Have you heard the idea that Laventiy Beria was a massive rapist and had childrens’ bones dug up out of his yard posthumously? Montefiore. The idea that he was a sadistic lover of torture comes first from Khruschev, and then the sexual element comes later from Montefiore and is sort of retroactively attributed to his supposed love of torture as leader of the NKVD. Beria is also blamed for the Katyn massacre (Nazis did that) as well as “genocidal” ethnic relocations during WW2 which is a complicated topic but the major point being that Beria did not single-handedly order this.
In reality, none of this is true. Under Beria, the NKVD nearly, if not entirely eliminated torture as an information retrieval tactic because 1. it’s cruel and fascistic and 2. it doesn’t work. Under Beria, the former torturer Yezhov was executed for his crimes against humanity (which he perpetuated of his own sadistic volition).
I’d recommend reading Khruschev Lied by Grover Furr to learn more, he dispels a lot of the myths relating to Beria there. If you investigate these claims on your own, you’ll find that the source for damn near everything either goes back to Montefiore’s “anonymous sources” or straight up unsourced garbage, or Khruschev’s “secret speech”.
Tangential here: I don’t think Beria poisoned Stalin either as seems to be a common idea among some MLs because of Beria’s renown as a rapist mass murderer. I think they were quite close and that Beria was most likely a good communist and comrade. He was executed by the Khruschevite clique, likely because he remained as a vestige of the Old Guard still fiercely loyal to the legacy of Stalin and Marxism-Leninism.
I was always suspicious about this. I mean there was literal coup in Moscow with Khrushchev organizing it, Zhukov personally arresting Beria, Malenkov getting with it (and look how they paid him back) and army units marching on Moscow just in case of NKVD units resisting. Beria was by all accounts completely surprised, which was incredibly weird for his supposedly classical villanous paranoia. Then he got just murdered with all traces lost.
Have you heard the idea that Laventiy Beria was a massive rapist and had childrens’ bones dug up out of his yard posthumously? Montefiore. The idea that he was a sadistic lover of torture comes first from Khruschev, and then the sexual element comes later from Montefiore and is sort of retroactively attributed to his supposed love of torture as leader of the NKVD. Beria is also blamed for the Katyn massacre (Nazis did that) as well as “genocidal” ethnic relocations during WW2 which is a complicated topic but the major point being that Beria did not single-handedly order this.
In reality, none of this is true. Under Beria, the NKVD nearly, if not entirely eliminated torture as an information retrieval tactic because 1. it’s cruel and fascistic and 2. it doesn’t work. Under Beria, the former torturer Yezhov was executed for his crimes against humanity (which he perpetuated of his own sadistic volition).
I’d recommend reading Khruschev Lied by Grover Furr to learn more, he dispels a lot of the myths relating to Beria there. If you investigate these claims on your own, you’ll find that the source for damn near everything either goes back to Montefiore’s “anonymous sources” or straight up unsourced garbage, or Khruschev’s “secret speech”.
Tangential here: I don’t think Beria poisoned Stalin either as seems to be a common idea among some MLs because of Beria’s renown as a rapist mass murderer. I think they were quite close and that Beria was most likely a good communist and comrade. He was executed by the Khruschevite clique, likely because he remained as a vestige of the Old Guard still fiercely loyal to the legacy of Stalin and Marxism-Leninism.
I was always suspicious about this. I mean there was literal coup in Moscow with Khrushchev organizing it, Zhukov personally arresting Beria, Malenkov getting with it (and look how they paid him back) and army units marching on Moscow just in case of NKVD units resisting. Beria was by all accounts completely surprised, which was incredibly weird for his supposedly classical villanous paranoia. Then he got just murdered with all traces lost.