Lavrentiy Beria

Lavrentiy Beria was a Georgian-born Soviet security official and politician who rose through the secret-police apparatus and became head of the NKVD in 1938. Under Stalin he exercised enormous power over state security, forced labour, deportations and wartime administration, and after 1945 he was also closely involved in the Soviet atomic project.

Beria rose through the Soviet security apparatus and became head of the NKVD in 1938, overseeing repression, deportations and the administration of the Gulag during Stalin's final years. During and after the Second World War he also supervised major state projects, including the Soviet atomic-bomb programme. After Stalin's death in 1953 Beria briefly became one of the most powerful figures in the new leadership before his rivals arrested, tried and executed him.

In Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin, Figures including Lavrentiy Beria and Nikita Khrushchev appear as members of the political world whose careers depended on access to Stalin and survival within his court. In Mark Ellis’ In the Shadows of the Blitz, Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria appear under their historical identities, but the missing gold conspiracy and the detective plot are fictional. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter based the novel on a real post-war case involving children of the Soviet elite, but the central characters and private stories are fictionalised. Stalin and senior figures such as Lavrentiy Beria are represented under their historical identities, with invented dialogue and interactions used to dramatise the atmosphere of late Stalinism.