Simon Montefiore - Stalin

He was a familiar sight in Moscow as he cruised the streets in his armoured Packard and sent his Caucasian bodyguards Colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraia to procure women for him. The colonels were not always happy with their role—indeed, Sarkisov kept a record of Beria’s perversions with which to denounce him to Stalin. The girls were usually taken to the town house where a Georgian feast and wine awaited them in a caricature of Caucasian chivalry. One of the colonels always proffered a bouquet of flowers on the way home. If they resisted, they were likely to get arrested. The film star Zoya Fyodorovna was picked up by these Chekists at a time when she was still breastfeeding her baby. Taken to a party where there were no other guests, she was joined by Beria whom she begged to let her go as her breasts were painful. “Beria was furious.” The officer who was taking her home mistakenly handed her a bouquet at the door. When Beria saw, he shouted: “It’s a wreath not a bouquet. May they rot on your grave!” She was arrested afterwards.

The film actress Tatiana Okunevskaya was even less lucky: at the end of the war, Beria invited her to perform for the Politburo. Instead they went to a dacha. Beria plied her with drink, “virtually pouring the wine into my lap. He ate greedily, tearing at the food with his hands, chattering away.” Then “he undresses, rolls around, eyes ogling, an ugly, shapeless toad. ‘Scream or not, doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Think and behave accordingly.’” Beria softened her up by promising to release her beloved father and grandmother from prison and then raped her. He knew very well both had already been executed. She too was arrested soon afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement. Felling trees in the Siberian taiga , she was saved, like so many others, by the kindness of ordinary people.

These women were just the tip of a degenerate iceberg. Beria’s priapic energy was as frenzied and indefatigable as his bureaucratic drive. “I caught syphilis during the war, in 1943 I think, and I had treatment,” he later confessed. After the war, it was Vlasik and Poskrebyshev, who, remembering Bronka, told Stalin about the syphilis. Lists were already a Stalinist obsession so this sex addict felt compelled to keep a record of his conquests. His colonels kept the score; some say the list numbered thirty-nine, others seventy-nine: “Most of those women were my mistresses,” he admitted. Beria ordered Sarkisov to destroy the list which he did but being a Chekist, the bodyguard kept a copy, later used against his master…

Some mistresses, like “Sophia” and “Maya,” a student at the Institute of Foreign Relations, inconveniently became pregnant. Once again, Colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraia were called upon to arrange abortions at the MVD’s Medical Department—and when a child was born, the colonels placed it in an orphanage. [241] To this day, Beria’s illegitimate children are well known among Moscow and Tbilisi society: they include a highly respected Georgian Member of Parliament and a Soviet matron who married the son of a member of Brezhnev’s Politburo. After the war, Stalin changed the People’s Commissariats to Ministries so that the NKVD and NKGB became the MVD and MGB. The State Defence Committee, the GKO, was abolished on 4 September 1945. The Politburo once again became the highest Party body though Stalin ruled as Premier, leaving the Party Secretariat to Malenkov.

Beria was also notorious among the magnates themselves: Stalin himself tolerated the peccadilloes of his potentates as long as they were politically reliable. During the war, when Beria was running half the economy, and Stalin was informed of his priapism, but answered indulgently, “Comrade Beria is tired and overworked.” But the less he trusted Beria, the less tolerant he became. Once, hearing that Svetlana was at Beria’s house, Stalin panicked, rang and told her to leave at once. “I don’t trust Beria.” Whether this referred to his sexuality or to his politics is not clear. When Beria told Poskrebyshev that his daughter was as pretty as her mother, the chef de cabinet told her, “Never accept a lift from Beria.” Voroshilov’s daughter-in-law was followed by Beria’s car all the way back to the Kremlin. Voroshilov’s wife was terrified: “It’s Beria! Say nothing! Don’t tell a soul!”

The leaders’ wives hated Beria. “How can you work with such a man?” Ashken Mikoyan asked her husband.

“Be quiet,” Mikoyan would reply, but Ashken would not go to functions if Beria was likely to be present: “Say I’ve a headache!”

Beria’s wife Nina told Svetlana and other friends that she “was terribly unhappy. Lavrenti’s never home. I’m always alone.” But her daughter-in-law remembers that “she never stopped loving Beria.” She knew that he had other women “but she took a tolerant Georgian view of this.” When he came home for the weekend, “she spent hours having manicures and putting on makeup. She lived downstairs in her own room but when he came home, she moved upstairs to share his bed.” They “sat cosily by the fire, watching Western films, usually about cowboys and Mexican banditos . His favourite was Viva Villa! about Pancho Villa. They chatted lovingly in Mingrelian.” Nina never believed the scale of his exploits: “When would Lavrenti have found time to make these hordes of women his mistresses? He spent all day and night at work” so she presumed these women must have been his “secret agents.” 3But gruesome new evidence suggests Beria really was a Soviet Bluebeard. [242] Recently, Beria’s house—now the Tunisian Embassy—has yielded up some of its secrets: in 2003, the 50th anniversary of Beria’s death, the Tunisian Ambassador confirmed that alterations in the cellars had exposed human bones. Who were they? Tortured Enemies or raped girls? We shall probably never know. There is of course no proof that Beria is to blame—but anything, no matter how diabolical, seems possible in his case.

Sergo Beria, now twenty-one, named after Ordzhonikidze, had been at School No. 175 with Svetlana Stalin, Martha Peshkova and most of the élite children. As a father, Beria was absent much of the time but he was enormously proud of Sergo. Theirs was a typically formal relationship between a Bolshevik and his son. “If Sergo wanted to talk to his father,” recalled his wife, “Lavrenti would say, ‘Come and see me in the office.’” Like Malenkov and most of the other leaders, Beria was determined that his son should not go into politics.

Like all Politburo parents, he encouraged him to become a scientist: Colonel Beria rose to prominence in military technology as head of the sprawling missile Design Bureau Number One. Sergo had grown up around Stalin, and Beria therefore could not prevent the Generalissimo inviting him to the wartime conferences.

Sergo was intelligent, cultured and, according to Martha Peshkova, Svetlana Stalin’s best friend, “so beautifully handsome that he was like a dream—all the girls were in love with him.” In 1944, Svetlana fell for him too, a fact that she leaves out of both her memoirs and her interviews. When Sergo wrote his own memoirs and claimed this was so, many historians disbelieved it. Yet Svetlana wanted to marry him, an ambition she never gave up even when he himself married someone else. When he was in Sverdlovsk during the war, Svetlana got her brother to fly her there. After the Kapler affair, this crush worried the Berias: “Don’t you realize what you’re doing?” Nina Beria told Svetlana. “If your father finds out about this, he’ll skin Sergo alive.”

Stalin wanted her to marry one of his potentate’s sons, specifying to Svetlana that she should marry either Yury Zhdanov, Sergo Beria or Stepan Mikoyan. But this honour appalled Beria.