John Wagner 🇺🇲🇺🇦🇮🇱

Lavrentiy Beria – The Strategist Look at this face. Round glasses, a gentle, serious look – a student who reads too much and cares too much. Put him in a seminar on social justice today, and nobody would look twice. He would have the right words, the right causes and the certainty of being on the right side of history. That is how it starts – not with cruelty, but with certainty. This is the young Lavrentiy Beria. At twenty-two, he joined the secret police. A quarter of a century later, at Yalta, Stalin reportedly introduced him to Roosevelt as "my Himmler." It sounded like a joke. It was a job description. He rose the way careers rise in a system of lies: by flattery. In Georgia, Stalin's homeland, he published a history of the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus that put Stalin at its center. Stalin noticed. In 1938, he was brought to Moscow to clean up after Yezhov, who had killed in a frenzy. The machine was devouring itself, and the country was exhausted. The mass shootings stopped. Some prisoners were even released, and people breathed again. Then Beria arrested Yezhov's men, and Yezhov himself. The terror did not end. It became efficient. In March 1940, he sent Stalin a short memo. The Polish officers, policemen and officials held in Soviet camps were, he wrote, "hardened, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power." He proposed to shoot them – without trial, without even hearing them. Stalin signed, and the Politburo with him. That spring, about 22,000 Poles were shot in the back of the head, in the forest of Katyn and in other places. At one of the sites, a single executioner shot thousands of them himself. We will meet him next. Many of the dead were reservists: doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers. The elite of a nation, killed by memo. That was the strategy: without its elite, a nation can be ruled by anyone. Five years later, Moscow's men were ruling Poland. Then came the second crime: the lie. For almost fifty years, Moscow said the Germans had done it. At Nuremberg, Soviet prosecutors even charged the Germans with it. In communist Poland, the truth could cost you your career. Moscow admitted it only in 1990. The shooting took a few weeks. The lie took half a century. During the war, he deported entire nations – the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars and others. Men, women, children and the old were loaded onto trains within days. He reported the numbers to Stalin like a delivery. A large share of them died on the way or in the first years of exile. He ran the camps as an economy. After Hiroshima, Stalin put him in charge of building the Soviet bomb. He delivered it in four years, with spies in America and prisoners in the uranium mines. At night, his car cruised the streets of Moscow. His bodyguards later testified that he picked out young women and had them brought to him. As each one left, she was handed a bouquet of flowers. Taking it meant she had consented. Refusing it meant arrest. In the system of the Lie, even rape came with a bouquet. When Stalin died in 1953, the strategist moved first – as a reformer. He pushed through an amnesty for over a million prisoners – common criminals, not political ones. He announced that the doctors accused in Stalin's last invented plot were innocent, and that their confessions had been obtained by methods forbidden by Soviet law. The chief torturer denounced torture. Nobody knew better what needed reforming. His colleagues knew him too, and none of them wanted to end up on his list. In June 1953, at a meeting in the Kremlin, Marshal Zhukov and a group of officers arrested him. The strategist had been outplayed by the colleague everyone underestimated: Khrushchev. Beria was tried in secret, without a defense, and charged – among other things – with spying for Britain. The line attributed to him was "Show me the man, and I will find you the crime." They found his. He was sentenced and shot on the same day. The verdict, as always, had come first. Then the system did to him what he had done to so many: it erased him. Subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia received a letter telling them to cut out the pages on Beria and paste in the new ones enclosed – a longer article on the Bering Strait. The man who erased millions was replaced by the Bering Strait. Today, it takes one click. And there is always a young man in round glasses, sure he is on the right side of history.