WikipediaExtracts:Lavrentiy Beria
Extracted from Wikipedia --
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Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria ( BERR-ee-ə; Russian: Лаврентий Павлович Берия, IPA: [lɐˈvrʲenʲtʲɪj ˈpavləvʲɪdʑ ˈbʲerʲɪjə]; Georgian: ლავრენტი პავლეს ძე ბერია; 29 March [O.S. 17 March] 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Georgian-born Soviet politician who was the most influential of leader Joseph Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his greatest influence as head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) from 1938 to 1946, during the period of the Second World War.
Beria enlisted in the Cheka (the first Soviet secret police) in 1920, and quickly rose through its ranks. He transferred to Communist Party work in the Caucasus in the early 1930s, and in 1938 was appointed head of the NKVD, signaling the end of Stalin's Great Purge, which had been carried out by previous NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Beria was responsible for organizing purges such as the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and officials. Following Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Beria became a member of the extraordinary State Defense Committee (GKO).
In 1943–1944, Beria orchestrated mass deportations of minority ethnic groups from the Caucasus, an act that was declared genocidal by various scholars and, as concerning Chechens, in 2004 by the European Parliament. Beria expanded the system of Gulag forced labour camps, mobilizing its millions of prisoners into wartime production, and acted as the de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of NKVD field units responsible for barrier troops and Soviet partisan intelligence and sabotage operations on the Eastern Front. Beria was also primarily responsible for overseeing secret Gulag detention facilities for scientists and engineers known as sharashkas. From 1944, he personally oversaw the Soviet atomic bomb project, which Stalin gave absolute priority to; the project was completed in 1949. After the war, Beria was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1945, and promoted to a full member of the Politburo in 1946.
After Stalin's death in March 1953, Beria became First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In this dual capacity, he formed a troika with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov that briefly led the country in Stalin's place. The Gulag system was transferred to the Ministry of Justice, and a mass release of over a million prisoners was undertaken. In June 1953, a coup d'état by Nikita Khrushchev, with the support of Marshal Georgy Zhukov, removed Beria from power. He was arrested, tried for treason and other offences, and executed that December. A prolific sexual predator, Beria serially raped scores of girls and young women; there is evidence he murdered some of his victims.
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