Why did Beria become Stalin's right hand? Were there not enough people in the Kremlin? Because he licked the Master's hands the hottest of all and rushed at the enemies the most furiously of all? But if careers were made in this way, if we had a country of mongrels, then who won the great war? No, there was clearly something different.
By birth, Lavrenty Beria came from the very bottom of Russian society - there were only vagabonds below. He was born in Abkhazia, in the mountain village of Merheuli, into a poor peasant family. In 1922, in the column of the questionnaire "Property status" I wrote: "I had nothing and have nothing." His mother was so poor that when she became a widow, the children had to be given to relatives. Then she married a newcomer Mingrelian Pavel Beria. Of the children from the second marriage, the eldest son died of smallpox, the daughter became deaf and dumb after an illness. There was only one son left - Lawrence, “relatively healthy and intelligent. A common story for the then Transcaucasia.
Break out of poverty
An intelligent child in the Caucasus is the mother's only hope. He can study, become a priest or even an official. This is how Stalin's mother reasoned, and Marta Beria thought the same, ready to give everything just to teach her son. For this, the parents sold half of the house. The family was divided: the father stayed in the village, and the mother and the children went to Sukhum.
Lavrenty did not shame his mother's hopes. After graduating with honors from the Sukhum real school, he entered the secondary mechanical-technical construction school in Baku. He worked part-time from childhood, wherever he could. In Baku, in his spare time he worked as a clerk at a factory. He dreamed of becoming an architect and stubbornly worked his way towards his dream. I managed to do everything: study, work, and also study Marxism. There is no doubt that even if the revolution had not happened, Lavrenty Beria would still have had his own house in St. Petersburg by the age of forty, and built according to his own design. Such was the person. But the revolution intervened and turned everything upside down.
From the very beginning of the Civil War, he joined the Reds. He worked in the Baku Soviet, after the fall of the Soviet regime there he went underground. Then he was engaged in illegal intelligence in Menshevik Georgia from the intelligence department of the 11th Army. These occupations naturally led him to the Azerbaijan Cheka after the war. By 1929 he became the “first Chekist” of the entire Transcaucasia. There, in the GPU, he assembled a team, which he relied on in the future, wherever the state need threw him. Somewhere along the way, I managed to finish three courses of an architectural institute - it didn't work out further.
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Master of the edge
In the end, Beria was removed from the GPU, but he was not allowed to study as he asked. On the contrary: in the fall of 1931 he became the first secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia and the second secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the CPSU (b), and a year later - the first secretary, the owner of the region.
Transcaucasia of those years did not at all resemble the three cheerful, prosperous republics as we remember them from Soviet times. The extreme poverty of the population, hunger, disease - the depressive outskirts of a poor agrarian country. It is, of course, five-year plans, industrialization … But you can also fail industrialization, and profuse the allocated funds, and build the devil knows what …
Beria did not fail industrialization. Here's just one example: collectivization. By 1931, 36% of the farms were collectivized in Georgia. The endless addition of scanty plots sown with corn, naturally, did not give anything worthwhile, except for the popular protest. Beria stopped the process, and transferred the collective farms to the cultivation of not corn and vegetables, but rare, expensive crops: tea, citrus fruits, tobacco, grapes. Fortunately, the climate allowed. The collective farms began to grow rich rapidly, and by 1939 the collectivization rate had risen to 86% - without pressure, uprisings and famines. The republic provided the country with tangerines, tea, tobacco, wine, money was rowed with a shovel. And you can buy corn in Ukraine.
And so it was in all areas of life. After the first five-year plans, tiny Georgia took first place in the USSR in the food industry - it produced wine, tea, and canned food. The mining industry was reconstructed, oil and machine-building plants appeared. During the first five-year period, the volume of gross industrial production in Georgia increased almost 6 times, in the second - another 5 times. Oil production has sharply increased in Azerbaijan, and shelf drilling has begun. The Black Sea coast has become an all-Union health resort - you can still see the remains of luxurious embankments and sanatoriums in Abkhazia. By 1938, almost illiterate Georgia (at the beginning of the 20th century, the literacy rate here was only 20%) came to be one of the first places in the Union in terms of education of the population, and surpassed England and Germany in terms of the number of students per thousand.
How did you manage to do this? Beria did any work in exactly the same way: he put the Chekists in the main nodes of the new case, his proven team. Those began to work and formed their teams, identifying suitable people among the environment and providing them, if necessary, dizzying careers, awards, salaries, apartments … The method is simple, like two and two, but with cunning. It works if you do not get distracted by sucking up and nibbling, but choose people strictly according to their business qualities.
In general, it is not surprising that such a leader did not stay on the periphery. But why, having taken to Moscow, he was "thrown" to the NKVD? Lubyanka nails miss the microscope?
Taming the People's Commissariat
By that time, the Soviet government had long and unsuccessfully tried to bring the KGB apparatus under its control. To be honest, it didn't work out very well. Even now, the special services are a state within a state. And then the Lubyanka was full of frostbitten revolutionaries mixed with just thugs. No, there were, of course, normal people too - but precisely because they were normal, they did not make any difference in this team. It is the NKVD that bears the main blame for the victims of the notorious “thirty-seventh year”. And by the middle of 1938, the People's Commissar Nikolai Yezhov, who was stupefied with blood and vodka, the leader of a completely insolent bloody flock, reached out to the supreme power, that is, he began to weave a conspiracy. The enraged People's Commissariat had to be stopped and returned to a manageable state. And for this - to put a reliable person on the levers.
The most dangerous character in the People's Commissariat was not even Yezhov, but his first deputy, the old Chekist Mikhail Frinovsky. In July, this man was sent on a business trip to the Far East, and on August 22, Beria was appointed in his place. Upon learning of this appointment, Yezhov went into a binge for a week, and then began to burn papers. On September 29, Beria became the head of the Main Directorate of State Security. Power softly slipped out of the "iron grip". As it turned out - forever.
The work of "normalizing" the People's Commissariat was grim. The old Chekist Vasily Ryasnoy recalled: when Beria came to the Lubyanka, he summoned the Chekists one by one and asked a simple question: "Who is behaving unhumanly here?" They were filmed and then shot or imprisoned without sentimentality. In the autumn of 1938, only the leading employees of the NKVD were arrested 332 people (including 18 people's commissars of the union and autonomous republics). And only then, having beheaded the office, Beria's people calmly dealt with the rest of the murderers in their crimson collars. Then the cleaning began.
The extent of this purge is not entirely clear. For example, if you look at the composition of the Leningrad NKVD during the war years, then the employees who came to the bodies before 1938 are numbered in units. So the pogrom was cruel. But since then there has been no talk of "lawlessness of organs" in the Soviet Union. The small surge of "Yezhovism" that took place in 1951-1952, the same Beria, who came to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in March 1953, liquidated it as usual, quickly and brutally.
So, the NKVD is manageable, obedient, taught to observe the law (as far as the Chekist comrades could be taught this at all). Now what?
Secret Commission
If everything is more or less clear with Beria's work in the NKVD, then in terms of the rest of his activities, a continuous fog begins from the moment of transfer to Moscow. In February 1941, he became deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and oversees the people's commissariats of the timber and oil industries, non-ferrous metals, and the river fleet. The first three are the most important strategic sectors in the light of the coming war. And the fourth too - not to roll tourists along the Volga. With the underdevelopment of road transport, the importance of river transport was quite comparable to that of rail transport. And it is unlikely that Beria began to deal with these issues only in February 1941, after all, he moved to Moscow in August 1938.
The fact is that the Stalinist system of government had one feature. The center of state administration, concentrated in the leader's office, from time to time let loose "prominences" in the form of various kinds of committees, commissions and the like. Some of them were created for a couple of days, others grew into real monsters.
For example, there was such a military-industrial commission under the USSR Defense Committee. Have you heard of her? It is unlikely that even an Internet search engine does not find this organ. Meanwhile, she was fully engaged in all issues of transferring industry to a military track, and in terms of responsibility and the scope of her powers was comparable to the State Planning Committee. And its chairman, respectively, not being the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, stood above the people's commissars.
Who was the chairman of this monster? In May 1941, when the commission was created - Lazar Kaganovich. And who then? Kaganovich too? Hardly. For him, even the operation of the railways in an emergency mode became an unbearable task, but here the entire industry was transferred to a military track, like clockwork an hour ahead, without noise and congestion. So who was the chairman of the military-industrial complex is unknown. Maybe Beria - why not? The scope of talent allows.
Beria's functions after the start of the war are also unclear. The powers are understandable - a member of the State Defense Committee, that is, the powers are almost absolute. But what specific functions?
From the memoirs of the Stalinist People's Commissars it is known that he was engaged in organizing the production of small arms, settled the conflict between the Office of Military Communications and Kaganovich, oversaw the work of Uralmash. All this in 1941, pay attention! Meanwhile, at that time, Nikolai Voznesensky was formally in charge of the production of small arms, and Vyacheslav Molotov was in charge of tanks (and, therefore, the work of Uralmash). In what capacity is Beria here? Most likely, indeed, in the role of the chairman of the military-industrial complex - otherwise why does he immediately get into other people's spheres of responsibility?
Defense Chief
The powers of the NKVD in the economic sphere are also interesting. In the directive of the People's Commissariat on organizing the work of economic departments for operational security services for the defense industry, we read: “Economic departments must promptly identify malfunctions in the work of enterprises that disrupt the fulfillment of government tasks … measures to eliminate these problems”. Beria was not one of those people who hammered each nail with a separate hammer. He had his own well-trained apparatus, and he used it wherever he worked. What do we get? And it turns out that during the war Beria was responsible for almost the entire defense industry. Except, perhaps, aviation - Georgy Malenkov was in charge of it. Well, after the war, a scandal broke out with the delivery of defective aircraft to the front - 5 thousand cars!That is, Beria was the second, after Stalin, the leader who won the Great Patriotic War.
In 1944, Beria became the head of the GKO Operations Bureau - the second person in the country after Stalin. And he stayed with them until the end - because after the war, the second person in the state and Stalin's successor should be sought not in party structures, but in the government. Where he is with extraordinary ease.
We will not touch upon Beria's work in the atomic committee - this topic has been widely promoted. It is less known that the matter was not limited to just one bomb. This was a man who, if not created, then organized the Soviet military-industrial complex - so that neither stagnation nor perestroika could destroy it. Not only nuclear weapons, but also missiles, and radar, and air defense, and the space program (which was then shamelessly attributed to Khrushchev), and indeed the entire military-industrial complex. At the same time, he also supervised the construction of Moscow University and other high-rise buildings, and in general architectural affairs. Apparently, the dream of becoming an architect has not gone anywhere.
So, according to the totality of his actions, Lavrenty Beria deserves the title of the best manager of the 20th century.
The language of numbers
The results of Beria's work as a member of the State Defense Committee are best seen from the numbers. If on June 22 the Germans had 47 thousand guns and mortars against our 36 thousand, then by November 1, 1942 their number was equal, and by January 1, 1944, we had 89 thousand against the German 54.5 thousand. Izhevsk gunsmiths, who at the beginning of the war traded with Beria over 5,000 rifles, in 1943 produced 12,000 rifles a day. From 1942 to 1944, the USSR produced about 2,000 tanks a month, far ahead of Germany. It was then that Beria began to cooperate with Boris Vannikov, who had been in charge of the production of weapons since the late 1930s. Vannikov was an inconvenient person, constantly arguing with the Deputy People's Commissar of Defense Marshal Kulik, and as a result he was arrested and sentenced to death. While on death rowAt the beginning of the war, he wrote a memorandum to Stalin with recommendations on how to increase the production of weapons, and straight from the cell he was sent to Stalin's reception. As a result, Vannikov becomes the People's Commissar of Ammunition and remains in this capacity until August 20, 1945, when Beria takes him with him to the Special Committee, appointing him head of the First Main Directorate. On September 30, 1943, for his work as a member of the State Defense Committee, Beria received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. On September 30, 1943, for his work as a member of the State Defense Committee, Beria received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. On September 30, 1943, for his work as a member of the State Defense Committee, Beria received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
Magazine: Mysteries of History No. 13 / C, Author: Elena Prudnikova