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"A Prison Is a Prison." Beria, of course, has an office in the Kremlin; but he does most of his work in Lyubyanka Prison,* not very far from the tomb of Lenin, who said he would make a state without crime, police or prisons. In the old hopeful days it was called the "Soviet Home for Those Who Have Lost Their Freedom." These days, it is frankly known as Lyubyanka Prison, for, as an eminent Soviet journal wrote in a campaign against squeamishness: "A prison is a prison." On his rare public appearances with other Soviet big shots, Beria usually seeks out Georgy Malenkov, obese, agate-eyed secretary of the Communist Party. Beria and Malenkov chat vivaciously, swap notes. They seem to like each other. The other leaders do not seem to like either of them.
A Brief Glow. The horrors of Beria's camps and inquisitions have been told by David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky, by Victor Kravchenko and Vladimir Tchernavin. These atrocities are so vast that, like Himmler's corpse factories, they are almost unbelievable. Meanwhile, a smaller, gentler story gives a notion of life in the police state:
A Moscow woman was aroused from her sleep one night by two strangers, kept four months in Lyubyanka Prison, sent to a labor camp In Khazakstan by cattle car, kept there for four years, brought back to Moscow and released without hearing, trial or explanation. An American was with her when she met an old friend in a Moscow street. He described the scene which followed: "Plainly, the friend thought she had encountered a ghost. There was a brief glow of happiness on the faces of the two women, then they fell into a humdrum conversation about the weather. A few minutes later, they parted on this unspoken note of things it was better not to speak about."
That is Berialand, the most rapidly expanding power in the world today. It moves in wherever a society decays or falters or listens to fools, and destroys what is left. Patriots like Nikola Petkoff in Bulgaria are shot. Compromisers like Jan Masaryk are driven (by Communist hands or their own despair) through windows. Men like Talich, who can express what the people feel, are silenced. Beria's march will continue until the brains, the dollars, the power, and a reawakened moral force of the West stop it.
But not everyone in the democracies is worried by Lavrenty Beria; last week when President Truman declared he did not want to see Communists in the Chinese government or any other government, Henry Wallace called that wish "utter folly and hypocrisy."
*Lyubyanka is no longer a really tough prison. Anyone taken there instead of, say, Lefortovo on the outskirts of Moscow considers himself lucky. Citizens of a police state quickly acquire such vital information, as citizens of free countries know about good or bad hotels.