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Beria; he is the normalcy of the Soviet state. Has he established a society whose normal members can be trusted to "keep order"? In a way, yes. An active Yezhov-type terror no longer stalks Russia. Most Soviet citizens go to bed at night without fearing that Beria's MVD will pound on their doors. This security, however, is bought at a terrible price. The Russian people live in a sort of "house arrest." They dare not shift from city to city in search of work. They do not talk or even think too long about how they are ruled. If they do, they are likely to join the 12,000,000 in Beria's labor camps.
The human mind, even the Communist mind, turns toward order. In a land where brother cannot trust brother, fear of the policeman must serve instead. The policeman has to be everywhere, because there is no other cement in the society. The spy, the informer and the censor are the aristocrats of the Communist world. The cop at the keyhole is king.
The Fiery Colchian. Beria, king of the cops, was born March 29, 1899, at Merkheuli, a village in Stalin's own Georgia. His family were poor peasants. He attended the polytechnic school at Baku and joined the Bolshevik Party before he received his degree in draftsmanship and engineering.
As a hard-working young Chekist he had his ups & downs, never amounted to much until he wrote a book. It was not about police work as understood in Western countries. But for Communist police work it was just the thing to commend him to his superiors. It was called On the History of the Bolshevik Organization in Trans-Caucasia. Largely through fictitious evidence it disputed Leon Trotsky's charge that Stalin never amounted to much as a pre-revolutionary theorist. Beria's Stalin is always right, always on the Leninist beam, always out in front of "the toiling masses." Why did this crass flattery matter to Stalin, who was already the world's most powerful autocrat? Precisely because the Communist regime had struck no real social roots, it attached fantastic importance to nuances of "theory." The Communist victory had been made by ideas in the heads of a handful of men, plus overwhelming police power used to cover up the failure of those ideas to create a genuine society.
To the man who said that Stalin had always had the best ideas went the police power. It was pure balm to the aging dictator when Beria recalled that in the old days Stalin used to call Lenin "the mountain eagle," and that Lenin in return called Stalin "the fiery Colchian." The man who put that on paper was the man Stalin trusted. He who expressed the Leader's truth so baldly must be the Leader's chief hunter of heresy.