Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 29, 1993 by David Pryce-Jones

IN CHARGE of Soviet terror at or around its peak, Lavrenti Beria left a special mark on this century. "This is our Himmler," as Stalin introduced the man to Ribbentrop, in Moscow in 1939 to sign the Hitler-Stalin pact. A biographer of Beria has to decide whether he had room for maneuver in respect to Stalin, or, to put it more directly, whether he had a conscience.

Unlike some Sovietologists, Amy Knight at least knows that Stalin did great evil and that Communism was unmitigated criminality. And what was the origin of that evil? In a word, power. Stalin did whatever was required for absolute power, and so did Beria. The system demanded it. Stalin unleashed terror calmly and deliberately as the proper instrument for controlling a disparate and unhappy Soviet Union. Since no tradition of government by consent existed, he relied on proven methods of tyranny. If the ends justified the means, administration and crime were the same thing. This accounts for the blithe absence of conscience in the actions of Stalin, Beria, and the rest.

For many Sovietologists, this is too blunt. Unable or unwilling to take the measure of terror, they resort to the alternative explanation that in the pursuit of power Stalin was suffering from "paranoia" and "megalomania" to the point of madness. Professor Knight subscribes to this thesis too, creating contradiction in the portrait she draws of Beria.

Whoever aroused these pathological reactions in Stalin, it follows from this thesis, could be certain that he would be murdered without ado. In that case, Stalin's henchmen such as Beria are not really culpable, since their conduct, no matter how inhuman, was dictated to them by someone all powerful but unreasonable. If Stalin had the character and the power to drive everyone else to conform to his madness, it would be possible to come to feel sorry for the likes of Beria, criminals because they had no choice. A number of Communist apologists in fact adopt that position, as did Nazi apologists before them.

Hitler in his day was similarly considered mad, and more recently Presidents Reagan and Bush respectively called Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein mad. Behavior inconsistent with democratic political culture is evidently a great puzzle for Westerners, so great that it has to be labeled irrational. But such irrational behavior may have a logic which is consistent on its terms and within its non Western context.

The description of Stalin as murderously suspicious of everyone and everything collapses in the face of the fact that in 1941 he was provided with full and accurate intelligence reports of Hitler's intention to invade, but he nonetheless allowed himself to be deceived, risking his own and his country's survival. Here was an almost childish rejection of reality. Within the political culture in which he had grown up and operated, cruelty and servility were indispensable ingredients of success. Whom, if anybody, to trust was the key question. Anyone can make a mistake in this respect. Misplaced trust in Hitler ought to have cost Stalin his life.

Like Stalin, Beria was a native of Georgia. Here were two of a kind. Early in his career, Beria decided to attract Stalin's attention through a loyalty which was more than trustworthy-plain servile. Cruelty was the surest proof of it. Beria beat some of his victims and could observe scenes of horror the likes of which we know that Himmler could not stomach. He was responsible for killing a number of his colleagues and friends, including fellow Georgians who had done him favors. One such was Nestor Lakoba. Beria went out of his way to ensure that Lakoba's wife died after a beating, and that his three teenage sons were shot. The more cruel and servile the deed, the more likely the promotion and subsequent power.

Communists asked to be taken at facevalue. No evidence has survived to permit judgment on the question whether Stalin had any self-awareness of his crimes and their moral dimensions. Similarly with Beria. His surviving writings are Party propaganda tracts. In all probability, Beria and Stalin fully understood what they were doing, and did not care what anyone thought, but we cannot be certain. Amy Knight drops into the text on two or three occasions the number of Beria's victims. She has excavated assiduously in the archives of the Georgian and Soviet Communist Parties. Resting on that material, she shrinks from judgments about motivations or division of responsibility between Stalin and Beria. What might have been a contribution to our understanding of Communism is instead another academic or Sovietological study, this time familiarly worthy, disappointingly narrow.

A page and a half is all that Professor Knight is able to provide about Beria's background and childhood. His father died when he was still a schoolboy in Sukhumi, the city at present fought over by Georgians and Abkhazians. Like Stalin's, and Himmler's, his mother was "a simple, deeply religious woman"--so much for her. Four years of study at a polytechnic in Baku seem to have fitted Beria for nothing except self-advancement at the expense of others.