Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953) — The “Heinrich Himmler” of the Soviet Union

The Georgian politician Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953) entered the history books as the notorious head of the Russian secret service NKVD in the Cold War era. He was called ‘our Heinrich Himmler’ by Joseph Stalin. Who was Beria? And why did he have the reputation of being a Russian Himmler?

Lavrentiy Beria in the 1920s — wiki

During the Yalta Conference (1945), Joseph Stalin, facing Franklin D. Roosevelt, called his follower Lavrentiy Beria ‘our Heinrich Himmler’. In her biography Beria, Stalin’s First Lieutenant (1994), biographer Amy Knight describes the same Beria with Hermann Göring. Beria was a violent person, held responsible for thousands of murders.

Beria: communist politician and chairman of the Cheka

List of people executed on 23 February 1942 drawn up by Beria and approved by Stalin — wiki

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was born on 29 March 1899. He received a strict religious upbringing in the Georgian Orthodox tradition. From 1915–1919 he received technical training.

In the year of the Russian Revolution, 1917, Beria joined the Bolshevik branch of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, a party which a year later continued under the shorter name of the Russian Communist Party. In 1921 Beria joined the Cheka in Georgia, the secret police of the Communists. The Cheka stood for ‘Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage’ and was the forerunner of the later secret service NKVD. Beria was chairman of the Cheka from 1923 to 1931.

A supporter of Stalinism, Lavrentiy Beria joined the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1934 and thus entered the highest political circles of the Soviet Union.

A career in the NKVD

The secret service NKVD, under the command of Nikolay Yezhov, set up the Great Terror of 1937–1938 by order of Stalin. The violence cost the lives of millions of Russians. Like many others, Yezhov became too powerful…