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Commissar: Life and Death of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria
This rare and vintage book is a perfect addition to any bibliophile's collection
- GenresNonfiction
566 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1973
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 13, 2024
Well written and researched. I knew a lot about Beria before reading this, but this book really a hard read as he was such a vile and disgusting man. An absolute narcissist and sociopath. It is unbelievable how much he had a hand in the suffering of so many people - from Katyn, to the gulag reconstruction, to the everyday Soviet citizen. He made to awful Soviet prison system much worse than it already was. He is in my opinion one of the worst villains in history.
July 18, 2025
Getting this book out of the back store of my local lending library was something I hoped would be an interesting side turn. The darkness of Lavrenty Beria started from the off-the three reports of how his death where any of them might be true but so dense was the propaganda around the myth of Beria that any account of his assassination could be true-getting the reader to bring himself to care about which account was truest was an uphill task.
I remembered the phrase 'The Beria Gang' from reading 'Krushchev and Stalin's Ghost' the book of the speech at the 24th Communist Party Conference in 1957 in which Stalin was denounced, which I read in the early 1980s when western media projected Soviet Communism as a still-powerful force. That seems like a longer time ago than it actually was. I read it again some time in the last five years and noted how opaque and managerial Krushchev's language was, so many decades after the cold war was over, but before V. Putin reignited that war from the Russian side.
I read the account of Beria's birth and noted a certain sulphurous tone in the writing which I found difficult to take in. I could not tell if the tone of writing came from the life of Beria or from the way he was written about. To test for which it was I scan-read the book, picking pages at random where the darkness in the book came from the character rather than the author. Everywhere Beria went and the more he climbed the Soviet hierarchy, the more noxious the smell of sulphur in the writing became, and the higher he rose in Stalin's Russia, in which Beria's adopted role was that of a parasite-type closeness to Joseph Stalin who was forever finding ways of paraphrasing Stalin to further do the bidding of the great leader, whilst carving out among those whom Stalin first imprisoned but later instructed to set free, a formidable cult of personality for Beria himself. In this competitively sadistic bureaucracy it seemed to be impossible to point out how repetitively evil it was. Confessions were extracted through lies, when the system of imprisonment seemed temporarily benevolent until the signing of the document that sealed the fate of the prisoners, Each five year plan brought another wave of terror until the last, when according to the author Beria shortened the life of his boss, who was falling into unconsciousness in his country dacha March the 8th 1953.
Beria is the feared minister for security did not live much longer himself. This one book which may have cured me of reading long detailed accounts of individuals lives, the doorstops of books that are produced with decreasing frequency, than previously, where if such length suits then they suit ebooks instead.
I remembered the phrase 'The Beria Gang' from reading 'Krushchev and Stalin's Ghost' the book of the speech at the 24th Communist Party Conference in 1957 in which Stalin was denounced, which I read in the early 1980s when western media projected Soviet Communism as a still-powerful force. That seems like a longer time ago than it actually was. I read it again some time in the last five years and noted how opaque and managerial Krushchev's language was, so many decades after the cold war was over, but before V. Putin reignited that war from the Russian side.
I read the account of Beria's birth and noted a certain sulphurous tone in the writing which I found difficult to take in. I could not tell if the tone of writing came from the life of Beria or from the way he was written about. To test for which it was I scan-read the book, picking pages at random where the darkness in the book came from the character rather than the author. Everywhere Beria went and the more he climbed the Soviet hierarchy, the more noxious the smell of sulphur in the writing became, and the higher he rose in Stalin's Russia, in which Beria's adopted role was that of a parasite-type closeness to Joseph Stalin who was forever finding ways of paraphrasing Stalin to further do the bidding of the great leader, whilst carving out among those whom Stalin first imprisoned but later instructed to set free, a formidable cult of personality for Beria himself. In this competitively sadistic bureaucracy it seemed to be impossible to point out how repetitively evil it was. Confessions were extracted through lies, when the system of imprisonment seemed temporarily benevolent until the signing of the document that sealed the fate of the prisoners, Each five year plan brought another wave of terror until the last, when according to the author Beria shortened the life of his boss, who was falling into unconsciousness in his country dacha March the 8th 1953.
Beria is the feared minister for security did not live much longer himself. This one book which may have cured me of reading long detailed accounts of individuals lives, the doorstops of books that are produced with decreasing frequency, than previously, where if such length suits then they suit ebooks instead.
June 9, 2020
Very good book about an horrific man. Oddly the photo section is repeated. The author is a man who was tortured under Beria's system of relentless and ruthless suppression. Many of the facts are buried beneath that same system's habit of rewriting history to suit the power structure. Nevertheless it is a harrowing account of the life of a brutal man. Many of that system's techniques still appear to be in play in Putin's Russia.
February 4, 2013
evil is the best description of this individual but wasn't anyone else during this era of Russian history.............
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews