The person extremely contradictory and ambiguous in the history of the USSR is Lavrenty Beria. His biography was overgrown with myths and legends, and a lot is still unknown. Over the past 54 years, he has come a long way as a politician.
Born into a peasant family in 1899 in the territory of modern Abkhazia. Thanks to the efforts of his parents, he studied at the Sukhumi Higher Primary School, and then left for Baku and entered the secondary construction mechanical and technical educational institution.
Already since 1915, during his studies, Beria Lavrenty Palych was active in the underground Marxist circle, and in subsequent years he held various posts and carried out orders of the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus. One of the main directions was counterintelligence work in Baku during the Turkish occupation.
At the same time, Beria Lavrenty Palych continued to study at the school and in 1919 received a diploma. And in 1917 he visited the Romanian front.
In the 1920s, he worked actively in the state security bodies of Azerbaijan and Georgia. Here at different times he held rather large posts and leadership posts. During this period, he took part in the suppression of the Menshevik uprising in Georgia, for which he was subsequently awarded the
Order of the Red Banner of the USSR.
In the thirties, Beria Lavrenty Palych switched to party work. Since 1932, he served as first secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee and the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia. In 1937, during the period of mass terror, he took part in the repression of many party workers in his country and Armenia, who were accused of conspiring to disconnect Transcaucasia from the USSR.
In 1938, he first became a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and by the end of the year he was appointed People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. Under him, a sharp reduction in the scale of repression was noted, and many were amnestied and released. However, according to some documents, in 1940, on his order, Polish prisoners of war were shot in Ukraine and Belarus. Also, as commissioner of internal affairs and head of state security, Beria, Lavrenty Palych led the mass deportations of representatives of various peoples held in the 40s. So, under his leadership, Chechens, Ingush, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, Khemshins were resettled.
In the postwar years, Beria was appointed to lead the project to create Soviet nuclear weapons. After a successful test of the atomic bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site in 1949, he was awarded the Stalin Prize.
In 1953, after Stalin died, he became the head of the newly formed Ministry of Internal Affairs and the MGB attached to it, in addition, the first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union. The position and influence of Beria made him one of the main contenders for the post of head of state.
As the head of law enforcement agencies, Lavrenty Beria sought to strengthen his position. Already in the first months after the death of Stalin , many cases were reviewed, including the notorious “case of doctors”, and a large amnesty was also conducted.
In June 1953, at a meeting of the USSR Council of Ministers, Khrushchev accused Beria of treason, after which the latter was arrested by a group of marshals led by Zhukov and placed in custody. December 23, 1953 he was shot.