Knight, Amy

Princeton. 1995. Princeton University Press. Reprinted Paperback Edition. Very Good in Wrappers. 0691010935. 338 pages. paperback. Jacket photo: Beria in uniform, early 1940s (Courtesy of the Library of Congress). Jacket design: Donald Hatch. keywords: Beria Russia History Stalin. FROM THE PUBLISHER - 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 known about his long and tumultuous career, Now, drawing on sources made available since glasnost, Amy Knight describes in chilling detail the story of Beria's climb to the top of the Stalinist system, his complex relationship with Stalin, and his bitter struggle with Khrushchev after Stalin's death. Born in 1899, twenty years after Stalin, Beria was not part of Stalin's generation of revolutionaries, who fought against the Tsar. But he was, like Stalin, a Georgian, and as police chief and later party chief of Georgia and Transcaucasia, he won Stalin's confidence. Moving to Moscow in 1938 to head the dreaded NKVD, Beria became responsible for all intelligence, counter-intelligence, and domestic security during the prewar and war years. He also commanded the vast slave labor network of the GULAG, oversaw the evacuation of defense industries as the Germans advanced and eventually took charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Knight sees Beria's skill of psychological manipulation as the key to his relationship with Stalin. Insecure even among his closest associates, Stalin surrounded himself mostly with malleable bureaucrats who lacked the insight to decipher his peculiar psychopathology. Beria was an exception to this rule. Playing on knowledge of their shared Georgian background, he flattered Stalin endlessly while feeding his ready suspicions with material from his police files. inventory #34967 ISBN: 0691010935.