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Historical person
1899–1953
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.
Simon Sebag Montefiore discusses Beria extensively in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar as one of the dictator’s inner-circle magnates. The record is included because the book is nonfiction and treats Beria as a documented historical figure; interpretations of personal motives and responsibility should be understood within the evidence and arguments presented by the historian.
Series
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Moscow Trilogy is a loosely connected sequence of historical novels set across revolutionary and Stalinist Russia. Sashenka begins in St Petersburg in 1916 and follows its heroine through revolution and the terror of the 1930s; Red Sky at Noon moves to the Eastern Front in…
All books in this series
Mark Ellis’s DCI Frank Merlin novels follow an Anglo-Spanish Scotland Yard detective through wartime London from the Phoney War of 1940 into 1943. The Embassy Murders begins amid uneasy Anglo-American diplomacy; In the Shadows of the Blitz moves into the Battle of Britain and Blitz; The French Spy…
All books in this series
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
