Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Beria was one of the few Stalinists who instinctively understood American dynamism: when Sakharov asked why their projects so “lag behind the U.S.A.,” only Beria would have answered like an IBM manager: “we lack R and D.” But the scientific complexities completely foxed Beria himself and his chief manager, Vannikov, the ex-Armaments boss. “They’re speaking while I blink,” admitted Vannikov. “The words sound Russian but I’m hearing them for the first time.” As for Beria, one scientist joked to Sakharov: “Even Lavrenti Pavlovich knows what mesons are.” His solution was high-handed arrogance and the threat: “If this is misinformation, I’ll put you in the dungeon!”

This fusion of Beria’s bludgeon and Kurchatov’s mesons led to some bombastic rows. In November 1945, Pyotr Kapitsa, one of the most brilliant Soviet scientists, complained to Stalin that Beria and the others behaved “like supermen.” Kapitsa reported his argument with Beria: “I told him straight, ‘You don’t understand physics.’” Beria “replied that I knew nothing about people.” Beria had “the conductor’s baton” but the conductor “ought not only to wave the baton but also understand the score.” Beria did not understand the science. Kapitsa suggested that he should study physics and shrewdly ended his letter: “I wish Comrade Beria to be acquainted with this letter for it is not a denunciation but useful criticism. I would have told him all this myself but it’s a great deal of trouble to get to see him.” Stalin told Beria that he had to get on with the scientists.

Beria summoned Kapitsa who amazingly refused him: “If you want to speak to me, then come to the Institute.” Beria ate humble pie and took a hunting rifle as a peace offering. But Kapitsa refused to help anymore.

Stalin meanwhile wrote him a note: “I have received all your letters… There is much that is instructive and I’m thinking of meeting you sometime…” But he never did. 2

Beria was at the centre not only of Stalin’s political world but also of his private one. Now their families almost merged in a Georgian dynastic alliance. Svetlana, still suffering from the end of her first love affair with Kapler, spent much time at Beria’s houses with his wife, Nina, blond, beautiful (though with stocky legs), and a qualified scientist from an aristocratic family who also managed to be a traditional Georgian housewife. Stalin still treated her paternally even as he began to loathe Beria himself. “Stalin asked Nina to look after Svetlana because she had no mother,” said Beria’s daughter-in-law.

Beria always craved athletic women, haunting the locker rooms of Soviet swimmers and basketball players. Nina herself was something of an Amazon, always exercising, playing tennis with bodyguards, cycling on a tandem. Beria was, like many a womanizer, a very jealous husband and the bodyguards were the only men allowed close to her. Beria lived in some style: he divided his grand town mansion into offices and private rooms on one side, and apartments for his wife and family on the other. His wife and son mainly lived at his “sumptuous, immense” white dacha at Sosnovka near Barvikha, which “was in Jugend style, lots of glass and stone, like art deco with a terrace and lots of guards around,” as well as pet bear cubs and foxes. [239] Many of the Soviet leaders had their own zoos or menageries: Bukharin had collected bear cubs and foxes. Khrushchev had fox cubs and deer; Budyonny, Mikoyan and Kaganovich kept horses. Yet Nina kept it “cosy” and it was always littered with English and German magazines and books. On holidays in the south, Beria, who was a trained architect, designed his own dacha at Gagra close to Stalin’s. The Master often invited over the Berias, who brought along their son Sergo.

By the end of the war, the balding broad-faced Beria with his swollen, moist lips and the cloudy brown eyes, was “ugly, flabby and unhealthy-looking with a greyish-yellow complexion.” The life of a Stalinist magnate was not a healthy one. No one worked harder than the “inhumanly energetic” Beria, but he still played volleyball every weekend with Nina and his team of bodyguards: “Even though he was so unfit, he was amazingly fast on his feet.” In common with other human predators, Beria became a vegetarian, eating “grass” and Georgian dishes but only rarely meat. He came home at weekends, practised shooting his pistol in the garden, watched a movie in his cinema and then drove off again.

Dressing like a southern winegrower, Beria hated uniforms, only sporting his Marshal’s uniform during 1945: usually he wore a polo-neck sweater, a light jacket, baggy trousers and a floppy hat. Beria was cleverer, brasher and more ambitious than the other magnates and he could not resist letting them know it. He teased Khrushchev about his looks and his womanizing, saying, “Look at Nikita, he’s nothing much to look at but what a ladykiller!,” tormented Andreyev about his illnesses, Voroshilov about his stupidity, Malenkov about his flabbiness and he told Kobulov that he dressed like Göring. No one ever forgot any of Beria’s wisecracks. Nina begged him to be more circumspect: “she hated his way of wounding people,” wrote their son. His own courtiers, who “idealized him,” met like modern corporate directors at his box at the Dynamo football stadium. The major organizations had their own football teams—Beria’s MVD had Dynamo, the trade unions had Spartak. The competition was so vicious that in 1942 Beria had the successful manager of the Spartak team, Nikolai Starostin, arrested and sent into exile. An invitation to watch a game in Beria’s box for a young Chekist meant entering his circle.

An inventory of his desk after his later arrest revealed his interests: power, terror and sex. In his office, Beria kept blackjack clubs for torturing people and the array of female underwear, sex toys and pornography that seemed to be obligatory for secret-police chiefs. He was found to be keeping eleven pairs of silk stockings, eleven silk bodices, seven silk nighties, female sports outfits, the equivalent of Soviet cheerleaders’ costumes, blouses, silk scarves, countless obscene love letters and a “large quantity of items of male debauchery.”

Despite his mountainous workload, Beria found time for a Draculean sex life that combined love, rape and perversity in almost equal measure. The war had given him the opportunity to engage in a life of sexual brigandage even more intense and reckless than that enjoyed by his predecessors in the job. The secret-police chiefs always had the greatest sexual licence: only Smersh watched Beria; otherwise he could do whatever he wanted. It was once thought Beria’s seductions and rapes were exaggerated but the opening of the archives of his own interrogation, as well as the evidence of witnesses and even those who were raped by him, reveals a sexual predator who used his power to indulge himself in obsessive depravity. It is often impossible to differentiate between women he seduced who went to him to plead for loved ones—and those women he simply kidnapped and raped. Yet mothers often pimped their daughters in return for limousines and privileges. Beria himself could also be a gentleman, treating some mistresses so kindly that they never criticized him even when he had been exposed. [240] On 17 January 2003, the Russian Prosecutor confirmed the existence of forty-seven volumes of files on Beria’s criminal activities which were gathered on his arrest after Stalin’s death. Even though the case against him was entirely political, with trumped-up charges, the files confirm the dozens of women who accused him of raping them. The State television network RTR was allowed to film the handwritten list of their names and telephone numbers. The files will not be opened for another twenty-five years. He combined seduction with espionage: he seduced a willing female friend of Kira Alliluyeva’s by saying, “What lovely cherry lips you have! A figure like Venus!” Afterwards, he quizzed her on her circle, recruiting her to spy on the Alliluyevs.