Beria

by Amy Knight

Release Date: 11 December, 1995

Edition: Paperback

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A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma....

Amy Knight's biography of Beria deserves a place in the pantheon of post-Soviet analysis of the Soviet Union. Knight is a serious scholar and doesn't suffer from the excesses seen in other works about the Soviet Union written in the last ten year. Unfortunately, this serious approach also has a limiting factor in discussing somebody so thoroughly reviled like Beria. Unlike Stalin, who even Knight admits still maintained his followers even after he was denounced in Khrushchev's 1956 speech, Beria became a complete non-person. As a result, one has the impression there is very little actual 'original' source information left by and regarding him. Knight says that Beria kept very few papers, but one has the impression that even if he had they would have disappeared in 1953 as quickly as their author did.
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.

Gripping, chilling and illuminating

This is a really excellent piece of work. Amy Knight has produced what is billed as the first biography of Beria and one it will be hard for any future writer to outdo. The book is determinedly unsensational, meticulously researched and annotated, and well-written. We are given a rounded picture of a brutal opportunist who could be pragmatic when the occasion called for it. The book speculates interestingly and plausibly on what might have happened had Beria succeeded in his bid to succeed Stalin. Khrushchev, who got the job in the end, adopted many of Beria's policies. My only minor gripe is that the switch from looking at Beria's myriad bad points to his good ones jars sometimes. But if you want to know more about a key, but shadowy, figure from the Stalin era, read this book. They don't come much better.