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To get any sort of understanding of Beria, the new kind of policeman whose beat runs around the world, the citizens of democracy, where his type is unknown, must look into his antecedents.
Something Old. People have always needed policing, but they have not always had policemen. Medieval watchmen were supposed to cry out if evil was abroad; the folk tumbled out and did their own law enforcing. The very word police (in its present meaning), like the institution it stands for, is no older than the 18th Century.
In complex modern society citizens need police to help them keep order; but in a healthy society the citizens, not the police, have the primary responsibility. A British M.P., Kenneth Pickthorn, expressed the principle in the 1930s, when a bill was placed before the House of Commons to give British policemen extraordinary powers in order to fight native fascists. "I think it was a governess, a butcher's boy and a curate," said Pickthorn, "who got in the way of a gunman after he committed a murder recently; and there was Mr. Fisk, the Battersea bricklayer, who seized a gunman . . . and held on to him, though [Mr. Fisk] was almost shot to pieces. These are the real defenders of our liberty."
Something New. Russia, long before the Bolsheviks, developed the sinister side of the policeman's role much farther than any democracy has to this day. The reason has an important bearing on Beria. The 19th Century Russian satirist, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, noted: "In every other country little boys wear trousers, but not our boys . . . everywhere else reason rules, but here only the whistle of the lash. . . . [In Russia] no independent form of social order [has] yet developed."
To make his own distinctly Russian substitute for a "form of social order," Czar Nicholas I (called "The Nightstick") in 1826 decided to create a new thing, a secret police which later came to be called the Okhrana (Guard). The inception of this dreadful institution took place in a scene of sentimental horror. When the Okhrana's first chief, Count Alexander Benckendorff, reported to the Czar for instructions, the monarch pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and said: "Dry the tears of the oppressed. May your conscience and the conscience of your subordinates ever remain as stainless as this linen."
Most unscrupulous and most famous Okhrana agent was Evno Azef. He went so far in preventive criminology that he became a leader of the pre-revolutionary Socialists whom he was assigned to watch. He betrayed each side to the other, not once or twice, but day in & day out over nearly 20 years. He sent his revolutionary comrades to Siberia and organized the murder of several Czarist bigwigs. Where did his real sympathies lie? Probably with Azef. He managed to get out of the country and lived out his days in Germany, peacefully playing the stockmarket and horsing around at bourgeois seaside resorts (see cut). Azef was the living transition between the Czar's police state and Lenin's.