--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> quoted: Sergo Beria's inevitable apologia for his father, who here stands for everything good and opposes everything evil,
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This isn't a very fair description of the book, though it is certainly true that it's an apologia. Sergo's version of his father is a competent chekist who tried to work within the system to lessen the Terror, make conditions better for his native Georgia, and had no discernable ideology whatsoever besides a desire for efficiency. It is noticeable that he elides entirely over the sex-predator reputation, though he does at one point say that "my father may have had his peccadillos, but so did Khrushchev, and at least he wasn't a corpulent pig." He focusses, as one might expect, on the huge reduction in the terror after Beria Sr. became NKVD head.
IMO it's not reliable on politics, but very good on gossip. AFAIK alongside the memoirs of Khrushchev and Svetlana Stalina (who is still alive, and wanted to marry Sergo at one point), these are the only recollections we have written by a person that was actually close to the Stalin Inner Circle.
I must say that I feel sorry for Sergo Beria.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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