About Me
I was born in 1899 (twenty years younger than Stalin) in Merkheuli, the Sukhumi District of Georgia. My parents were Mingrelian peasants. My mother was probably married twice, and my father's name was Pavel--he died when I was in middle school.
I participated in several Marxist student cells at secondary schools in Sukhumi in 1915, although I was not yet a member of any party.Georgia's social democrats represented the first legal and genuinely popular socialist party in Imperial Russia. A number of socialist politicians won office as mayors and members of city councils. But Georgia was the stronghold of the Mensheviks, the other side in the Bolshevik split engineered when Vladimir Lenin, in exile, fractured the Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1904, Mensheviks led a tremendously successful general strike in Georgia. Alarmed by his adversaries' growing strength, in that year Bolshevik missionaries arrived with orders from Lenin to increase agitation and sharpen the sometimes petty differences between the two factions.Never one to be accused of political brinkmanship, I joined the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democrats only in March of 1917. I was then studying architecture in Baku, Azerbaijan, a Bolshevik island in a Menshevik sea. In June 1917 I was conscripted and sent to the front in Romania where I spread Bolshevik propaganda in the ranks.I returned to Baku in 1918, and a year later received a degree in architecture. The three great states of the Transcaucasus had in the meantime taken advantage of the disintegration of the Czarist régime to declare independence. Georgia was led by Noah Zhordania, once a colleague of Lenin's before his heresy of aligning with the hated Mensheviks.The Bolsheviks in Baku were besieged by an advancing Turkish army before being overthrown by a bizarre coalition of ethnic Armenians and a Marxist sect known as the Social Revolutionaries. The British occupied Baku for a time, but withdrew just in time to watch the advancing Turkish army massacre the city's Armenian population.By 1918, the Musavat had taken control of Baku and Azerbaijan. Formed in 1911-12 by Marxist dissidents, the Musavat evolved into a nationalist party dominated by the homegrown Azeri bourgeoisie. I had kept in touch with his my Party colleagues, ad in the Autumn of 1919 I was given my first intelligence mission: the Bolshevik underground in Baku ordered me to penetrate the ranks of the Musavat.This was a fateful decision. Over the decades to follow, my Party enemies would discover and rediscover this little nugget of info and spread rumours to the effect that I, Lavrenti Beria - the great persecutor of heretics - had actually joined one of the counter-revolutionary organizations which so obsessed me. As early as the 1920s, I was called before one of Lenin's commissions of inquiry to answer for my membership in the Musavat, and the charge lived on to grace the pages of my official indictment more than thirty years later.After my tenure as the Musavat infiltrator, I was dispatched on follow-up missions to my native Georgia. I was twice arrested for espionage in Georgia (once when working as a "secretary" for the Russian embassy) and deported back to Baku in May 1920.It was only a matter of time before the Red Army, spurred on by Stalin and his faction of the Communist Party, overwhelmed the weak and feeble states of the Transcaucasus. I was too smart, and didn't immediately bank on my good deeds in espionage for a sinecure in the new government. I actually tried to leave state service altogether.the thing is, that my youthful heart was set aflutter by the pursuit of architecture. Often over the next ten years or so, when riding the murderous waves of denunciation that would become such a charming feature of Stalinism, I would react to trouble by begging my superiors to let me leave the Party to pursue the building of socialism with concrete rather than the truncheon. My protests, however, were a pose. I, in spite of my area of specialization, consistently pursued the dirtiest jobs the Party could offer.Accordingly, after my expulsion from Georgia and my subsequent enrollment in the Baku Polytechnic to further my studies, I continued to work for the Azeri Central Committee, and then for the fabulously named "Extraordinary Commission for the Expropriation from the Bourgeoisie and Improving the Welfare of the Workers." And when this body was dissolved in February 1921 (to the thrill of typesetters everywhere), after a brief stint back at the university, I plunged himself into the filthiest line of work of all as a footsoldier for the Azeri branch of the Soviet secret police: the Cheka.THERE WERE NO EVILS done by the NKVD, the MVD or the KGB that were not invented by their predecessor among Soviet "internal security" organs, the Cheka. Formed by "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky in December 1917, the Cheka was Communism's boot in the face to aristocrats, democrats, priests and reticent peasants. In places where the new order was on life support, the Cheka was the seismic force that leveled the earth so the commissars could move in unmolested to build human happiness.
Chekists were charged with smashing largely imaginary conspiracies and making examples of notorious criminals who tried to cheat on the massive appropriations of grain the new government was taking from their stores. They were permitted to conduct summary judgment on most people who were unlucky enough to fall into their hands, with one notable exception: they were not to molest any member of the Communist Party.The Caucasus, with the exception of a few pockets of Bolshevik sentiment here and there, were uniformly hostile to the new order, and it was here that the Cheka was driven to its most bloody excesses. The Cheka was abolished across the Soviet Union in 1922 by a new security force - with the exception of the Caucasus, where it remained in existence until July 1926.From all accounts, I excelled at this type of work. I propelled myself through the ranks with unfathomable speed, leaping over my superiors on the ladder of promotion. In 1921, I became chief of the Secret Operative Department of the Azeri Cheka and deputy leader of the whole bloody enterprise in the republic. I was only 22 years old.Considering my youth, my inexperience in the Party (having been a member for, at most, four years) and my lack of knowledge of anything more complex than the fundamentals of Marxism, my advancement through the Cheka is at first glance puzzling. Yet this was precisely the profile of the average Chekist and the "child soldiers" preferred by the Politburo in Moscow (the only body the Cheka answered to). They were zealous in their outlook and uncorrupted in their personal lives, unattached to either the Czarist régime or by lingering ties of friendship to the Mensheviks. They viewed the Party as the greatest hope of mankind, and their own role as midwives of Utopia. What were decrees, books, agitation in the factories? Out in the fields, in the prison courtyards where thousands were marched, their wrists bound behind their backs - here's where Socialism's victories were being won.The Chekist was, in a sense, a kind of priest. He held the powers of life and death in his hands. Humiliation and redemption were at his command. Party leaders talked. The Chekist, cradling his rifle in his hands, purified society.
