(5 of 9)
Benevolent Exterior. With his pince-nez and some carefully cultivated propaganda about his being a pianist and a profound student of architecture, Beria brought an air of respectability to the secret police, which had become almost unmentionable, so greatly was it feared. The whole apparatus of the NKVD was reorganized. Thousands were released from the prisons and the story put about that this was Stalin's (and Beria's) clemency, and that the real instigators of the purge had been Yagoda and Yezhov. Beneath this relatively benevolent exterior, Beria turned the NKVD into the most ruthless and extensive police organization the world has ever known.
It was Beria who expanded the slave camps and exploited the labor of prisoners in the interest of the state, a system which developed to the point where, cautious students of Russia estimate, not less than 15 million people are forcibly engaged. He also developed the military arm of the NKVD, creating a force of something like 15 divisions of elite troops, resembling Hitler's SS. He extended the system of informers to embrace every institution, factory, farm and, indeed, every building in the Soviet Union. Within the party itself he had spies watching spies, reporting back to the NKVD and through him to Stalin. His operatives followed Trotsky to Mexico, killed him there. When Germany attacked Russia, Beria's police system was Stalin's organizational strength. Stalin made him one of the five members of the State Defense Committee (the others: Stalin, Malenkov, Molotov, Voroshilov), and Lavrenty Beria was at last in the very top Soviet leadership. After the war, as the fortunes of Malenkov and Molotov fluctuated, and Voroshilov showed signs of age, the legend grew that Beria was the man closest to Stalin, his most trusted confidant and, protector.
Political Farce. Stalin put him in charge of Soviet atomic development. His great contributions: 1) information gathered by his spies in the U.S. and Britain from Fuchs, May, Pontecorvo, the Rosenbergs, et al.; 2) uranium mined by his prisoners and impressed workmen in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and, probably, Arctic Siberia. While the Cominform's Andrei Zhdanov was making the most noise about eastern Europe, Beria quietly stepped down from his police job (now a full ministry, the MVD) and took over the organization of the satellite countries, the consolidation of the Soviet Union's own republics.
Under his direction, whole populations were moved from the border areas to regions deeper in Russia. The great prison administrations of central Siberia took in millions of foreign deportees, then dispersed them to distant parts of the Soviet Union, later—with the characteristic switch to benevolence—parceling them back to their own countries. The countries were often grateful. It was a technique Stalin and Beria had learned through experience. Then he returned to the MVD and became Minister of Internal Affairs.