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100-460: Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria ( / ˈ b ɛ r i ʌ / ; Russian: Лаврентий Павлович Берия , IPA: [lɐˈvrʲenʲtʲɪj ˈpavləvʲɪdʑ‿ˈbʲerʲɪjə] ; Georgian : ლავრენტი პავლეს ძე ბერია , romanized : Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria ; 29 March [ O.S. 17 March] 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph Stalin 's secret police chiefs, serving as head of

200-554: A troika with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov which briefly led the country in Stalin's place. In June 1953, a coup d'état by Nikita Khrushchev , with the support of other members of the leadership and Marshal Georgy Zhukov , removed Beria from power. He was arrested, tried for treason and other offences, and executed in December. Beria was born in Merkheuli , near Sukhumi , in

300-451: A vigesimal numeric system like Basque and (partially) French . Numbers greater than 20 and less than 100 are described as the sum of the greatest possible multiple of 20 plus the remainder. For example, "93" literally translates as 'four times twenty plus thirteen' ( ოთხმოცდაცამეტი , otkhmotsdatsamet’i ). One of the most important Georgian dictionaries is the Explanatory dictionary of

400-552: A Roman grammarian from the 2nd century AD. The first direct attestations of the language are inscriptions and palimpsests dating to the 5th century, and the oldest surviving literary work is the 5th century Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik by Iakob Tsurtaveli . The emergence of Georgian as a written language appears to have been the result of the Christianization of Georgia in the mid-4th century, which led to

500-665: A capital-like effect called Mtavruli for titles and inscriptions. Georgian is an agglutinative language with a complex verb structure that can include up to eight morphemes , exhibiting polypersonalism . The language has seven noun cases and employs a left-branching structure with adjectives preceding nouns and postpositions instead of prepositions. Georgian lacks grammatical gender and articles, with definite meanings established through context. Georgian's rich derivation system allows for extensive noun and verb formation from roots, with many words featuring initial consonant clusters. The Georgian writing system has evolved from ancient scripts to

600-507: A doctor was tacitly supported (or at least not opposed) by the rest of the Politburo, which was rudderless without Stalin's micromanagement and paralysed by a legitimate fear that he would suddenly recover and take reprisals on anyone who had dared to act without his orders. Stalin's suspicion of doctors in the wake of the Doctors' Plot was well known at the time of his sickness; his private physician

700-542: A glass of poisoned wine. They attended the opera after the dinner, watching the play Mzetchabuki ( მზეჭაბუკი ; "Sun-boy" in Georgian). During the performance Lakoba showed the first signs of his poisoning and returned to his hotel room, where he died early the next morning. Officially, Lakoba was said to have died of a heart attack , though a previous medical examination in Moscow had showed he had arteriosclerosis (thickening of

800-493: A hand against the will of our people, against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed." On 20 July, he wrote to Stalin to report that he had had 200 people shot, was about to submit a list of another 350 who were also to be shot, and that Shalva Eliava , Lavrenty Kartvelishvili , Maria Orakhelashvili (wife of Mamia Orakhelashvili ) and numerous others had all confessed to counter-revolutionary activities but Mamia Orakhelashvili himself

900-899: A landowner in Sukhumi Okrug, from the Mingrelian ethnic group. Beria attended a technical school in Sukhumi, and later claimed to have joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 while a student in the Baku Polytechnicum (subsequently known as the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy ). Beria had earlier worked for the anti-Bolshevik Mussavatists in Baku . After the Red Army captured the city on 28 April 1920, he

1000-585: A policy of "Georgification". In the months that followed Lakoba's death, members of his family were implicated on charges against the state. His two brothers were arrested on 9 April 1937, and his mother and Sariya were arrested on 23 August of that year. A trial of thirteen members of Lakoba's family was conducted between 30 October and 3 November 1937 in Sukhumi, with charges including counter-revolutionary activities, subversion and sabotage , espionage , terrorism , and insurgent organization in Abkhazia. Nine of

1100-548: A population of 839 people. Fragments of Greek pottery, date back to the 6th century BC, have been found in the village. Merkheuli was established in 1879. Following the Armenian genocide , many Armenians resettled in Merkheuli, eventually becoming the majority ethnicity in the town. Lavrentiy Beria , chief of the NKVD from 1938 to 1945, was born in Merkheuli in 1899. Merkheuli has

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1200-490: A ri means 'friend'; megobrebi ( megob Ø rebi ) means 'friends', with the loss of a in the last syllable of the word stem. Georgian has seven noun cases: nominative , ergative , dative , genitive , instrumental , adverbial and vocative . An interesting feature of Georgian is that, while the subject of a sentence is generally in the nominative case and the object is in the accusative case (or dative), one can find this reversed in many situations (this depends mainly on

1300-399: A row, as may be seen in words like გვფრცქვნ ი gvprtskvni 'you peel us' and მწვრთნ ელი mts’vrtneli 'trainer'. Vicenik has observed that Georgian vowels following ejective stops have creaky voice and suggests this may be one cue distinguishing ejectives from their aspirated and voiced counterparts. Georgian has been written in a variety of scripts over its history. Currently

1400-508: A significant contribution to the victory of the Soviet Union in the war through his organisation of wartime production and his use of partisans. Abroad, Beria had met with Kim Il Sung , the future leader of North Korea, several times when the Soviet troops had declared war on Japan and occupied the northern half of Korea from August 1945. Beria recommended that Stalin install a communist leader in

1500-589: A word. Georgian vowels in non-initial syllables are pronounced with a shorter duration compared to vowels in initial syllables. long polysyllabic words may have a secondary stress on their third or fourth syllable. Georgian contains many "harmonic clusters" involving two consonants of a similar type (voiced, aspirated, or ejective) that are pronounced with only a single release; e.g. ბგ ერა bgera 'sound', ცხ ოვრება tskhovreba 'life', and წყ ალი ts’q’ali 'water'. There are also frequent consonant clusters , sometimes involving more than six consonants in

1600-615: A written language began with the Christianization of Georgia in the 4th century. Georgian phonology features a rich consonant system, including aspirated, voiced, and ejective stops , affricates , and fricatives . Its vowel system consists of five vowels with varying realizations. Georgian prosody involves weak stress, with disagreements among linguists on its placement. The language's phonotactics include complex consonant clusters and harmonic clusters. The Mkhedruli script , dominant in modern usage, corresponds closely to Georgian phonemes and has no case distinction, though it employs

1700-461: Is a good organizer, an efficient, capable functionary." But according to Stalin's daughter Svetlana : He was a magnificent specimen of the artful courtier, the embodiment of Oriental perfidy, flattery and hypocrisy who had succeed in confounding even my father, a man whom it was ordinarily difficult to deceive. A good deal that this monster did is now a blot on my father's name. In October 1931, when Stalin proposed to appoint Beria Second Secretary of

1800-516: Is because syllables in the language often begin with two consonants. Recordings are available on the relevant Wiktionary entries, linked to below. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights : Merkheuli Merkheuli ( Abkhaz : Мархьаул ; Georgian : მერხეული [meɾχeuli] ; Armenian : Մերխեուլ ) is a village in Abkhazia , Georgia . A 2011 census recorded

1900-998: Is rather light, and in fact Georgian transliterates the tenuis stops in foreign words and names with the ejectives. The coronal occlusives ( /tʰ tʼ d n/ , not necessarily affricates) are variously described as apical dental, laminal alveolar, and "dental". Per Canepari, the main realizations of the vowels are [ i ], [ e̞ ], [ ä ], [ o̞ ], [ u ]. Aronson describes their realizations as [ i̞ ], [ e̞ ], [ ä ] (but "slightly fronted"), [ o̞ ], [ u̞ ]. Shosted transcribed one speaker's pronunciation more-or-less consistently with [ i ], [ ɛ ], [ ɑ ], [ ɔ ], [ u ]. Allophonically, [ ə ] may be inserted to break up consonant clusters, as in /dɡas/ [dəɡäs] . In casual speech, /iV, Vi/ sequences can be realized phonetically as [jV~i̯V, Vj~Vi̯]. Phrase-final unstressed vowels may sometimes be partially reduced. Prosody in Georgian involves stress, intonation, and rhythm. Stress

2000-578: Is sharpening his knives". Khrushchev opposed the alliance between Beria and Malenkov, but he was initially unable to challenge them. Khrushchev's opportunity came in June 1953 when a spontaneous uprising against the East German communist regime broke out in East Berlin . Based on Beria's statements, other leaders suspected that in the wake of the uprising, he would consider trading the reunification of Germany and

2100-455: Is that Khrushchev prepared an elaborate ambush, convening a meeting of the Presidium on 26 June, where he suddenly launched a scathing attack on Beria, accusing him of being a traitor and spy in the pay of British intelligence agencies . Beria was taken completely by surprise. He asked, "What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich? Why are you picking fleas in my trousers?" When Beria finally realised what

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2200-401: Is very weak, and linguists disagree as to where stress occurs in words. Jun, Vicenik, and Lofstedt have proposed that Georgian stress and intonation are the result of pitch accents on the first syllable of a word and near the end of a phrase. According to Borise, Georgian has fixed initial word-level stress cued primarily by greater syllable duration and intensity of the initial syllable of

2300-452: The Dittionario giorgiano e italiano . These were meant to help western Catholic missionaries learn Georgian for evangelical purposes. On the left are IPA symbols, and on the right are the corresponding letters of the modern Georgian alphabet, which is essentially phonemic. Former /qʰ/ ( ჴ ) has merged with /x/ ( ხ ), leaving only the latter. The glottalization of the ejectives

2400-494: The Mkhedruli script is almost completely dominant; the others are used mostly in religious documents and architecture. Mkhedruli has 33 letters in common use; a half dozen more are obsolete in Georgian, though still used in other alphabets, like Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan. The letters of Mkhedruli correspond closely to the phonemes of the Georgian language. According to the traditional account written down by Leonti Mroveli in

2500-732: The Caucasus in the 1930s, and in 1938 was appointed head of the NKVD by Stalin. His ascent marked the end of the Stalinist Great Purge carried out by previous chief Nikolai Yezhov , whom Beria purged. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Beria organized the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia, and after the occupation of the Baltic states and parts of Romania in 1940, he oversaw

2600-506: The Georgian Orthodox Church and together are called Khutsuri 'priest alphabet'. In Mkhedruli , there is no case. Sometimes, however, a capital-like effect, called Mtavruli ('title' or 'heading'), is achieved by modifying the letters so that their vertical sizes are identical and they rest on the baseline with no descenders. These capital-like letters are often used in page headings, chapter titles, monumental inscriptions, and

2700-669: The Georgian SSR . Between 1922 and 1924, Beria was deputy chairman of the Georgian OGPU (as Cheka had been renamed). He then led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising in 1924, after which up to 10,000 people were executed. Between 1924 and 1927, he was head of the secret political department of the Transcaucasian SFSR OGPU. In December 1926, he was appointed Chairman of the Georgian OGPU, and deputy chairman for

2800-653: The Gestapo–NKVD Third Conference was held in Zakopane , Beria sent a note (No. 794/B) to Stalin in which he stated that the Polish prisoners of war kept at camps and prisons in western Belarus and Ukraine were enemies of the Soviet Union, and recommended their execution. Most of them were military officers, but there were also intelligentsia, doctors, priests, and others in a total of 22,000 people. With Stalin's approval, Beria's NKVD executed them in what became known as

2900-452: The Kartlian dialect. Over the centuries, it has exerted a strong influence on the other dialects. As a result, they are all, generally, mutually intelligible with standard Georgian, and with one another. The history of the Georgian language is conventionally divided into the following phases: The earliest extant references to Georgian are found in the writings of Marcus Cornelius Fronto ,

3000-676: The Katyn massacre . From October 1940 to February 1942, the NKVD under Beria carried out a new purge of the Red Army and related industries. In February 1941, Beria became deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars , and in June, following Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union , he became a member of the State Defense Committee (GKO). During the Second World War , he took on major domestic responsibilities and mobilised

3100-528: The Kremlin . Stalin's death prevented a final purge of Old Bolsheviks Mikoyan and Molotov, for which Stalin had been laying the groundwork in the year prior to his death. Shortly after Stalin's death, Beria announced triumphantly to the Politburo that he had "done [Stalin] in" and "saved [us] all", according to Molotov's memoirs. The assertion that Stalin was poisoned by Beria's associates has been supported by Edvard Radzinsky and other authors. From 1939 to 1953,

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3200-503: The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) from 1938 to 1946, during the country's involvement in the Second World War . Beria was also a prolific sexual predator , who serially raped scores of girls and young women, and murdered some of his victims. An ethnic Georgian , Beria enlisted in the Cheka in 1920, and quickly rose through its ranks. He transferred to Communist Party work in

3300-672: The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (the nominal head of state ). Beria undertook some measures of liberalisation immediately after Stalin's death. He reorganised the MVD and drastically reduced its economic power and penal responsibilities. A number of costly construction projects, such as the Salekhard–Igarka Railway , were scrapped, and the remaining industrial enterprises became affiliated under other economic ministries. The Gulag system

3400-492: The Soviet Poison Laboratory was under the direct supervision of Beria and his deputy Vsevolod Merkulov . According to Radzinsky, Stalin was poisoned by a senior bodyguard. Beria's son, Sergo Beria, later recounted that after Stalin's death, his mother Nina told her husband that, "Your position now is even more precarious than when Stalin was alive." Some authors have claimed that Stalin "may have been poisoned" using

3500-574: The Soviet atomic bomb project , which Stalin gave absolute priority; the project's first nuclear device 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 head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and a First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers , and formed

3600-646: The Sukhum Okrug of the Kutais Governorate (now Gulripshi District , de facto Republic of Abkhazia , or Georgia , then part of the Russian Empire ). He grew up in a Georgian Orthodox family; his mother, Marta Jaqeli (1868–1955), was deeply religious and church-going. Marta was from the Guria region, descended from a noble Georgian family, and was a widow before marrying Beria's father, Pavle Beria (1872–1922),

3700-519: The anticoagulant warfarin , although others have argued that "the description we have of Stalin's illness does not match the appearance or timeline of patients that experience severe warfarin or warfarin-related overdoses." Furthermore, towards the end of his life, Stalin was "obsessive about the possibility of being poisoned", and that given his paranoia, "it is difficult to imagine a scenario where Beria or another conspirator could have slipped an anticoagulant into his drink." After Stalin's death, Beria

3800-420: The deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians to remote areas or Gulag camps. In 1941, Beria began a new purge of the Red Army . After Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union later that year, he was appointed to the State Defense Committee , overseeing security. Beria expanded the system of forced labour, mobilizing millions of Gulag prisoners into wartime production. He also

3900-452: The 11th century, the first Georgian script was created by the first ruler of the Kingdom of Iberia , Pharnavaz , in the 3rd century BC. The first examples of a Georgian script date from the 5th century AD. There are now three Georgian scripts, called Asomtavruli 'capitals', Nuskhuri 'small letters', and Mkhedruli . The first two are used together as upper and lower case in the writings of

4000-728: The Georgian Communist Party Central Committee and Second Secretary of the Transcaucasian party, the First Secretary Lavrenty Kartvelishvili exclaimed: "I refuse to work with that charlatan!" Ordzhonikidze also objected to the promotion. Kartvelishvili was replaced by Mamia Orakhelashvili , who wrote to Stalin and Ordzhonikidze in August 1932 asking to be allowed to resign because he could not work with Beria as his deputy. On 9 October 1932, Beria

4100-668: The Georgian SSR. Beria ordered the executions of Devdariani's brothers George and Shalva. In 1935, Beria cemented his place in Stalin's entourage with a lengthy oration titled, "On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia" (later published as a book), which emphasised Stalin's role. It quoted from what purported to be police reports from early in the century, which identified Stalin, under his real name Jugashvili, as

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4200-568: The Georgian language ( ქართული ენის განმარტებითი ლექსიკონი ). It consists of eight volumes and about 115,000 words. It was produced between 1950 and 1964, by a team of linguists under the direction of Arnold Chikobava . Georgian has a word derivation system, which allows the derivation of nouns from verb roots both with prefixes and suffixes, for example: It is also possible to derive verbs from nouns: Likewise, verbs can be derived from adjectives, for example: In Georgian many nouns and adjectives begin with two or more contiguous consonants. This

4300-563: The MGB to counter Beria's dominance of the power ministries. Kruglov and Abakumov moved expeditiously to replace Beria's men in the security apparatus with new people. Very soon, Deputy Minister Stepan Mamulov of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) was the only close Beria ally left outside foreign intelligence, on which Beria kept a grip. In the following months, Abakumov started carrying out important operations without consulting Beria, often working with Zhdanov, and on Stalin's direct orders. One of

4400-526: The Moscow metro, which he denied: Beria hit me in the face. After that, I was given 30 minutes to think in the next room, next to his office, from where the screams and groans of the beaten could be heard. An hour later, called to the office, I was met with the words of Kobulov: "What shall we start beating?" In March 1939, Beria was appointed as a candidate member of the Communist Party's Politburo . Although he did not rise to full membership until 1946, he

4500-457: The NKVD carried out the Great Purge : the imprisonment or execution of a huge number, possibly over a million, of citizens throughout the Soviet Union as alleged " enemies of the people ". By 1938, however, the oppression had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure, economy and even the armed forces of the Soviet state, prompting Stalin to wind the purge down. In September, Beria

4600-683: The NKVD while retaining general control over national security matters as Deputy Prime Minister and Curator of the Organs of State Security under Stalin. However, the new NKVD chief, Sergei Kruglov , was not a supporter of Beria. Also by the summer of 1946 Beria's man, Vsevolod Merkulov , was replaced as head of the Ministry for State Security (MGB) by Viktor Abakumov . Abakumov had headed SMERSH from 1943 to 1946; his relationship with Beria involved close collaboration (since Abakumov owed his rise to Beria's support and esteem) but also rivalry. Stalin had begun to encourage Abakumov to form his own network inside

4700-772: The No. 1 person he wanted to "eliminate". During the postwar years, Beria supervised the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and chose their Soviet-backed leaders. Starting in 1948, Abakumov initiated several investigations against these leaders, which culminated with the arrest in November 1952 of Rudolf Slánský , Bedřich Geminder and others in Czechoslovakia . These men were frequently accused of Zionism , " rootless cosmopolitanism ", and providing weapons to Israel. Such charges deeply disturbed Beria, as he had directly ordered

4800-530: The Party secretary." Within days, Khrushchev persuaded the other leaders to support a coup d'etat against Beria. Beria, as first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and an influential Politburo member, saw himself as Stalin's successor, while wider Politburo members had contrasting thoughts on future leadership. On 26 June 1953, Beria was arrested and held in an undisclosed location near Moscow. Accounts of his downfall vary considerably. The historical consensus

4900-404: The Politburo issued a decree formally removing him from his posts as a "traitor and capitalist agent" and accused him and his co-defendants of attempting to place the MVD above the party in a bid to seize power and liquidate the Soviet regime. A Pravda editorial on 10 July repeated these charges and made a number of further accusations, claiming that Beria had caused food shortages by undermining

5000-471: The Soviet satellite states in Europe.</ref> Beria said of East Germany, "It is not even a real state but one kept in being only by Soviet troops." The East German uprising convinced Molotov, Malenkov and Bulganin that Beria's policies were dangerous and destabilizing to Soviet power. On 21 June 1953, Khrushchev was contacted by MVD Chief Timofei Strokach, a wartime colleague of his, who warned him that Beria

5100-451: The Soviet collective farm system, and claimed his policies of liberalization (in which a number of Russian officials in Latvia were dismissed from their posts) were meant to incite ethnic hatred and undermine the friendship of the Soviet people. Vyacheslav Malyshev succeeded Beria as head of the Soviet nuclear weapons project. After a review of project documentation during the summer of 1953 it

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5200-464: The Soviet press began an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, euphemistically termed the "struggle against rootless cosmopolitanism". Initially, 37 men were arrested, but the number quickly grew into hundreds. Scores of Soviet Jews were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, sent to the Gulag, or executed. The "plot" was presumably invented by Stalin. A few days after Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Beria freed all

5300-519: The Transcaucasian OGPU. Beria and Joseph Stalin first met in summer 1931, when Stalin took a six-week rest in Tsqaltubo , and Beria took personal charge of his security. Stalin was unimpressed by most of the local party leaders, chosen by the former Georgian party boss, Sergo Ordzhonikidze , but writing to Lazar Kaganovich in August 1932, Stalin commented that "Beria makes a good impression. He

5400-551: The arrested doctors, announced that the entire matter was fabricated, and arrested the MGB functionaries directly involved. Stalin's aide, Vasili Lozgachev, reported that Beria and Malenkov were the first members of the Politburo to see Stalin's condition when he was found unconscious. They arrived at Stalin's dacha at Kuntsevo at 03:00 on 2 March 1953, after being called by Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin . The latter two did not want to risk Stalin's wrath by entering his private rooms. Lozgachev tried to explain to Beria that

5500-492: The arteries), cardiosclerosis (thickening of the heart), and erysipelas (skin inflammation) in the left auricle that had led to his hearing loss. His body was returned to Sukhumi, though notably all the internal organs (which could have helped identify the cause of death), were removed. Lakoba was accused of "nationalist deviationism", of having helped Trotsky, and of trying to kill both Stalin and Beria. With Lakoba dead, Beria effectively took control of Abkhazia and implemented

5600-621: The assassination of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov (1 December 1934), Beria was one of the few regional party leaders considered ruthless enough to purge the region under his control, without outside interference. On 9 July 1936, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Armenian Communist Party , Aghasi Khanjian was found dead from a bullet wound. It was officially announced that he had committed suicide, and he

5700-403: The character of the verb). This is called the dative construction . In the past tense of the transitive verbs, and in the present tense of the verb "to know", the subject is in the ergative case. Georgian has a rich word-derivation system. By using a root, and adding some definite prefixes and suffixes, one can derive many nouns and adjectives from the root. For example, from the root - kart -,

5800-458: The construction and operation of uranium processing plants. They also constructed test facilities, such as those at Semipalatinsk and in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. In July 1945, as Soviet police ranks were converted to a military uniform system, Beria's rank was officially converted to that of Marshal of the Soviet Union . Although he had never held a traditional military command, he made

5900-452: The current Mkhedruli, used for most purposes. The language has a robust grammatical framework with unique features such as syncope in morphophonology and a left-branching syntax. Georgian's vocabulary is highly derivational, allowing for diverse word formations, while its numeric system is vigesimal. No claimed genetic links between the Kartvelian languages and any other language family in

6000-490: The defendants, including Lakoba's two brothers, were shot on the night of 4 November. Rauf, Lakoba's 15-year-old son, tried to speak to Beria, who visited Sukhumi to view the start of the trial. He was promptly arrested as well. Sariya was taken to Tbilisi and tortured in order to extract a statement implicating Lakoba, but refused, even after Rauf was tortured in front of her. Sariya would die in prison in Tbilisi on 16 May 1939. Rauf

6100-725: The economic chief, Nikolai Voznesensky ; the Party head in Leningrad, Pyotr Popkov ; and the Prime Minister of the Russian SFSR , Mikhail Rodionov . However, Beria was unable to purge Mikhail Suslov , whom he hated. Beria felt increasingly uncomfortable with Suslov's growing relationship with Stalin. Russian historian Roy Medvedev speculates in his book, Neizvestnyi Stalin , that Stalin had made Suslov his "secret heir". Evidently, Beria felt so threatened by Suslov that after his arrest in 1953, documents were found in his safe labelling Suslov

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6200-468: The end of the Cold War for support from the United States, as had been received in the Second World War. The cost of the war still weighed heavily on the Soviet economy. Beria craved the vast financial resources that another (more sustained) relationship with the U.S. could provide. According to some later sources, he ostensibly even considered giving the Estonian , Latvian and Lithuanian SSRs "serious prospects of national autonomy", possibly similar to

6300-422: The first such moves involved the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair, which commenced in October 1946 and eventually led to the murder of Solomon Mikhoels and the arrest of many other members. After Zhdanov died in August 1948, Beria and Malenkov consolidated their power by means of a purge of Zhdanov's associates in the so-called " Leningrad Affair ". Those executed included Zhdanov's deputy, Alexey Kuznetsov ;

6400-498: The following words can be derived: Kart veli ('a Georgian person'), Kart uli ('the Georgian language') and Sa kart velo ('the country of Georgia'). Most Georgian surnames end in - dze 'son' (Western Georgia), - shvili 'child' (Eastern Georgia), - ia (Western Georgia, Samegrelo ), - ani (Western Georgia, Svaneti ), - uri (Eastern Georgia), etc. The ending - eli is a particle of nobility, comparable to French de , Dutch van , German von or Polish - ski . Georgian has

6500-539: The invaders, including the Balkars , Karachays , Chechens , Ingush , Crimean Tatars , Kalmyks , Pontic Greeks , and Volga Germans . All these groups were deported to Soviet Central Asia . In December 1944, the NKVD supervised the Soviet atomic bomb project ("Task No. 1"), which built and tested a bomb by 29 August 1949. The project was extremely labour-intensive. At least 330,000 people, including 10,000 technicians, were involved. The Gulag system provided tens of thousands of people for work in uranium mines and for

6600-426: The journalist Mikhail Koltsov . Some of the NKVD officers Beria promoted, such as Boris Rodos , Lev Shvartzman , and Bogdan Kobulov were brutal torturers who were executed in the 1950s. The theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold described being beaten on the spine and soles of his feet until "the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas." His interrogation record

6700-458: The leader of the Social Democrats (Marxists) in Georgia and Azerbaijan, though as the historian Bertram Wolfe noted: "These new finds tell a different story and even speak another language from all police documents and Bolshevik reminiscences published [...] while Lenin was alive. The language sounds uncommonly like Beria's own." In the first couple of years of mass arrests of members of the Communist Party and Soviet government that began after

6800-421: The liberalization was only relative: arrests, torture and executions continued. On 16 January 1940, Beria sent Stalin a list of 457 "enemies of the people" of whom 346 were marked to be shot. They included Yezhov and his brother and nephews; Mikhail Frinovsky and his wife and teenage son, Yefim Yevdokimov and his wife and teenage son, and dozens more former NKVD officers, and the renowned writer Isaac Babel and

6900-498: The like. This is the Georgian standard keyboard layout. The standard Windows keyboard is essentially that of manual typewriters . Georgian is an agglutinative language . Certain prefixes and suffixes can be joined in order to build a verb. In some cases, one verb can have up to eight different morphemes in it at the same time. An example is ageshenebinat ('you [all] should've built [it]'). The verb can be broken down to parts: a-g-e-shen-eb-in-a-t . Each morpheme here contributes to

7000-472: The meaning of the verb tense or the person who has performed the verb. The verb conjugation also exhibits polypersonalism ; a verb may potentially include morphemes representing both the subject and the object. In Georgian morphophonology , syncope is a common phenomenon. When a suffix (especially the plural suffix - eb -) is attached to a word that has either of the vowels a or e in the last syllable, this vowel is, in most words, lost. For example, megob

7100-466: The millions of people imprisoned in NKVD Gulag camps into wartime production. He took control of the manufacture of armaments, and (with Georgy Malenkov ) aircraft and aircraft engines. This was the beginning of Beria's alliance with Malenkov, which later became of central importance. In 1944, as the Soviet Union had repelled the German invasion, Beria was placed in charge of the various ethnic minorities accused of anti-sovietism and/or collaboration with

7200-483: The occupied territories. With Stalin nearing 70, a concealed struggle for succession amongst his entourage dominated Soviet politics. At the end of the war, Andrei Zhdanov , who had served as the Communist Party leader in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) during the war, seemed the most likely candidate. After 1946, Beria formed an alliance with Malenkov to counter Zhdanov's rise. In January 1946, Beria resigned as chief of

7300-617: The replacement of Aramaic as the literary language . By the 11th century, Old Georgian had developed into Middle Georgian. The most famous work of this period is the epic poem The Knight in the Panther's Skin , written by Shota Rustaveli in the 12th century. In 1629, a certain Nikoloz Cholokashvili authored the first printed books written (partially) in Georgian, the Alphabetum Ibericum sive Georgianum cum Oratione and

7400-446: The room, he broke the sombre atmosphere by shouting loudly for his driver, his voice echoing with what Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva called "the ring of triumph unconcealed". Alliluyeva noticed how the Politburo seemed openly frightened of Beria and unnerved by his bold display of ambition. "He's off to take power," Mikoyan recalled muttering to Khrushchev. That prompted a "frantic" dash for their own limousines to intercept him at

7500-447: The sale of large amounts of Czech arms to Israel. Altogether, fourteen Czechoslovak communist leaders, eleven of them Jewish, were tried, convicted and executed as part of Soviet policy to woo Arab nationalists, which culminated in the major Czech–Egyptian arms deal of 1955. The Doctors' Plot began in 1951, when a number of the country's prominent Jewish physicians were accused of poisoning top Soviet leaders and arrested. Concurrently,

7600-504: The traditional policy of Russification and encouraged local officials to assert their own identities. He first turned to Georgia, where Stalin's fabricated Mingrelian affair was called off and the republic's key posts were filled by pro-Beria Georgians. Beria's policies of granting more autonomy to the Ukrainian SSR alarmed Khrushchev, for whom Ukraine was a power base. Khrushchev then tried to draw Malenkov to his side, warning that "Beria

7700-604: The trial ended. Beria was executed separately; he allegedly pleaded on his knees before collapsing to the floor wailing. He was shot through the forehead by General Pavel Batitsky . His final moments bore great similarity to those of his own predecessor , Nikolai Yezhov , who begged for his life before his execution in 1940. Beria's body was cremated and the remains buried in Communal Grave No. 3 at Donskoi Monastery Cemetery in Moscow. Beria's personal archive (said to have included "compromising" material on his former colleagues)

7800-643: The trunk of a car. He was taken first to the Moscow guardhouse and then to the bunker of the headquarters of Moscow Military District . Defence Minister Bulganin ordered the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division and Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division to move into Moscow to prevent security forces loyal to Beria from rescuing him. Many of Beria's subordinates, proteges and associates were also arrested and later executed, among them Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov , Sergey Goglidze , Vladimir Dekanozov , Pavel Meshik , and Lev Vlodzimirsky . Following Beria's arrest,

7900-404: The unconscious Stalin (still in his soiled clothing) was "sick and needed medical attention". Beria angrily dismissed his claims as panic-mongering and quickly left, ordering him, "Don't bother us, don't cause a panic and don't disturb Comrade Stalin!" Alexsei Rybin, Stalin's bodyguard, recalled, "No one wanted to telephone Beria, since most of the personal bodyguards hated Beria". Calling a doctor

8000-447: The uneasy silence following the cessation of Stalin's last agonies, he was the first to dart forward to kiss his lifeless form (a move likened by Montefiore to "wrenching a dead King's ring off his finger"). While the rest of Stalin's inner circle (even Molotov, saved from certain liquidation) stood sobbing unashamedly over the body, Beria reportedly appeared "radiant", "regenerated" and "glistening with ill-concealed relish". When Beria left

8100-399: The world are accepted in mainstream linguistics. Among the Kartvelian languages, Georgian is most closely related to the so-called Zan languages ( Megrelian and Laz ); glottochronological studies indicate that it split from the latter approximately 2700 years ago. Svan is a more distant relative that split off much earlier, perhaps 4000 years ago. Standard Georgian is largely based on

8200-441: Was appointed First Deputy Premier and reappointed head of the MVD, which he merged with the MGB. His close ally Malenkov was the new Premier and initially the most powerful man in the post-Stalin leadership. Beria was second-most powerful, and given Malenkov's personal weakness, was poised to become the power behind the throne and ultimately leader himself. Khrushchev became Party Secretary. Kliment Voroshilov became Chairman of

8300-504: Was appointed head of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD, and in November he succeeded Yezhov as NKVD head. Yezhov was executed in 1940. Beria's appointment marked an easing of the repression begun under Yezhov. Over 100,000 people were released from the labour camps. The government officially admitted that there had been some injustice and "excesses" during the purges, which were blamed entirely on Yezhov. But

8400-771: Was appointed party leader for the whole Transcaucasian region. He also retained his post as First Secretary of the Georgian CP. In 1933, he promoted his old ally, Bagirov, to the head of the Azerbaijani communist party. He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1934. During this time, he began to attack fellow members of the Georgian Communist Party, particularly Gaioz Devdariani , who served as Minister of Education of

8500-543: Was being tortured in the basement of the Lubyanka for suggesting the leader required more bed rest. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after Stalin's stroke, gone about "spewing hatred against [Stalin] and mocking him". When Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria dropped to his knees and kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria immediately stood and spat. After Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Beria's ambitions sprang into full force. In

8600-457: Was by then one of the senior leaders of the Soviet state. In 1941, he was made a Commissar General of State Security, the highest quasi-military rank within the Soviet police system of that time. In 1940, the pace of the purges accelerated again. During this period, Beria supervised deportations of people identified as "political enemies" from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia after Soviet occupation of those countries. On 5 March 1940, after

8700-407: Was deferred for a full twelve hours after Stalin was rendered paralysed, incontinent and unable to speak. This decision is noted as "extraordinary" by the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore , but also consistent with the standard Stalinist policy of deferring all decision-making (no matter how crucial or obvious) without official orders from higher authority. Beria's decision to avoid immediately calling

8800-522: Was destroyed on Khrushchev's orders. Georgian language Georgian is most closely related to the Zan languages ( Megrelian and Laz ) and more distantly to Svan . Georgian has various dialects , with standard Georgian based on the Kartlian dialect, and all dialects are mutually intelligible. The history of Georgian spans from Early Old Georgian in the 5th century, to Modern Georgian today. Its development as

8900-399: Was found that Beria had started thermonuclear weapons development without approval from the Central Committee, which was "shocked" by the revelation. Beria had even scratched out the signature block for Malenkov's signature and signed it himself. "Evidently Beria had been confident enough of his ascent to power to assume that he would command sole authority by the time the thermonuclear design

9000-455: Was happening and plaintively appealed to Malenkov to speak for him, Malenkov silently hung his head and pressed a button on his desk. This was an arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room, who burst in and arrested Beria. As Beria's men were guarding the Kremlin at the time, he was held there in a special cell until nightfall and then smuggled out in

9100-406: Was holding out, though he repeatedly fainted under interrogation and had to be revived with camphor. The evidence against all of them was found, after Beria's execution, to have consisted of false confessions extracted under torture. Reputedly, Orakhelashvili's ear drums were perforated and his eyes gouged out. In August 1938, Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the NKVD. Under Yezhov,

9200-595: Was in charge of NKVD units responsible for barrier and partisan intelligence and sabotage operations on the Eastern Front . In 1943–1944, Beria oversaw the mass deportations of millions of ethnic minorities from the Caucasus , actions which have been described by many scholars as ethnic cleansing or genocide . Beria was also responsible for supervising secret Gulag detention facilities for scientists and engineers, known as sharashkas . From 1945, he personally oversaw

9300-406: Was preparing for a coup in Moscow and had threatened him personally, saying "we shall expel you from the MVD, arrest you and allow you to rot in the camps." He claimed that Beria intended to send special MVD divisions to Moscow to help him seize power, and that several MVD agents had boasted that the MVD would become independent of Party bodies and "a regional MVD chief would no longer be answerable to

9400-570: Was ready to be tested." Beria and his men were tried by a "special session" ( специальное судебное присутствие ) of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union on 23 December 1953 with no defence counsel and no right of appeal. Marshal Ivan Konev was the chairman of the court. Beria was found guilty of: Beria and all the other defendants were sentenced to death on the day of the trial. The other six defendants – Dekanozov, Merkulov, Vlodzimirsky, Meshik, Goglidze and Kobulov – were shot immediately after

9500-456: Was retrospectively denounced as an enemy of the people, but in 1961, the then head of the KGB , Alexander Shelepin reported that he had been murdered by Beria. On 26 December 1936, Beria summoned the head of the communist party of Abkhazia , Nestor Lakoba , to the Party headquarters in Tbilisi. Beria had Lakoba over for dinner the next day, where he was served fried trout, a favorite of Lakoba's and

9600-509: Was saved from execution because there was not enough time to arrange his shooting and replacement; it may also have been that Sergei Kirov intervened. While in prison, Beria formed a connection with Nina Gegechkori (1905–1991), his cellmate's niece, and they eloped on a train. In 1919, at the age of 20, Beria started his career in state security when the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic hired him while he

9700-499: Was sent to a labour camp , and was eventually shot in a Sukhumi prison on 28 July 1941. In December 1936, Nikolai Yezhov , the newly appointed People's Commissar for Internal Affairs ( NKVD ), the ministry which oversaw the state security and police forces, reported that more than 300 people had been arrested in Georgia in the previous few weeks. In June 1937, Beria said in a speech, "Let our enemies know that anyone who attempts to raise

9800-473: Was signed by Shvartzman. Robert Eikhe , a former high ranking party official, was sadistically beaten and had an eye gouged out by Rodos, in Beria's office, while Beria watched. He not only permitted and encouraged the beating of prisoners, but in some case carried it out in person. One prisoner who survived to give evidence in the 1950s, testified that he was brought to Beria's office and accused of plotting to blow up

9900-570: Was still a student at the Polytechnicum. In 1920, he was enlisted in Cheka , the original Bolshevik secret police by Mir Jafar Baghirov . At that time, a Bolshevik revolt took place in the Menshevik -controlled Democratic Republic of Georgia , and the Red Army subsequently invaded . The Cheka became heavily involved in the conflict, which resulted in the defeat of the Mensheviks and the formation of

10000-417: Was transferred to the Ministry of Justice , and a mass release of over a million prisoners was announced, although only prisoners convicted for "non-political" crimes were released. That amnesty led to a substantial increase in crime and would later be used against Beria by his rivals. To consolidate power, Beria also took steps to recognise the rights of non-Russian nationalities. As a Georgian, he questioned

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