<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Beria, hwoever, was only an opportunistic reformer,
> was thoroughly hated by the elite and the leadership
> as a symbol of Stalinist tyranny (most dangerous,
> personally, to the Party elite), and was personally
> hated because of his serial rapes of everyone's
> wives,
> sisters, a nd daughters.
Thanks! I don't believe he ever preyed sexually on the relatives of any of the top circle? In any case Stalin did categorically forbid his daughter Svetlana (who is still alive) from riding in Beria's car, and when she and Sergo Beria fell in love he put an end to that pronto, as he did when she had the affair with an older man during the war (in which she probably lost her virginity). That must have been one brave guy -- messing around with the teenage daughter of ANY Georgian father is risky enough, but when that Georgian father is also the Father of the Peoples... The mind boggles. I don't think anything happened to him however.
> But taht may not represent current scholarship.
>
There is a revisionist strain in hurrent Russian historiography that argues, following the principle that history is written by the winners, that Khrushchev et al. magnified Beria's evil by making him a scapegoat and blaming all their own crimes on him, and that in fact he was a moderating influence on Stalin. I have not read this material and have no idea if it is based on anything substantive. Sergo Beria spent his last years trying to clear his father's name:
Broadcast on Thursday 15th July 1999
SERGO BERIA
I am now 74 years old. I am a Georgian*. And my father was Lavrenty Beria. Now I have a different name that was given to me. They told me that I couldn't live in the Soviet Union with the name of my father. Well, I have heard some problems about that: that my father was somehow active in killing - or some such rumours. But I know that it isn't true. It isn't true. In our family and our friends' families, we were very much in love with Stalin. He was like a god. He was occasionally very strict (laughs) but it was my fault. About '43, when the War was going on, I came from the Front to Moscow and met Svetlana, his daughter. And I brought her a little revolver. Some months afterwards, I was in Leningrad, at the Academy. And his chief General came to the Academy, took me to an aeroplane, and I was taken to Moscow and brought to Stalin. We had dinner. We were alone. He told me to sit, and asked me; "Did you give to Svetlana a revolver?" I told him: "Yes". And he very rudely told me; "Are you, in your brains, are you mad? A girl with an unstable nervous system - you give her a revolver! You know how her mother died?" I told him: "I don't know." And I really didn't know that she killed herself. And he looked at me and spoke and he saw that I didn't know. "Now you are free. Go to your Academy and study there!" Well, (Laughs), I was afraid.
But I must say that I have two sides of his portrait Yes, I saw that he was really a genius. Churchill is for me a very great person - but Stalin - not his politics, about Communism and so on, but as a person - he was much greater. He was a real dark genius. His thoughts were for him everything. And everything that was against them could be demolished and disgraced. He liked humour very much and was very humoristic. But in his humour - you laughed; and then you could see that it was not so funny, what he said. Every time he made such things. It was his character. I am angry. He was a clever man. And he understood everything that was good and that was bad He was not a fanatic who didn't understand what he was doing. And it is very sad that such a man was the State's head. He was a very lonely man. His character was such that his behaviour made him quite alone.
(*CD--actually Beria was a Mingrelian, which is an ethnic minority in Georgia that speaks a different language, but that's nationalities arcana.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/mycentury/transcript/wk28d4.shtml
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