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Grand Guignol. Joseph Stalin had no friends, but there were always sycophants around him, and the longest-lived of all of them was Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. Like Stalin, Beria was born in the Transcaucasian state of Georgia. The record says that he came of a poor peasant family in the Sukhum region. At 18, he became a member of the Russian Social Democratic (Bolshevik) Party. He worked underground, was jailed by the post-Czarist government of Azerbaijan, released on the plea of Russian Ambassador Kirov, after which he joined the Cheka (secret police) and took an active part in overthrowing the governments of the Transcaucasian republics and their forcible incorporation in the Soviet Union.
In many details, Beria's official origins run parallel with those of Stalin, a coincidence historians regard with suspicion, for it was as a faker of history that Beria first came to Stalin's favorable notice. In 1935, Beria wrote a pamphlet glorifying Stalin as the hero of the Bolshevik struggle in Transcaucasia. False in almost all of its particulars, it made Stalin a hero without fear and without reproach, provided many phony arguments against Trotsky and other factions opposed to Stalin's extension of personal power.
Beria's benefactor, Kirov, had been sensationally murdered about this time, and the Soviet Union was on the verge of a political bloodbath. The instrument of the purge set off by the Kirov assassination was Genrikh Yagoda, a leather-capped roughneck who was then head of NKVD (successor to the Cheka). Yagoda did a thorough job and, in due time, he got his reward: he was charged, like thousands of his victims, with being an enemy of the people, imperialist spy, etc. Yagoda was the third of the great cops, following Felix Dzerzhinsky, the lean, cat-eyed Polish aristocrat, who lies buried in the Kremlin wall, and Vyacheslav Menshinsky, another Pole, who invented the great show trials of 1936 (Vishinsky prosecuting) and was himself later done in.
Yagoda, showpiece at a great public trial, confessed (after due treatment in Lubianka) that he had planned a "palace coup," but denied that he was an imperialist spy. In court he cracked: "If I had been a spy, dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services—there would have been no need for them to have maintained such a mass of spies." He was executed, and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, a madman who carried on the slaughter to the point where millions of Russians were dead or jailed. Yezhov, often styled "the beloved pupil of our leader and teacher Stalin," had his own group of pupils, among them a fat, pallid young man named Georgy Malenkov. After two years in office, Yezhov disappeared. His successor: Lavrenty Beria.