Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria (1899-1953) was the longest-serving and most powerful of Stalin’s security chiefs. A Georgian Chekist who rose to party leader of the Transcaucasus, he replaced Nikolai Yezhov as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs in November 1938 and headed the NKVD until December 1945, presiding over a purge of Yezhov’s officers and the partial winding down of the Great Terror.

On March 5, 1940, he proposed the execution of Polish officers and officials that became the Katyn massacre, and his NKVD carried out the wartime deportations of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and other peoples. From 1945 he directed the Soviet atomic bomb project, which drew heavily on espionage in the United States and Britain. After Stalin’s death he took over a merged MVD, but his rivals had him arrested on June 26, 1953. He was tried in secret and shot on December 23, 1953.

Sources

• Knight, Amy. Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant. Princeton University Press, 1993.
• Cienciala, Anna M., Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds. Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment. Yale University Press, 2007.
• Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books, 1999.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.