The iron-fisted East German Chancellor Walter Ulbricht (photo, left) opposed the reforms, and the contradictory statements confused the issue, creating instability and fueling public
discontent. Influenced by Beria's intended reforms, East German protestors, whose objectives now included not only economic liberalization but also the removal of the hard-line, communist Chancellor Ulbricht, took to the streets. By June 17, 1953, Soviet tanks were rolling into East Germany to crush the rebellion.
Georgi Malenkov, who now supported Khrushchev, along with Nikolai Bulganin and V. Molotov, blamed Beria for the crisis in East Germany.
Amy Knight correctly asserts that "the East German crisis provided Khrushchev with the pretext for rallying opposition against Beria," and that Khrushchev and Molotov would later denounce Beria's program at the July 1953 Central Committee Plenum, "accusing him of turning against socialism and playing into the hands of the West by trying to create a united, neutral bourgeois Germany."
Perhaps the most intriguing portion of this book is the plot that Khrushchev successfully instigated and how it was carried out against Beria. Stalin's first Lieutenant had greatly underestimated Khrushchev, the former Ukrainian operative who fairly recently had been brought to Moscow by Stalin, and as the current head of the Secretariat had become Beria's chief opponent in the Kremlin power struggle.
Khrushchev had persuaded Malenkov, Molotov, and Bulganin to take an active role in the coup, while Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan assumed more passive roles, believing it to be more politically expedient not to interfere until the coup had been carried out.
Beria was arrested by military men at a hastily convened meeting of the Presidium on June 23, 1953, only nine days after the East German insurrection was squelched by Russian troops. Khrushchev had been moving feverishly within the Politburo and the military to undermine and gather forces against Beria. Beria was uncharacteristically caught off guard and entered the Presidium without suspecting the plot and the coup that awaited him. Once inside the Presidium, MVD guards (security apparatus successors to the NKVD) who had been posted outside were dismissed by Defense Minister Bulganin and replaced with military troops loyal to General K. S. Moskalenko (photo, above) and Soviet Marshall Georgi Zhukov (photo, below), who had been brought into the plot. Beria's fate was sealed.
The trials of Beria and his lieutenants were conducted in camera, in secret from December 18-23, 1953. To this day, controversy exists as to whether Beria participated in the proceedings or had already been executed along with his comrades by the time of the trial, six months after their arrest. Among the many charges levied against them, they were accused of attempting "to seize power and liquidate the Soviet worker-peasant system for the purpose of restoring capitalism and the domination of the bourgeoisie."
Beria's life in contrast to Stalin's other sycophantic lieutenants can be summarized by the author's following words: "If Beria was an exception, it was not because he was amoral, sadistic, and cruel. Rather it was because he was intelligent, astute, and devoted to achieving power. He was also adept at the kind of court politics that prevailed in the Kremlin and below. His deviousness and two-faced behavior was an asset in this environment, particularly in dealing with Stalin."
This book is highly recommended and deserves a 5-star rating. A longer, illustrated version of this review appears at [...]
Dr. Miguel A. Faria is the author of Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002).
Knight does a good job in showing Beria's rise from simple roots in Georgia to almost the top of Soviet politics. Beria is portrayed as the ultimate opportunist, ruthlessly undercutting everybody in his path to further his ambition. In the process, Beria built up his own 'personality cult' and network of cronies to do his bidding. Indeed, Beria is portrayed as being the ultimate Stalinist politician, a born survivor with an ambition to reach the top (unlike other people, such as Molotov, who were content just to survive). In the end, its Beria's ambition and his own arrogance that prove to be his undoing. According to Knight, Beria was taken down by an amateurish coup by Khrushchev, who Beria consistently underestimated.
The greatest weakness of this book is its own serious nature. So little actually unbiased or original information is left that a lot of the early parts of the book are pure history with very little analysis or new information. Beria supposedly was a vicious pedophile, a serial rapist of young women, but very little mention is given of that or other sins. Knight does give some examples from witnesses of Beria's cruelty, but not enough to really give a feel for the man. Reading this book, I never felt like I had a real appreciation of who this man was. Beria was supposed to be a monster, as brutal as Ezhov and Yagoda but much more intelligent. With a few exceptions, Knight gives the reader very few glimpses of this brutality.
The big irony of the book, and its greatest strength, is the coverage Knight gives to Beria's 100 days in power after Stalin's death. This man, so reviled for unrestrained brutality, shown to be a complete opportunist with Stalin, spent his last days in a quest to completely reform and overhaul the Soviet system. As with everything, Beria's personal arrogance and inability to restrain himself in his reforms proved to be his undoing. After some bungled liberalization in East Germany that resulted in riots and Soviet military intervention, Beria was 'removed' in a coup instigated by Khrushchev. The book's real impact is in these final chapters. Much detail is given to the wholesale reforms instigated by Beria; taken in context of a speech Beria gave the previous year criticizing Russian chauvinism (at the expense of minorities) one can really see the enigma of the situation: Beria, so reviled for his brutality, in the end is a reformer... a man, despite all his flaws, who is before his time. Knight does a good job of showing how Khrushchev, despite his recent rehabilitation, was as compromised as everybody else, and how Beria, has been reviled without a second thought by history. Knight's biography makes you wonder how accurate this view is.
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The last 2 chapters deals with BERIA's insight which is well written !!