Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's ruthless NKVD chief, orchestrated the Katyn massacre where 97% of nearly 15,000 Polish prisoners were executed by executioner Vasily Blokin, who killed an estimated 7,000 people. While Beria expanded the Gulag to hold 3.5 million inmates and deported families to Kazakhstan, he also improved camp conditions for labor productivity. Despite allegations of sexual crimes corroborated by diplomat Edward Ellis Smith, his regime's brutality persisted even as he navigated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Ultimately, this era reveals how the Soviet Union systematically devalued human life for geopolitical gain and economic extraction under totalitarian rule. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Japan, Mongolia, and the Empire00:15:16
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Welcome back to our epic four-parter on La Vrinti Beria.
Everybody's second favorite Georgian who went on to commit crimes against humanity.
Yeah, that's even the people of Georgia's second favorite.
Yeah, yeah, definitely the people of Georgia's second favorite.
He is not quite winning against our buddy Stalin.
But who is winning today is our guest in this fine podcast, Joe Kasabian.
Joe, welcome to the Program.
Hey, thanks for it.
I'm happy to be the second Joe mentioned so far in this episode.
Yeah, it's good to be back.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're going to want to become like the unquestioned head of the USSR, you're going to need a pithier last name than Kasabian.
It's just not going to sell.
I mean, just like Joseph Stalin had to change his last name, I'm going to have to change mine.
Have you considered a different alloy?
Joe Tungsten?
That could work.
I'm more of like a man of aluminum type guy.
Depending on the year, that could be very valuable.
Useful, but not all that reliable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Speaking of useful, but not all that reliable, let's get back to the story of Lavrinti Beria.
When we left off our buddy, he had kind of finally worked his way into Stalin's good books.
He had succeeded Yezhov, the man that everybody called a homicidal dwarf, despite the fact that he was five feet tall, which is like a normal human height, I think.
Everybody says like Napoleon was short.
He was just normal sized.
It's more fun to think of evil people as short because then they're kind of adorable and innocent.
Yeah, as opposed to someone with millions of people's blood on their hands.
I don't know why we think it makes it better, but I guess people did.
But anyway, Yezov is out.
He's going to be killed pretty soon after this because he's a guy who lost his job as a secret policeman in the Soviet Union.
And that's what happens when you're a secret policeman.
Yeah, the severance packages are normally, you know, I don't know how much a Tokarev bullet costs, but it's worth about that much money.
Yeah, the severance packages are measured in millimeters.
Yeah.
And that's more or less what happens to Yezhov.
So by kind of the late 1930s, 37 or so, Beria is 38, like late 1938.
Beria is the head of the NKVD.
He's gotten close to Stalin by becoming his mom's nurse and then attending his mom's funeral in lieu of Joseph Stalin, which is great.
Stalin, at least two biographers I've read say Stalin always felt bad about this.
I don't know that I believe Stalin felt bad about things.
Maybe.
I don't think Stalin ever felt bad about anything.
Yeah, perhaps.
Could he?
Maybe it's like a Darth Vader thing where he's like doing the big, like cheesy.
No, as he is, he did.
Did Stalin have powered body armor that acted as a life support system, I assume?
So it worked all the way until he collapsed into a pile of his own piss in his office.
Yeah so, November of 1938, NKVD head Yezov had been forced to resign citing his health and the strain of being overworked.
Lavrentiy Beria replaces him and he does the normal thing you do when you take over for the secret police, which is purge all of the guys who had been loyal to the dude before you.
Right now, one of the things that happens whenever this goes on is that you wind up purging all of the people who had done the last round of purges, which which Beria does, and that's really kind of the safe move.
Right, you want the people who are really good at carrying out a purge out of there, because you know that's not going to benefit you at all if they're sitting around with their finger on any triggers.
Yeah, it's like any company however, that has like a complete 100 turnover rate in three years.
You got to start getting a little bit worried about where, like the only way to secure, to make sure that you don't end up in a ditch, is to put everybody else in a ditch.
Yeah, it's an Amazon Dot kind of situation.
Yeah, maybe he does.
I assume this is how every Amazon warehouse works, but with robots like an Amazon warehouse, his first job is to hound his predecessor's wife into suicide, which he does, of course.
She winds up taking poison that is supplied by his old boss Sergo, who has also been killed by this point's widow.
So Sergo's wife is like I know the plan.
Like look, your husband got fired you, you should probably just take this poison.
I promise it's better what it's better to eat this than what Lavrenti has planned for you otherwise.
It is 1938 in the Soviet Union.
Things aren't going to get better anytime soon.
You really don't want to be around for the next like seven years.
It's all bad.
Maybe we should take our daily vitamin suicide pill.
Yeah, yeah.
Just go ahead and take this.
You'll miss out on some bad times.
So the rate of arrests and executions does decline after late 1938, but not by as much as you'd think.
Like people will generally agree this is the end of the terror, but they're still executing quite a few people.
And now it's Beria kind of doing the executions.
Three arrested Politburo members are killed in early 1939, and Beria handles those executions.
But these prove to be the deadir of this particular level of fear, at least for high-ranking Soviet officials.
The next thing Berry is going to do is follow in his former boss's footsteps, purging Red Army officers.
And since all of the really good ones are gone, he's not even purging the top guys at this point, right?
He's taking out random lieutenants who look at him.
There's one Marshal here.
Right after he moves to Moscow to like take over the NKVD, he's going to wind up like torturing Marshal Bluker, B-L-I-U-K-H-E-R is how it's usually anglicized.
And Beria, he's not great at, he's not as good at torturing as he's going to be.
So he kind of accidentally beats this guy until he loses an eye and dies a few weeks later from his injuries.
We did on-the-job injuries, you know.
It's a bummer, you know?
You're not supposed to torture them quite that much.
But what do you do when you've accidentally killed this guy too fast?
You torture his wife, right?
Sure.
That's what it says in my employee handbook right here.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the norm for podcasters.
And this marshal's wife is later going to claim she felt that Beria tortured her just for sadistic curiosity, kind of because he had killed her husband too early.
I don't know how well to judge that.
He's going to get better at it.
You know, he needs on-the-job treatment.
You need 10,000 hours of torturing to get really good at it.
That's what that Malcolm Gladwell book is about, if I'm remembering it properly.
I think it might actually have been.
Yeah.
That book is torture, so I get it.
Now, as the killing receded, a sense of cautious optimism emerged among the men of Stalin's inner circle, and Beria is now officially among them.
At the 18th Party Congress in March of 1939, the gang was met with thunderous applause, and Stalin announced that their recent purges had made the USSR more resilient than ever in the face of ongoing fascist pressure.
And again, this is the justification guys like Molotov are going to be parroting until literally 1980, that this great terror that kills all of the officers who know how to do anything in the army was necessary because you didn't want unreliable men around when this inevitable conflict with fascism starts out.
Everybody knows the first step of every emergency is to take the nearest firearm and just shoot the tip of your own dick off.
Yeah, yeah.
Just so the enemy is getting in the way.
Yeah.
Now they can't shoot you in the dick.
You've already suffered the worst that you can suffer.
Exactly.
That is kind of the logic they're working on here.
It's one of those, you know, it's fair to say that Stalin at least always expresses that war with the Nazis is inevitable.
And obviously, Hitler believes that war with the Soviet Union is inevitable because he starts one.
That said, not everybody is convinced that this is in fact the case.
And kind of some of the evidence for this is that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are kind of engaging in war games and joint training exercises through the mid-30s.
And a much more direct threat to actual Soviet territorial integrity in the late 30s is the Empire of Japan.
And they're actually going to wind up fighting the Empire of Japan well before they wind up in a direct conflict with the Nazis.
Yeah, Mongolia, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, over Mongolia.
That's right.
Because, you know, the Japanese army has occupied Manchuria since 31, and they're kind of continually expanding through the 30s, which eventually locks them into a series of border conflicts with the Soviets.
This kind of culminates in the Battle of Lake Kassan in 1938.
That's kind of the really big engagement in this series of clashes.
And then there's a series of kind of lower stakes battles until the calamitous battles of Kulkin Gol in Mongolia.
Yeah, that one was real bad.
It's really bad.
Yes.
The Soviets built an entire rail line just to get all of their supplies there while Japan made all their dudes march hundreds of miles on foot.
And it's, by the way, not easy to make the Russian army look efficient, but the Japanese manage it during this fight.
It's a sizable battle for the time.
By like World War II standards, this is like a skirmish, right?
There's like tens of thousands of men and hundreds of tanks on each side, which does not make it hugely noteworthy within the conflict that's going to happen.
But this is one of the first massive tank battles in history, right?
And it's where Georgi Zhukov is going to earn his reputation.
And Zhukov is going to be a big player in the war that's coming up, right?
I think I've heard of him.
Yeah, yeah.
He's kind of noteworthy.
The Japanese Sixth Army is defeated.
And it's kind of clear to everybody that like the Empire of Japan is probably going to keep doing Empire of Japan stuff, right?
So again, within sort of the gang that's running the USSR at this point, there's a lot of concern about Hitler planning an invasion, but you could be forgiven for being like, well, maybe Japan's kind of the more immediate threat at this stage.
Because I mean, it's not the first war that they fought.
There was the Russo-Japanese war as well.
That's right.
Disastrous.
Yeah.
And this is kind of like, you do have to look at also like, if you're these guys who have overthrown and replaced the Tsar, it's pretty good for them to be like, well, when we fought Japan, it went a hell of a lot better.
Yeah.
We didn't lose the whole Navy.
Even at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union would be retaking things that the Empire of Japan took during the Russo-Japanese War.
So it was all like petty grievances 40 years later.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, and again, within kind of the gang of people around Stalin, there's still overall much more of a focus on Hitler, which is going to prove to be pretty wise in the long run.
Although how they actually prepare for war with Hitler is not wise because they don't really prepare for war with Hitler, you know?
See, Robert, I disagree.
They prepared plenty by murdering everyone who knew what they were doing.
Yeah, get rid of all those guys who knew how to fight a war, except Brzukov, thankfully, over in Mongolia.
Now, there's a couple of different plans that they kind of have for how to play this.
Stalin's first idea is to try and develop a situation wherein Britain and France invade Germany, and he just sort of chills, which, if that had worked, would have been a much better plan for the Soviet Union, right?
Hard not to see why you would prefer that.
Now, since 1935, the general policy of the Soviet Union had been the popular front against fascism.
And a lot of officials thought this meant that kind of inevitably we're going to wind up in some sort of alliance with Britain and France, right?
Because they are clearly like, obviously, just based on World War I, not hard to see why you would expect that that's how things are going to break down, right?
Right.
But it's not going to wind up being that simple, as Sheila Fitzpatrick writes.
When Britain put its negotiator on a slow boat to Leningrad in August 1939, Stalin and Molotov had had enough.
Molotov was offended that the British had sent a foreign office official of the second class, William Strang, to negotiate.
And Strang, like other Western diplomats who encountered him in his first months as a foreign minister, was struck by Molotov's lack of diplomatic technique as well as social finesse.
He had no sense of negotiation.
The British ambassador later recalled and would just stubbornly and woodenly repeat his own point of view and ask innumerable questions of his interlocutors.
And, you know, Molotov, because of the pact with the Nazis that's going to come out of this, I think has this kind of reputation for being a good negotiator.
Stalin's Secret Nazi Alliances00:11:17
He's certainly not at this point.
And again, it's also not hard to see why his immediate kind of reaction to these Western powers isn't going to be positive, because these guys had been enemies of the USSR since the Civil War, right?
Since before it's like settled as a state.
So it's not really surprising that one of the things that's happening in this period, contrary to what's going to happen later, is there is some serious talk of allying with the Nazis.
That is probably never, that's certainly never Stalin's plan, but it's something Molotov thinks actually might happen for a while.
I mean, you also have to remember, like during and after the Russian Civil War, the British, the French, the Americans, and the Japanese all were actively invading Russia.
Yes, exactly.
This is not like, and also historically, it's not weird, right?
Otto von Bismarck had worked very hard to develop an alliance with the Russian Tsar because Bismarck, being reasonably intelligent, is like, well, if we have an alliance with the Russians, we just can't be invaded.
Like, you can't take Germany if Russia is backing it up.
Like, it's just not really realistic.
You know, how do you fight that war, right?
And obviously, like, the fucking Kaiser fucks all of that up, which is part of why World War I goes the way it does.
Again, Stalin has never liked or trusted Hitler.
He sees some sort of conflict, a war as pretty inevitable, but there's definitely a period where even Stalin is like, we might have, we might be able to like temporarily have some sort of an accord with the Germans that will give us time to rebuild the Red Army, which I know I kind of fucked up, right?
And this is what leads to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which is, you know, one of the like three treaties everybody learns about in high school.
Now, the terms in broad are that neither state is going to attack the other or help with someone else's attack on the other.
That's the public stuff in this pact.
And this is a pretty major reversal from the popular front against fascism, obviously, right?
You can't call this a popular front against fascism.
Well, now it's a popular front with fascism.
Yeah, because those secret agreements of like, you know, let's have this cake shaped like Poland.
How would you like to divvy it up a bit?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we'll get to that there.
But the fact that there is this dissonance between the old popular front against fascism and this new pact, this is like severe enough that it causes some real issues within sort of the Soviet power structure.
And these are serious enough that Stalin has to kind of take them seriously.
And he actually sits down with a lot of his underlings to try to explain the necessity of the move.
Beria's son would later claim that this never works on Beria and that he's privately unenthusiastic about the pact.
I don't know how seriously to take that.
You know, the key word is certainly private.
And was he really enthusiastic about anything other than murder?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What hobbies does Beria have?
Marrying teenagers, you know, extra police guy stuff.
Yeah.
Beating people until they go blind.
Yeah.
Obviously, Beria knows that his new position in Moscow is still pretty shaky and all the comfort that it brings him relies on continuing to suck up to Stalin.
Khrushchev in this period describes Beria as constantly manipulative and always working to ingratiate himself with Stalin and provide dirt on his colleagues.
Stalin, who does have kind of a sixth sense for when people are kind of getting too far up his ass, would regularly, whenever kind of Beria would get too close, would do something to try to remind him of his place.
And we get a good example of this in September of 1939, when at a dinner, Beria kept pushing the German embassy counselor, Gustav Hilger, to drink to excess.
Hilger later claimed, Stalin soon noticed that Beria and I were in dispute about something and asked across the table, What's the argument about?
When I told him, he replied, Well, if you don't want to drink, no one can force you, not even the chief of the NKVD himself, I joked.
Whereupon he answered, Here at this table, even the chief of the NKVD has no more say than anyone else, which is going to make him go visit his mom again.
Yeah, yeah, go see my mom again.
Well, she's dead at this point.
Fuck off, go hang out at her grave.
I'm sick of you.
Get out of here, Beria.
I mean, this is Barry is kind of doing to this Nazi what Stalin had him do to kind of the other guys in the Soviet power structure, which is he's kind of the dude at their dinners who's often pushing people to drink more, which Stalin likes to see.
But Stalin doesn't get anything out of making this Nazi get hammered, right?
He's still trying to keep good relations with them at this period.
So he's kind of just like, Beria, what the fuck, man?
Like, he wants to get the benefits really drunk so he can draw dicks on his face.
You know, we're going to watch cowboy movies.
You're going to pass out and then you're going to wake up and I'm going to laugh really hard.
Yeah, tomato in your pocket and a cock on your cheek.
So, however, I forgot about the tomato in the pocket.
It's my favorite.
It's hard not to like that part of Stalin, right?
That's just such a fun little prank.
It's something like a 12-year-old boy would do.
Okay, I kind of did something similar when I was, I wasn't necessarily a kid.
I was like 16, maybe 15, going to house parties, getting drunk.
And one of my favorite things to do was like when one of my friends had like a dog or a cat or whatever, is like find where they had the cat or dog food and then like slide my hand into people's pockets and deposit fistfuls of dog or cat food into their pockets without them noticing.
I have no idea why I thought it was so funny.
I think a lot of us have our like little psychopathic thing we did to our friends when they were.
I used to light my friends' pants on fire, you know, just a little bit, not all that much, right?
As a bit, you know, as a fun bit.
Yeah, it's not, it's not bad if you're like, haha, I got you, as you're, I don't know, Jinko's jeans are going up in flames.
And if you can't have them executed for not laughing at the bit, right?
I think that's key.
That is the ultimate punchline.
Yeah.
This throwing someone in a mass grave.
You will laugh or else.
Yeah.
So, however, Beria feels about this pact with the fascists, he presides over a purge of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to wipe out any diplomats who have a strong anti-German history.
As soon as Stalin is like, we're going to be friends with the Nazis for a little while, Barry is like, well, it's time to kill every diplomat who doesn't like the Nazis, right?
That's going to be a problem when you just have like the coalition against fascism.
Like, right.
I would like everybody in the diplomatic office, like, wait, wait, I thought anti-fascism was our thing.
God, I'm sorry.
Where are we on this?
Yeah.
And this is, I mean, the main purpose of this is not just to get rid of anti-Germans.
It's, it's largely an opportunity to take out any diplomats who are not totally committed to Stalin, right?
Because a lot of, there's a lot of diplomats in the foreign policy chunk of the USSR who are just like diplomats, right?
And that's the thing that they actually wanted to do is like be functional diplomats.
And what's happening in this period is the NKVD is gaining what's going to be semi-permanent oversight over like the actual foreign services, right?
Beria is going to have men in there for most of the rest of the time that he's alive.
And so that's kind of what they're doing in this period.
And one of these guys, one of these anti-German diplomats, is a dude named Litvinov, who had supported forming an anti-German bloc with the West.
Litvinov is one of the guys who's like, well, Stalin, you keep saying we're going to fight these Nazis.
We should probably have a thing set up with the British and the French.
That just seems like good business, you know?
You probably need this on paper and not just vibes.
Yeah, not just a vibe thing.
And Berry is going to respond to that by having the NKVD surround Litvinov's house.
And Litvinov, you get the feeling he's kind of like a cool customer, because when he sees he's entirely surrounded by the secret police, he calls Beria on the phone and he's like, what the fuck are you doing?
And Beria responds, you just don't know your worth, man.
I got to protect you.
You're in danger, right?
Yeah, I do seem to be in danger.
That is correct.
I will agree with you.
This seems unsafe.
Now, another arrestee in this moment is a diplomat named Nazarov, who gets busted on charges of spying for Italy, not because he had actually spied for Italy, but based on the undeniable fact that he had been born in Genoa.
And he'd been born in Genoa because his parents were longtime committed communist revolutionaries who had to flee after the revolution, right, in 1905, which is like really unfair to this guy.
You know, your parents are like so committed to the cause that they have to go into exile.
And then people are like, well, you're clearly an Italian spy.
You're trying to stop.
He's trying to steal our sauces for their goddamn pastas.
You were born in Genoa and you only eat pasta.
Fuck.
You cannot be trusted.
This passage from Amy Knight's book gives good context on how brutal some of these arrests tended to be and just the sheer level of like bullying that dominated them, right?
Quote, Gnadin, who's one of these guys who gets arrested, recalls how he was taken to Beria's office after he had refused to confess to the espionage charges that Kobalov had accused him of.
When he continued to deny the charges, Kobolov, who weighed more than 300 pounds and his assistants, began beating him on the skull as Beria sat complacently watching.
Then Beria impatiently ordered Gannadin to lie on the floor where he was kicked repeatedly by several prison employees.
Gannadin had one final session with Beria, who at first adopted a thoughtful, cultured manner, asking Gannadin calmly if he had finally decided to confess.
Again, when Ganaden steadfastedly asserted his innocence, he was brutally beaten.
Beria's last words to Ganadin were, with such a philosophy and such provocations, you only make your situation worse.
Christ.
Oh, what good would have been done to, like, even if they are innocent?
Most of the time, I'm going to assume they're probably innocent.
It's like, okay, you got me.
I'm guilty.
I did all this shit.
Well, you're just going to die anyway.
You might as well make him work for it.
You know, you're still going to kill me, but you're going to kill me tired.
Yeah, I mean, that is often the decision people are making.
It's like, well, if I admit it, it'll hopefully be over faster, right?
Of course.
Of course.
That's the reason why torture doesn't work as an interrogation tactic.
Like, I'll tell you whatever you want as long as you stop pulling out my fucking fingernails.
Yeah, and that's why I am kind of amazed by the few people it doesn't work on who are like, torture me all you want.
The one thing I have is not giving in on this, you know?
And you do run into a couple of those guys.
Not many of them, obviously, because most people, for understandable reasons, don't hold up under that forever.
But there are a couple.
Anyway, Beria.
Yeah, yeah, at least tougher.
Beria was given a dacha on the outskirts of Moscow that had once belonged to the former chairman of the USSR, who'd been arrested in 38 and executed that year.
It was furnished by the same architect Stalin used, who was later sent to a gulag and killed in 39.
Like most powerful men in the USSR, Beria's Dacha had a movie theater.
Svetlana, Stalin's daughter, claims that on Sundays at the Dacha, Beria would relax by shooting at targets and then watching American and German films in the evening.
Beria's Rampant Crimes00:02:44
Afterwards, he would disappear to, quote, no one knew where.
We'll probably never know precisely how Beria spent his off hours, but the largest allegation you'll hear involves that he was committing rampant rape, often of children.
I was about to say, at any point, there's a long period of time where nobody can pinpoint Beria's location.
I'm assuming someone is suffering.
Someone is having the worst day of their life.
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On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
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If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm wild back to the ball.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
The Flower of Terror00:15:25
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back and we're talking about Beria's extracurricular activities.
Now, the fact that Beria is like a rampant sex criminal is often taken as a given by people discussing his life.
It is worth hammering home that a lot of what's alleged about him comes from fellow members of the inner circle who again wanted to pin all of the blame for Stalin's excesses on Beria.
This is in like 53 after Stalin dies.
After his arrest, Beria's bodyguard is going to produce a list of 39 women who Beria was said to have had sex with.
And this is presumably a mix of just actual consensual affairs and non-consensual stuff.
Another bodyguard made this allegation, summarized by Knight.
Quote, Another bodyguard, Nidaria, confessed at his trial in 1955 that he and Sarsakov picked up young women off the streets and transported them to Beria's house, where he would rape them.
According to another source, young women in Moscow came to be terrified just by a glimpse of Beria's pictures in the press.
Stalin, who was a professed aesthetic in sexual matters, must have heard what Beria was up to, but apparently chose to ignore it.
And again, it's really hard.
I don't doubt this, but it's also like you do have to keep the province in mind, which is other guys who are being tortured to confess.
I 100% believe that there's truth to both sides of this, or Barry was absolutely a monster in his personal time as well, especially because, like, look where they kept finding skeletons, for example, as well as everybody making him seem like, you know, a hundred thousand times worse than he actually was, which is not a defense.
I mean, like, especially because, like, Stalin totally knew when you, like, I, like, I think we already talked about it, he told his daughter to never go near Barry alone.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, he did that for a reason.
Yeah.
And I don't think like the fact that Svetlana seemed to have always been aware that there was something unsafe about this guy is some of the best evidence we get, right?
Because I don't see why she would necessarily like why she would not have felt that way, right?
If there wasn't an actual danger, it does make me wonder when it, when it started, because he's had a fair amount of power for quite a long time.
And I highly doubt he waited until he's the head of the NKVD to flip a switch and be like, all right, now I'm going to do this for fun on my free time.
Like there had to be something we just don't know about, you know?
Yeah, I can see it being a situation where just like when he's earlier in his career, still in Georgia, there's just not enough good info left from that period of time that we have many of these stories because of how many people get purged, right?
And so it's when he gets to Moscow and there's more survivors from that time that we get these stories.
That seems plausible to me.
Yeah.
One of the stories you'll hear from his bodyguards is that they were ordered to hand each of his victims a flower bouquet as the victim left Beria's house.
And the implication was that this made it consensual.
And if they refused the bouquet, they would be arrested and probably don't have to guess what would happen then.
One of Beria's bodyguards, Sarkasov, reported that a woman who had been brought to Beria rejects the flower bouquet and flees his office.
And Sarkasov hands her the flowers anyway.
And Barry is like, no, it's not a bouquet now.
It's a wreath.
And may it rot on her grave.
Christ.
So, yeah.
Again, I don't really have trouble believing this.
I don't either.
It seems to be his kind of his thing.
Yeah, it's probably, you know, yeah, I don't have trouble believing it.
And when you, when you hear the same story from so many different sources, it is convincing.
And there's no reason, like, yeah, it makes sense that they would lie and she to make Barrier look worse to cover their own asses, but it makes no sense for him to lie and come up with incredibly elaborate flower-based murder reasons.
Right.
That's that feels really specific.
Right.
That's not something someone just pulls out of their ass.
Like it would be very easy for them to lie and be like, yeah, he was a rapist and a murderer.
Not suddenly he has a flower game involved.
He has this flower-based system.
Yeah, I don't know.
Now, there are some folks who will say that this is all bupkis.
You know, one former NKVD employee has stated he thinks it's unlikely Beria would have had time to do this because he had so much self-control and he was so busy.
And Baria's wife says the same thing, which like I, you know, and maybe she's honestly saying this.
Like her claim is that like he was always working.
We already found the time to do this.
And it's like, well, but he was very powerful and it would have been easy for him to lie to you about this.
And, you know, she would hardly be the first serial killer's spouse who had no idea that they were doing what they're doing.
I mean, he was killing so many other people.
Right.
How would she even notice that she killed 38 or so other people as like a side gig?
Yeah.
And that's kind of where I land is like, yeah, you can, you can find people from the United States in the 70s who were married to someone who was committing like serial murders and didn't know it.
I don't have trouble believing that the head of the NKVD could get away with a version of that, you know?
Like the Green River killer's wife had no idea that he was the Green River killer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't need to actually think that she's trying to cover up something to think that like she's not right when she states that, you know.
And I don't feel like Berry is the most open soul when it comes to having deeping, meaningful conversations with their spouse.
I would not be surprised to hear that he was not great at communication with sort of his relationship.
Yeah.
Probably a fair assessment, you know.
Yeah.
So anyway, this is a thing that is debated, and it's kind of worth talking about the degree to which some of this is uncertain.
Knight concludes the argument around it this way.
Even if the stories circulating in Moscow were exaggerated, they almost certainly had some foundation.
They were corroborated by Edward Ellis Smith, a young American diplomat who was serving in the U.S. embassy in Moscow after the war.
Smith noted that Beria's escapades were common knowledge among embassy personnel at the time because his house was on the same street as a residence for Americans, and those who lived there saw girls brought to Beria's house late at night in a limousine.
So there you go.
But like Knight says, I think it's almost certain that he was committing what we would consider to be a pretty huge number of sex crimes.
That seems easy to argue.
Yeah, I mean, like a well-regarded journalist Grover Fur would probably disagree.
So on November 30th, 1939, the USSR invaded Finland.
This would prove to be not the best idea that ever happened out of the Stalinist era, largely because Finns are notably bullish on remaining Finns.
This kind of goes badly.
The USSR gets expelled from the League of Nations, although that's not really a huge loss for them.
But they do suffer titanic casualties, which further contributes to the kind of collapse of the Red Army, which appeared so total in 1940 that Hitler grew convinced he only needed to kick in the door to cause the whole house to collapse.
And obviously, Hitler is not accurate here, but the Red Army's not looking good after the invasion of Finland.
For his part.
There's a very small plug here, my show.
We did a series on the Winter War a little while ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good one to listen to to figure out how Finland can hold off the Red Army and inflict, what, like around a million casualties?
It didn't go great for the Soviets.
Yeah, don't piss off guys who are into butterflies.
It turns out that ends badly.
For his part, Beria did crucial work on the Finnish front.
Largely, he established the NKVD Ensemble of Song and Dance to ensure the young boys being sent to die to Finnish snipers had one last night of very mid entertainment.
That is such a imagine being sent to get shot to death by lepidopterists and your last relaxing experience as the NKVD song and dance unit.
This sounds like the most depressed song and dance.
What is the goth version of theater kids?
That's the kind of energy I expect to be brought here.
Everybody's dancing.
No smiles on any faces.
Yeah.
And their music listing, all ska.
Yeah.
Oh, hey, now that would be a nice last night.
If it's good, Scott, bring some real big fish out there before you get murked on the Finnish front.
Nobody's going to have a nice time.
Like their horn player barely knows how to play.
Nobody's skanking.
They're just doing that fucking mighty, mighty Bostones album about the short George Floyd.
Oh, what a horrible time.
Hey, look, there's a landmine.
Pick it up, So Beria also spends a lot of time fucking up his new position as the center of foreign affairs.
Now that the NKVD is basically overseeing the foreign affairs office and watching over every diplomat's every move, Beria found the temptation to fuck with things too great to endure.
As part of the German-Soviet pact, the Nazis sent a battlecruiser to Russia as payment for raw materials.
Beria had his men try to entrap the Nazi naval officer who brought the ship.
The goal was to turn him into a double agent, but they were really bad about this.
And Hitler found out and complained to Stalin, and Stalin's like, what the fuck are you doing?
Like, we needed this boat.
Why are you doing this?
Nobody told you to fuck with them this way.
Berry is such a weirdo, he can't even honeypot someone correctly.
No, he's far too weird for that.
So the Nazi-Soviet treaty was publicly just a non-aggression pact.
But like any good treaty, it included a bunch of secret protocols.
And these laid out how, when the Nazis carried out their invasion of Poland, the Red Army would be allowed to move into eastern Poland and some of the Baltic states, right?
And this doesn't happen kind of all at once.
They move into Poland first.
The Baltic states kind of stay independent on paper for a while and the Red Army moves into the Baltic states.
But this process starts in September 1939.
And when it does, Beria finds himself presiding over a vast number of captured Polish officers and soldiers, something like 200,000 men.
Oh, no.
That's never a good sign.
No, no, you certainly don't want to be one of these Polish officers.
Now, I don't think anybody loves a good protocol quite like the Russian secret police at any given era of time.
They're loving good protocols.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, you don't want, I mean, none of this is going to be a good situation.
Now, about half these 200,000 guys are freed pretty quickly because holding prisoners is expensive and kind of a pain in the ass.
You got to feed them and shit.
You got to feed them.
You got to take just the logistic problems.
But this is going to quickly turn into a very ugly situation, as Timothy Snyder lays out in this passage from Bloodlands.
Lavrinty Beria had come to a conclusion, perhaps inspired by Stalin.
Beria made it clear in writing that he wanted the Polish prisoners of war dead.
In a proposal to the Politburo, and thus really to Stalin, Beria wrote on 5th March 1940 that each of the Polish prisoners was just waiting to be released in order to enter actively into the battle against Soviet power.
He claimed that counter-revolutionary organizations in the new Soviet territories were led by former officers.
Unlike the claims about the Polish military organization a couple of years before, this was no fantasy.
The Soviet Union had occupied and annexed half of Poland, and some Poles were bound to resist.
Perhaps 25,000 of them took part in some kind of resistance organization in 1940.
True, these organizations were quickly penetrated by the NKVD, and most of these people arrested, but the opposition was real and demonstrable.
Beria used the reality of Polish resistance to justify his proposal for the prisoners, quote, to apply to them the supreme punishment, shooting.
So they take this chunk of Poland.
A chunk, about a quarter of the people they initially take prisoner, engage in some kind of resistance activity, like you do when your home is invaded and occupied.
And Beria uses the resistance that's there to justify shooting as many of these guys as we possibly can, right?
Now there's debate.
Is this a thing that Beria proposes and Stalin rubber stamps?
Is this a thing that Stalin made clear in a conversation like, Beria, I want you doing this?
And then Beria just carries it out.
You get this kind of debate with a lot of the stuff that Beria does, right?
Is this a hard time?
A hard time believing he's committing such a wide-scale massacre without some kind of official approval.
Certainly some kind of official approval, but I also, Stalin's doing enough that I wouldn't be wildly surprised if it's Beria saying, hey, I think this is a good idea.
And Stalin going, yeah, man, let's fucking, let's go for it, you know?
That's what it really was.
Much like there's no written order from Hitler to commit the Holocaust.
It's like, yeah, go ahead.
That's not really how the guy worked.
You know, he's got a lot on his plate.
Regardless, it is Beria who is in position and is going to take responsibility for the massacre of a great number of Polish captives.
To do this, he had to revive the logic and tools of the Great Terror.
A new Troika system was established to go through the files of every Polish POW.
Most of these men had already been interrogated and generally shown to have been nothing but soldiers who had done their duty.
Beria instructed the Troikas to ignore all previous conclusions and issue new verdicts.
They would not actually need to interview any of these prisoners to do this, of course.
As in the terror, Beria gave his men a quota.
In all, 97% of the nearly 15,000 Poles in various camps were put to death, along with 6,000 Polish officers held in prisons and another 1,305 who were arrested in April of 1940.
This was disguised until the last moment, with prisoners who were evacuated being told that they would be sent back to their homes.
It's likely many of them realized something was fishy, but there was little to do but queue up for the buses and trains that eventually took them to a train station.
Snyder continues, quote, there they found themselves disembarking from the train into a cordon of NKVD soldiers with bayonets fixed.
About 30 of them at a time entered a bus, which took them to the Goat Hills at the edge of a forest called Katin.
There, at an NKVD resort, they were searched and their valuables taken.
One officer, Adam Solsky, had been keeping a diary up to this moment.
They asked about my wedding ring.
The prisoners were taken into a building on the complex where they were shot.
Their bodies were then delivered, probably by truck in batches of 30, to a mass grave that had been dug in the forest.
This continued until all 4,410 prisoners sent from Kozelsk had been shot.
The 6,000 some odd Poles held in prisons in Belarus and Ukraine were executed indoors rather than in a field.
Snyder tells one hideous story of an NKVD officer shooting the shit, just kind of bullshitting with an 18-year-old boy while he waited for the executions to start.
He asked the kid, like, what was your job in the Polish army?
The kid says, telephone operator.
Vasily's Bloody World Record00:04:16
He's like, how long did you do it?
The kid says, six months.
And then he goes and shoots the kid in the back of the head.
Christ.
This kid and 6,313 other prisoners, at least, were handcuffed in a soundproof cell and shot in the base of the skull.
So this is like pretty bad stuff, you know?
It's not good.
The NKVD found him guilty of a high crime in the Soviet Union, which is being Polish.
Being a Polish dude.
Yeah.
Now, one of Beria's main trigger men is a guy named Vasily Blokin.
Vasily had been an NKVD executioner during the terror, and he had done the deed on some of the highest-ranking prisoners that were purged.
Today, Blokin holds the official Guinness World Record for most prolific official executioner.
I checked on this.
What a high award.
What a high honor.
Did he escape being purged himself?
He does, I think, eventually get purged.
Honestly, I don't have that on here.
I probably should have.
But what I do have on here, Joe, I found his official Guinness website page for his world record.
And boy howdy, does the website design of the Guinness website seem inappropriate for hosting an article about this guy?
Check this shit out.
Sophie's got to put the most prolific official executioner.
They didn't even capitalize the first letter in every word of that.
Oh my God.
What is this?
What is this fucking title?
It's like most prolific official executioner above like an image that's just like a cut of like the tallest man in the world.
Yeah, people like the biggest.
Really bad Photoshop.
A lady with long fingernails, a guy balancing a bike on his chin.
Meanwhile, no picture of him.
What's it like?
What is happening?
Yeah, you painted the stinky leg, right?
He's doing the stinky arm.
It's fucking incredible.
This is one of those records that like Guinness wouldn't have up anymore for fear of someone attempting to break it.
But like this one, I feel like I feel like we're safe on this one, guys.
You note that, Joe, immediately after this pretty grotesque graphic comes the note, this record is currently inactive and no applications are being accepted for it.
Well, isn't that good?
I'm glad they closed this one.
And here I thought Jeremy Rinner would finally be the Guinness World Record.
We don't know what he's doing in his spare time.
This could have been his.
Ah, God.
That is sad, though, folks.
I know someone at home has a dream to beat Vasily's record, and I am sorry, but the Guinness people have made up their minds.
Some poor civil servant that works for the state of Texas immediately got let down.
There's a postal worker driving around listening to this show who's just like, ah, rats.
Damn it.
I just have to go back to growing my fingernails now.
It would not, if you're paying for your own bullets, this is not a cheap world record to meet because they estimate this guy's kill total at some 7,000 people.
See, you can't do that anymore these days.
Bullets are too expensive because of whoa.
He's an interesting guy, Vasily.
He wears a leather cap apron and long gloves to keep clean.
He uses German pistols.
If you're going to mass execute people, you're going to want a German handgun, right?
You certainly don't want a Russian man.
No, you definitely don't want a Russian one, right?
You know, a 1911 probably would have been great for field executions, but I understand maybe they were hard to find.
I'm guessing a Mauser, pretty reasonable gun to use for that at this period of time.
Small caliber, less splatter, but he is wearing an apron.
The man is well prepared.
He has his merit badge in preparedness.
You have to assume he was good at this, right?
Yeah, otherwise he would have been fired after like, I don't know, a dozen.
No, no, he keeps doing this.
And he's during this massacre of these Polish officers.
He's just other soldiers.
It's not all officers.
He's going to execute about 250 men each night, personally, which is a lot.
Yeah, that's a lot of dudes to shoot on your own.
He's going to get a repetitive stress injury in his trigger finger.
He gets a fucking carpal tunnel.
He has to wear one of those little wrist guard things before he goes to bed at night.
Gets like whatever their purple heart is for repetitive stress injuries in the field of genocide.
Yeah.
Christ.
The Executioner's Apron00:02:15
That's good.
That's nice.
It's really sad that he probably survives World War II, right?
Like that's unfortunate.
I think he, well, yeah.
You know what?
I'll edit that in here when I look it up.
But first, Joe, you know what I don't have to edit?
My love for these products and services.
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Labor and the Gulag System00:12:19
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I'm really glad that your ad finally sold me the proper wrist support I need for pulling the trigger hundreds of times.
Yeah.
Look, if you're going to be like the silly Bloken, you need a wrist brace.
It's just irresponsible to kill 7,000 men without one.
Are you going to be able to do that?
He makes it to 53.
Oh, that motherfucker.
He makes it all the way to the end of Stalin.
Yeah, he does.
He does.
He's forcibly retired after Stalin dies.
He gets stripped of his rank during the de-stalitization process by Khrushchev.
And then it does seem like he dies maybe just as a result of being super unhealthy and sick.
He kills himself officially.
His final execution.
It may have been a heart attack.
And yeah.
The only person who can kill me is me, the guy who knows how to do it the best.
Yeah, I will say living to 60 when you're this guy is not bad.
Yeah.
I mean, it's bad because he's bad, but that's impressive for the guy who shoots 7,000 people.
Normally, the death squad guy isn't the one that survives this long.
No, no, that's a good span for the death squad guy.
The stars that burn the brightest burn the fastest.
Yeah.
So while all of these prisoners are still alive, Beria had allowed them to communicate with their families, like send letters back and forth, not out of humanity, but because, again, he's about to do another crime against humanity.
He wants to collect the names and addresses of their family members.
And after he executes all of these people, he takes the friends and family that they had been communicating with and he rounds them up and deports them to Kazakhstan.
This winds up being something like 60-something thousand people.
And in NKVD transport documents, they're described as family members of, quote, former people.
Oh, God.
I believe this is around the same time the Soviets support large numbers of Chechens and Pakistanis to Kazakhstan.
A lot of deportations are happening right at this time, right?
This is kind of the, this is kind of like he's sort of breaking the seal on doing mass deportations.
And Beria is the mass deportation guy because he's good at logistics, right?
Like he's brutal.
A lot of people are dying during this, but he's good at moving lots of people, you know?
And again, I probably don't have to labor on the fact that this is a miserable situation for the people being deported.
These evacuees, to use the Nazi term, were not properly cared for or fed.
They were put to an unfamiliar land.
They were separated from their homes and their support networks, and thousands of them die.
Their situation is so bad that on May 20th, 1940, a group of these Polish children write Stalin a fawning letter, swearing, please, Stalin, we will be loyal communists, and then begging, it's hard to live without our fathers.
So that's bleak.
I really hope Beria doesn't read that and he's like, okay, well, I'll send you to your father's then.
Because that is how Beria would read that letter.
Yeah, it's probably good that he didn't get access to this.
Now, these NKVD executioners and the guys who manage the deportations, Beria does make sure they get a cash bonus, you know, because he's a good boss, at least.
You had mentioned the other deportations.
There's a lot of them.
In March of 1940, Beria had ordered the deportation of any Poles who refused a Soviet passport, arguing that they had rejected the Soviet system.
Now, there are good reasons to not want this passport because this passport, and this passport system is pretty new at the time, lists your ethnicity.
And that had been used to target members of national groups, right?
The vast majority of people deported in this first wave of deportations are Jewish refugees who had fled to eastern Poland from Western Poland, making the best choice they could at the time, which is like, well, the communists are probably better for us than the Nazis, right?
And they're fucking choice to have to make sure.
It's not a lot.
It's not like as much better as you'd hope, right?
Because the Nazis are going to try to kill everybody.
And Berry is just going to force all of these people further to the east, where a lot of them die, but not all of them, right?
And the Soviet passport, by the way, never takes your ethnicity off of it the entire length of the Soviet Union.
No, that is always a major thing.
And it's going to be, there's also a lot of these guys who are like Western Polish Jews are like, well, we're not, we're refugees.
We had to flee here to not die.
But like, I'm not a Soviet citizen.
I don't want to be a Soviet citizen, right?
I want to go back home at some point, which is why they don't, you know, but that's seen as like a sign that they're not reliable of disloyalty rather than a pretty normal response to the situation that they're in, right?
Now, that said, you know, at least a lot of these people do survive, and maybe they wouldn't have, probably wouldn't have if they'd stayed in Western Poland.
You know, so I don't know.
I don't know where you want to like place that.
It's a rough time.
It's like trying to pick which kind of shit is the best or the worst.
Yeah, at least maybe you live through this kind of shit, you know?
Now, at the same time, Berry is managing all these mass deportations.
They get much broader than this, right?
Again, a lot of not too long from now, a lot of Chechens are going to be deported.
Like this, this is a pretty widespread program.
Barry is also presiding over the vast expansion of the Gulag system.
Now, Gulag is an acronym, and it stands for Main Administration of Corrective Labor Colonies.
But, you know, whatever that is in Russian, you know, I don't speak it.
By March of 1940, as Beria expelled Jewish refugees from West Poland, the Gulag system included about 53 full camps, 425 corrective labor colonies, and 50 colonies for children.
In total, I think something like 1.6 to 1.7 million people are interned.
Everybody knows that.
Those numbers have a little flex, right?
Everybody knows like a good policy for any good empire is to have prison colonies for children.
Yeah.
That puts you on the right side of history and there's no debating that.
Yeah.
Why wouldn't you want camps just for little kids to be forcibly separated from their families?
Their little fingers can get into machinery.
Right, right, right.
That you have, I mean, that is kind of where this goes because, like any sort of large-scale labor camp program, these are largely an economic incentive, right?
Like that's why what the Gulag system is in large degree.
Now, some historians like Alex Nov will argue that you should include people in prisons and so-called NKVD special settlements as well in the number of people in gulags.
If you do that, it brings the number of human beings incarcerated under Beria's nominal supervision to something like three and a half million by the outbreak of war.
Again, it's debated how you should consider this.
One Soviet source puts the number at a still terrifying 2.3 million.
That's a lot.
It's a population number larger than several Soviet satellite countries.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a significant amount of people are in various camps and prisons that Beria is running.
And the Gulags are not death camps, right?
Most people who are interned there do survive.
And that's important because these are not the same as what the Nazis are doing, but they are not good, right?
You know, something could still be shit and not be a death camp.
Right, right.
The goal is not to wholesale exterminate populations, but that's really the only nice thing you can say about them, right?
A lot of people still die there.
Between 34 and 53, probably about a million people die in gulags.
This is debated.
It's not a small number, though, right?
I think those numbers are quite unreliable.
It's not like they're keeping track of how many people that died.
Right, right.
You're not going to get a precise count.
And how deadly these places are varies based on what's happening in the rest of the USSR and with the war, right?
During the worst years of the Gulag system, some accounts will say like a 25% mortality rate, right?
It was usually under 10%.
Now, both of those are bad, right?
Neither of those is a good situation.
I'm not trying to mitigate it, but it changes in terms of how deadly it is based on what else is going on, right?
Right.
Now, and again, when I say the purpose of these gulags is not to eliminate people, it's because the purpose is to profit from their labor.
And you can really only do that if they're well enough to work, or at least if most of them are, right?
And I'm going to continue with a quote from Amy Knight's book here.
The most important economic activity of the NKVD was construction of roads, railways, waterways, and power stations.
Some projects were undertaken directly by the NKVD and some by Gulag workers contracted out to other commissariats.
Mining of gold and non-ferrous metals and lumbering were other key areas of production for the Gulag.
To have such a vast economic enterprise under his control was an awesome responsibility for Beria, though he left the day-to-day administration to his lieutenants.
According to most accounts, Beria's group was more effective in the utilization of camp labor than Yezhov's had been.
In an effort to raise productivity and more rationally exploit forced labor, Beria improved physical conditions in the camps and increased food supplies.
As a result, camp death rates declined from what they were under Ezov, and forced labor became a more productive element of the national economy.
So you could argue, compared to how they had been under his predecessor, broadly speaking, gulags are less deadly and miserable under Beria.
And this is pretty consistent with how he treats, for example, captured Nazi scientists.
Not out of the goodness of his heart, because he needs work from them, right?
And he's a rational enough guy to know.
He's good at logistics.
He's like, well, people who are starving to death don't work as well, and I want them to produce economic value for me, right?
Right.
The level of arithmetic, you know?
Exactly, exactly.
And again, these are still not nice places.
In 1941, an internal report showed that prisoners at the Gulags lacked soap, water, clothing, and food, and were often made to work 12-hour shifts with regularity.
You don't need your soap if you're building roads for 16 hours.
Right.
Why would you need soap?
You know?
No, no.
Yeah.
In October of 1941, nearly 1,500 people died at just two NKVD railway construction camps.
Former Gulag prisoner Antov Antonov Ovyasenko later described Beria's influence on the Gulags this way.
The Gulags existed before Beria, but he was the one who built them on a mass scale.
He industrialized the Gulag system.
Human life had no value for him.
And, you know, I might add human life didn't.
Labor did.
But I don't know if you give him a lot of credit for that, right?
Yeah, of course, of course.
That's the point.
It's not that he made the gulags more humane, is he made them more efficient.
Right.
He made them work better, you know?
Because why wouldn't you in his situation?
But you know what works really well, Joe?
Oh, no.
You, as a podcast host, and author.
You want to tell people where they can find your work?
Uh, yeah, I am the host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.
Uh, we talk about military history, disasters, and also occasionally assholes like Beria.
We also did a series on the Winter War, and we did a series on the Battle of Stalingrad, and uh, several other things that are loosely connected to this topic.
I'm also an author.
I'm currently in the middle of writing a military science fiction trilogy, and you can find it anywhere you find your books.
It's called The Undying Legion.
Hell yeah.
Check out the Undying Legion, check out the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.
And look, if you ever want to start a system of forced labor camps, I don't know, maybe have a sandwich instead.
See if fixing your blood sugar maybe makes you less want to run a series of labor camps.
I thought I wanted to make a forced labor camp system.
Military History and Assholes00:02:27
It turned out my blood sugar was just slow.
I was just kind of hungry, had some fruit loops, feeling a lot better now, to be honest, guys.
Ah, if only.
Anyway, everybody, go to hell.
I love you.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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