Behind the Bastards - Part One: Beria: Stalin's Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer
Episode Date: April 9, 2024Robert sits down with Joe Kassabian to tell the sordid tale of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Stalin's secret police, prolific sex criminal and ethnic cleanser, and nuclear weapon entrepreneur. https://...gofund.me/e815d59e Sources https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=O-CKDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=beria+planet&source=bl&ots=jMc6z53_-K&sig=ACfU3U0xFZvDPSae5clBjjfMT99GQhBThg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjNm9fq0cb5AhXLiVwKHaqYDaEQ6AF6BAg4EAM#v=onepage&q=beria%20planet&f=false https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541600061?psc=1&language=en_US https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Team-Living-Dangerously-Politics/dp/0691175772/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Beria-Stalins-Lieutenant-Amy-Knight/dp/0691032572/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&sr=1-1 https://web.archive.org/web/20240319033536/https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/lavrentiy-p-beria/ https://www.history.co.uk/article/historys-forgotten-people-lavrentiy-beria https://archive.is/GjzYI https://web.archive.org/web/20240319033536/https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/lavrentiy-p-beria/ https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-1331.1999.tb00004.x https://web.archive.org/web/20150315203304/http://nucleardiner.com/2015/03/13/a-soviet-coup-the-fall-of-lavrenty-beria/ https://csc.asu.edu/2015/03/19/rofer-on-the-fall-of-beria-and-putins-vanishing-act/ https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/letter-lavrentiy-beria-georgii-malenkov-reflecting-events-spring-1953-excerpt See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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place. So please consider donating if you can. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards,
the only podcast that makes you sad.
That's the promise we make with Behind the Bastards
is that after listening to this episode,
your life will be worse.
And to help me make your life worse,
the great Joe Kasabian.
Joe, welcome to the program.
Hey, thanks for having me back.
I'm glad to finally get my Behind the the bastards hat trick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
What's the hat trick?
Sports reference that you yeah that you should really know I was about to say cuz I don't I don't know you as a hat guy
Joe
Three times in oh
Okay, yeah, okay. So for everybody listening they have to take their hat off and throw it somewhere Okay, okay. So for everybody listening, they have to take their hat off and throw it somewhere, anywhere.
Okay, okay.
Well, while they're all busy doing that,
I'm gonna throw you a story of a real piece of shit, Joe.
What do you know, Joe Kasabian,
host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast,
author of several books.
What's your latest, Joe?
So my latest-
We do the plugs up front now.
Yeah, I have a military science fiction series coming out.
The first two books are currently out.
The whole series is called the Undying Legion.
So if you look up the Undying Legion series or my name,
you could find it.
And the first two books are currently out and the third book will be out next month.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Excellent.
And you also have your work of nonfiction, The Hooligans of Kandahar.
People should check out all of your books.
Now, you know who didn't write fiction, but did lie enough to be considered a fiction writer.
Oh boy.
Lavrenty Beria.
What do you know about Lavrenty Beria?
Oh no.
Yeah.
Oh.
I would be brought in for Beria, wouldn't I?
Yeah, of course.
Oh, he is.
If you've watched The Death of Stalin, he's the bad guy.
I mean, everyone is the bad guy in The Death of Stalin, except for maybe Zhukov, but he's the bad guy in The death of Stalin. He's the bad guy. I mean, everyone is the bad guy in the death of Stalin,
except for maybe Zhukov,
but he's the bad guy in the death of Stalin.
That's what we're talking about.
He's the bad guy in everything.
He was the bad guy in real life too.
One of them.
We open a lot of our episodes with comparisons to,
usually the Nazis, right?
We'll call King Leopold the Hitler of African colonialism or like the British Empire slow Nazis.
Because Nazis are like everyone's touchstone
for the absolute depths of human evil.
And one of the things that's interesting
about Lavrenty Beria is that Stalin himself
compared him to a Nazi during the Yalta,
I think it was the Yalta Conference,
when he's talking to like FDR,
he calls Beria our Himmler.
Like that's how he introduces Beria to the president. he calls Baria our Himmler. That's how he introduces Baria to the president.
This is my Himmler.
Yeah, I got one too.
We all got a Himmler.
Everybody's got a Himmler, right?
It's like FDR or Churchill.
It's like FDR or Churchill said Stalin is a bastard,
but he's our bastard.
He's like, yeah, he's Himmler, but he's our Himmler.
He's our Himmler.
It's cool, we got one.
I actually don't agree with that comparison. He's not much like Himmler, it's cool, we got one. I actually don't agree with that comparison.
He's not much like Himmler.
I guess he kinda, you know, Himmler runs the SS,
Beria runs the secret police,
cause that's the comparison,
but like Himmler is a hardcore believer, right?
Himmler's not like a fair weather Nazi.
He's like into the occult, he's trying to,
he's got a castle where he's doing rituals and shit.
Like one thing you could say about Himmler
is he believed all that kooky nonsense.
Really into witches.
Really into witches.
I don't think Beria believed,
I don't think Beria was really,
like in his, I don't think Beria,
Beria was a communist
and that was like the system he worked in.
But I don't think he was like a hardcore believer, right?
Beria was a power guy, right? And he was gonna do whatever would get him into power
He I think he was the kind of guy
My knowledge of barrier is like he would have been he would have glommed on to any system that would allow him to do
What he did?
Right, right
He would have at least attempted which I don't do to like take any blame away
from the horrible state communist system
that existed in the USSR, particularly under Stalin.
It's just, that's not the kind of dude Beria was.
He was a consummate opportunist.
And that's kind of what's interesting about him.
The love of the game, man.
It's just the love of the game.
He just loves being an asshole in a government.
You know, he would have tried to find his way.
His job is being a dickhead and he excels at his job.
He was such a good piece of shit.
I had a line in here about how he's got a body count
only rivaled by these Australian dudes
I met once in a Berlin hostel,
but I wasn't sure if that was an obvious enough joke.
Oh God.
Don't room next to Australians in a hostel,. It's it's it's just a mess
You know the don'ts true Australians don't room next to Australians anywhere don't
That's why they're on that island. You know they need to be there
It's the only thing that contains them is the isolation and countless venomous animals that will murder them if they step out of line
When you get kicked out of the UK for being too much of a hooligan, you know, it says something
You know, there's one thing I can say positive about Australia's I love the national pastime of hooning. Yes
I have to give them shit because Australians and Texans are the two peoples on the world that are like closest in their in their overall
Temperament and neither of us likes to hear it, but it's it's undeniable when you spend time with both
Australia is Texas if Texas wasn't connected to anything else. Yeah, if we were really exist in a vacuum
Speaking of Texas a lot of people say the Texas of Eastern Europe is Georgia
I don't know if anyone's ever said that Joe Joe. Actually, as someone who lived in both Texas and Georgia,
I'll allow it.
Well, that's where our friend Beria is born.
And Georgia, the country, is in a tough historic position.
If you just look at a map,
and you have a vague knowledge of the last thousand years,
you can put together in your head some of the problems
Georgia was likely to have had, right?
They're kind of in the middle.
If you're the Terps, right?
If you're the Ottomans,
Georgia's in the way of where you wanna get to, right?
And if you're Europe,
George is also in the way of getting to places
you wanna go.
If you're Russia, George is in the way.
They're just kinda,
they're one of those speed bump countries
and they're gonna wind up having kind of a tumultuous history as a result of just kinda being in the way. They're just kind of, they're one of those speed bump countries and they're going to wind up having kind of a tumultuous history as a result of just kind of being in the middle
of a bunch of shit.
So by the end of the 1700s, Russia has won most of Eastern Georgia in a gentleman's game
of murder each other with the Ottomans.
Russian interest in the area peaked whenever the Turks looked tired or weak and would fade
whenever Turkey looked like it really wanted to throw hands.
By the middle of the 1800s,
this tug of war had gone Russia's way often enough
that most of Georgia winds up in possession of the Tsars,
who treated the Georgians about as carefully
as they treated everything else, right?
Not great, it's not great.
About as great as Russia currently treats Georgians
within its borders.
Yeah, that's a generally accurate way to look at it.
So Georgians by and large are not thrilled
with this situation,
but since the Turks had really been any better,
some of them started looking at some radical solutions
to their having a government problem.
And socialism's kind of the new hotness at this point.
So in Georgia, socialism is kind of,
it becomes kissing cousins with nationalism, right?
And by the start of the 1900s,
there were two broad socialist groups
that were kind of gaining influence in Georgia.
You got your Mensheviks and you got your Bolsheviks.
Bolsheviks basically means the majority party
and Mensheviks means the minority party,
but the Mensheviks are much more numerous
than the Bolsheviks.
It's a little bit of a fuck game there, right?
The Minsheviks are kind of,
it's not really accurate to view them as social Democrats
the way we know them, but they're closer to that
than what becomes the government of the Soviet Union, right?
And that sounds pretty good to a lot of Georgians.
And so the Minsheviks are larger,
they're more organized than the Bolsheviks,
and the Bolsheviks are gonna spend
all of subsequent history pretending
it had always been the other way around, right?
Again, that sounds very familiar.
The exact same, like I am Armenian and Georgians and Armenians are like their brothers, culturally
very, very, very similar.
Even in our own revolutionary history of like the first Republic of Armenia, the conflict
between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks is literally identical.
Yes. Yes. It's through the caucuses in general and the Bolsheviks is literally identical. Yes, yes.
Through the caucuses in general, the story rhymes.
And this is, Beria is a little more Georgia focused.
But he also, he spends most of his early career in Azerbaijan.
And his whole life, his whole early political career
is in the trans caucuses.
Because as you said, you can't really separate Azerbaijan,
Armenia, Georgia during this kind of revolutionary period
in what had once been the Russian empire.
They're all very tied together.
Once they became one country.
Yeah, yes, exactly.
So our subject for this week, Lavrenty,
is born right in the middle of this kind of surge
in socialist organizing in Georgia on March 29, 1899.
So I believe he's an Aries Pisces cusp.
If that matters to you.
The worst.
I don't know anything about signs.
I just know whenever a sign is pronounced,
the people that I know that are into them
always just like sigh heavily.
Like, oh God. Of course.
Of course.
That's exactly what he is.
That's always my response.
Whenever somebody brings up like,
oh yeah, and this famous person does this sign,
you roll your eyes and go, oh God, obviously.
They couldn't be more whatever you just said.
Becoming the head of the NKVD, what a Pisces move.
That's classic, it's right on the Pisces.
Yeah, doing the Caden massacre, Katian massacre,
that's classic Ay shit, right?
Not surprised he's got both in him.
Yeah.
You wouldn't expect that from say a cancer.
Oh God, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm sure one of the Nazis was a cancer.
They all kind of were.
Anyway, Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria becomes a baby
March 29th, 1899.
He's born in a small village, Merculi,
which is kind of out in the boonies
near the Black Sea coast.
His family are Mingrelian,
which is an ethnic minority in Georgia
with its own language, but not a written one.
So they use the Georgian language for writing,
but they've also got their own language
that's kind of just an oral tradition.
The fact that he's Mingrelian
is going to become relevant much later
near the end of his life
because Mingrelians are different, right?
They're not the same as everyone else in Georgia.
And in the late Stalinist period,
anyone who's part of an ethnic group
that isn't Russian or mainstream Georgian
is gonna have a bad time, right?
Unfortunately, still kind of currently true as well.
Still, this is, if you know one period in Russian history,
there's some broad strokes you'll be accurate about
in most of it, right?
Yeah.
So Beria's Georgia was considered by Western Europeans
to be among the most backwards parts of the continent.
One visitor in 1891 from Germany
claimed they didn't even know about crop rotation,
which might speak more to his racism
than actual agricultural practice,
but it's undeniable that this was seen
as the middle of nowhere in most people's eyes.
And as a result, it's much more culturally isolated
than most parts of the Western Russian Empire.
It's not a very cosmopolitan place.
Beria's mother, Marta Ivanova, was 27 when she had him,
which is pretty late in that period.
Yeah, it's surprising. I was expecting you to late in that period. Yeah, it's surprising.
I was expecting you to say 14 or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's late.
I mean, she'd had some other kids, I think, before.
And she is described by Beria biographer Amy Knight
as a, quote, simple, deeply religious woman who attended
church regularly all her life.
Some sources, including Knight's biography,
claim she came from a noble background,
although it was a branch of the nobility that had no money. Another biographer I read, a
guy named Sangster, and a couple other people have come in to argue that he probably had
no noble blood. It was kind of a rumor. Might have been like a family legend. We've got
this ancestry, but there's not evidence of it. But a lot of this comes down to like family
lore as opposed to something that
like it's very much a Caucasian thing to have like family lore that is not at all
grounded in reality.
It like started as like your great, great uncle's once removed story and then like
spreads throughout your family until it's just spoken as just an unassailable fact.
And it's tough because part of it, there's probably, almost certainly,
everyone has some noble ancestry
because nobles fuck a lot of their servants
and have a lot of illegitimate children.
Like Stalin is going to be taken care of
by this rich guy his mom worked for, right?
Like this rich guy is gonna give them a lot of money
and Barry, his mom's gonna have the same situation.
And we don't know, well,
is it just because she worked for this guy, he considered her part of the family,
so he helped out, is it because they were stupin',
is it because there's like,
that he had an illegitimate kid with her, right?
Like we'll never know, you know?
Maybe she's working the whole time, you know?
Maybe she's working the whole time, right?
Maybe she's got a little bit of Nancy Reagan magic.
Nothing against that, you know?
Bury a family of the McGrellian throat goats.
Yeah.
So it's interesting to note that a lot of Marxist rebel,
like Marxist leaders, because all Marxists are kind of
members of an illegal party in this period,
whether you're kind of more in the Menshevik
or the Bolshevik side, the Tsar doesn't like
what you're doing.
Most of the leaders of these Marxist organizations
have a background where there's some nobility.
A lot of them come from the cashless nobility,
which is like a big thing all throughout Europe.
You've got like your nobles who are rich
and you've got your nobles who squandered everything.
So they've got the blood, but nothing else.
I know which ones I respect more.
Yes, yes.
And a lot of leftist leaders in this period,
particularly of youth organizations,
are these like cashless nobles.
And it makes sense because they tend to benefit
from much more of an education,
but they're not really, even though they're nobles,
they're not really the same class as the people with money
because they don't have any fucking money.
So it's not hard to see, right?
Like why that would be the case.
Marta's got a pretty difficult life.
Her first marriage gives her one son who dies young.
Her husband dies too.
So she marries again.
She has three more kids.
One of them, Anna is born deaf and mute.
Another who is Barry's brother, we know nothing about.
So he probably died young too.
And then she's got Baria,
who's the only boy we know survived to adulthood.
And by the way, her second marriage with Barry's dad in the same way
Is the first and that her husband dies the Martin the the Barry a family husbands have a proud tradition of dying instantly after making kids
We don't know if Lavrenti had something to do with any of this
It's not yeah, not a zero percent chance, right?
If someone told me like, you know when he was barely able to walk
He sank a knife into someone's neck. I'd be like yeah probably
You hear a lot about like yeah, you know this this kid killed his mom and childbirth or whatever right common story
Barry a pops out with a knife and shanks his dad right in the gut I
Mean from my own family history. You know what I'm okay with this
I mean, from my own family history, you know what? I'm okay with this.
So Barry is going to be the only boy to make it to adulthood.
And it's probably not surprising that Marta dotes on him, right?
He is a mama's boy and Stalin is as well.
And another thing I've noticed when you read about a lot of the more influential, like
rebel leaders in Russia in this period, decent number of them are mama's boys, you know?
So if you want your kid to overthrow the government, spoil him a little bit, moms.
You know?
It's good for him.
Maybe ban him along, right?
I was also a mama's boy growing up, so I guess I'm just waiting for my time.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Don't let the immigration board hear that.
I already got my residency card, motherfuckers.
So one of his peers later recalled that he, quote, grew up on the hands of his mother
who earned by her sewing.
So that's kind of how she keeps the lights on, although the lights are not like electric
lights.
So she actually keeps the lights on by.
That's how you buy the candles.
Yeah, buying candles.
Yeah.
So here's how Knight describes Lavrenti as an adolescent in the book Beria, Stalin's
first lieutenant.
Beria was a mediocre student, not excelling in any subject, but considered cunning and
devious.
After completing school in Sukhumi in 1915, Beria went to the city of Baku in Azerbaijan,
where he enrolled in the Baku Polytechnical School for Mechanical Construction, remaining
there for the next four years.
Beria probably chose Baku for his studies instead of Tbilisi, which was much closer
to home because it offered the specific course he was interested in.
Nonetheless, Baku was almost 600 kilometers from home, quite a distance for a boy of only
16.
Beria says in his autobiography that he supported himself, his mother, his sister, and young
niece by doing office work during school vacations.
Now, these claims that Beria is a shitty student but supports his family and somehow gets into
Baku Polytechnic are primarily supported by a family friend and later comrade in the USSR
government named Danilov.
Danilov is the guy who's like, yeah, he wasn't book smart, he was a shitty student, but he's
just cunning.
We get a different version of what happened in a summary of Beria I found on globalsecurity.org,
which is a think tank founded in 2000 that focuses on defense and foreign policy.
Bob Woodward likes them.
I don't know much more about them beyond that, but they seem to be relatively credible.
This scans with some other things I've read.
In school, Beria did very well.
As the best student, the villagers' pride, he went to study in Tsukumi.
Apparently, they always moved in vain desire to advance, to be the first in any cost."
And this is kind of a discrepancy you'll get.
Like, Beria is either this shitty student who's super cunning and gets by on being
a schemer, or he's a pretty good student who's like really well respected in town
because he's this local boy who does well.
The fact that there are discrepancies in this and almost every other fact about the man
comes down to the fact that most of what we know
about Beria comes from either coworkers
who later helped to murder him
and thus wanted to make him look bad
or his own cult of personality, right?
Which is also full of shit.
So it is really hard to know much for certain
about particularly his early life.
Polish writer, Thaddeus Whitlin,
an early Beria biographer,
even called Beria the man without history.
Of course, Andrew Sankster notes,
he then spins pages on his early life,
how he dressed and even his thought processes,
how he behaved in school.
And from this, the reader can only assume
it is mere conjecture.
So again, like there's so much bullshit about this guy,
even in the pretty good biographies.
And I'm not shitting on Knight here.
I think her book is generally quite good,
but like there's just a lot of maybes with Baria, right?
I think that's like, you know, kind of part and parcel
with a guy like Baria, right?
Yes, yes.
He, when he comes to power, he's known for being terrifying,
which you know, obviously we'll get to.
And one of the most terrifying things you can do
and something that he had the power to do
was erase his own history.
Then you can't use it against him.
Right, and that's a part of it.
And also one thing Sankster will note
is that most early Beria biographies
are written after his execution.
When he becomes, so Stalin dies, they kill Beria,
and guys like Khrushchev comes into power next,
and Khrushchev and everyone who kind of survives
from the Stalinist era, they're all complicit
in the crimes of the Stalinist era,
and they all wanna blame everything
that went bad in that period on Beria,
because it really works out well for them.
So the books about him in this period
are basically just novels with Beria as the villain,
and he was a villain, but that doesn't mean everything
in those novels is true, right?
For his part, Sangster agrees that Berya was actually probably a really good student.
And I kind of think he's right about this because from what I've read, Baku Polytechnic's
a pretty competitive school, and it's not super common for kids like Berya from poor
villages to go there if they're not really good students, you know?
Yeah, I mean, far be it for me to say anything positive about the city of Baku, but everything
written about the polytechnic is very, very good.
I've never heard it is like, you know, it's not a schlup school or anything like that.
And especially being from a village, being from a cashless noble family or just maybe a regular poor family, whichever it may be,
you had to show some kind of promise in order to get in and they're not gonna allow some dumbass who's
coasting by on mediocre grades, but is quote-unquote cunning. You can't judge cunning on standardized testing.
Yeah, maybe if he was getting like an English degree where bullshitting was part, but he's like in architecture, right?
You presume he had to show some promise. It's always the fucking architects Robert. You can't never look
I've been saying this for years Joe. We have to kill all the architects
I know that's half of our listeners were huge among architects, but you're all you're all the death of this world
And they can't trust them. I don't know what it is. That's a lot like horses. I don't know what it is.
Yeah.
Just don't trust them.
No horses, no architects.
That's the new anarchist flag
I'm gonna try to get people to adopt.
That's right.
But if you hate architects,
you know who's working to destroy them all
and end all laws about how you can and can't build a house?
Our sponsors.
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the V-2 rocket was a total disaster.
How did it come into existence? Why were so many of the people
at hurt, not the people you might expect? And what lessons can we glean from this catastrophic
mega project even today? Join me, Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast for my
gripping mini-series on the Nazi V2 rocket, available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back and I just in the break rewired my entire home. I've found out that if you
don't put that plastic coat around the wires it really cuts down on the weight
You know of your house, which is as helpful
Yeah, and now I have nothing but mail to mail plugs like the suicide plugs
I have my good my other
I'm really happy they ponied up the money to get like you know
Awareness out there for Rube Goldberg s ways to kill yourself with electricity. I'm all on board for it
Yeah, let's let's let's actually Sophie
Can we get a sponsorship from the people who make those mail-to-mail plugs on Amazon that burn down your house and kill your family?
By him anyway folks, they're probably safe, it's the only product you only ever have to buy once. Yeah, exactly exactly
Beria would have liked them
He likes killing people
So there's a weird mention by one of the first Soviets to chronicle various life
That he and his family were supported by cash gifts from a wealthy noble that his mom worked as a servant for
Kind of again makes me wonder if she was maybe getting some strange
There are rumors that actually
Beria might be this guy's son.
It's plausible, but you get this,
like literally the same thing happened with Stalin.
So I think the fact is just,
this is not a really uncommon social relationship.
Like if your mom was hot in rural Georgia,
she probably had like a wealthy patron, right?
And why not?
It's hard to get by back then you know your husband's gonna
Die three times in your life. You need money from somewhere. I mean what are your options you?
You're a penniless dirt farmer, or you let some like rich guy clap them cheeks for like 15 seconds every two weeks
Yeah, I'm on board.
Well, no, actually you and I are both dying at age 19
after fathering our fifth child.
In the classic tradition.
A man can dream.
So when Beria was five or six,
Russia gets convulsed by revolution
for the first time in his life.
We know now that this was the prelude
to the 1917 revolution, but at the time a lot of people would have seen the complete and
Devastating crackdown by the Tsar as evidence that the regime was pretty strong, right? You get this
This this does not go well and the Tsar kills so many fucking people
Now in those days again the left-wing opponents of the Tsarist system are Bolsheviks and Minsheviks
The Bolsheviks are a tightly centralized party
led by Lenin who is not in country for a lot of this period.
And they want a one party.
He's in Germany, right?
He's in Germany for a spell.
He moves around a bit.
I'm not an expert on his whole movements,
but he's out of the country leading from afar
for most of Beria's early life.
And the Bolsheviks are very centralized.
They're a one party state that wants one party control
of a proletarian dictatorship, right?
That's the whole idea.
The Minsheviks are again, closer to social Democrats.
And as a result, are more popular
for most of various childhood.
Cause most people generally prefer not one party rule
to one party rule.
That does change rapidly at points, but-
Whenever anybody throws around a term like
Dictatorship it's a turnoff. I'm not on board I'm not generally on board now in this case you can debate like that your if your choice is
Dictatorship of the proletariat to the Tsar I don't I don't think you're wrong and saying like well
Let's try anything but having a fucking Tsar I get it
You know if I was ruled by Tsar Nicholas, I would accept anything that
is not czar. Anything that's not the czar. It makes sense to me. Logical step. Um, from
the age of 16 on Barry is going to be his mother's primary means of financial support,
which means that he's able to, when he moves to Baku, kind of one of the things he does,
he gets involved in socialist organizing and one of his jobs for the student organization
he's in, because he's working full time,
he has a lot of connections with workers that are also organized in different Marxist unions
and stuff.
And he's able to make connections between the student group that he's at at the college
and these laborers who are not super educated.
So that's kind of his earliest job as a, not even quite a revolutionary, but certainly
an activist at this stage.
More just like a run-of-the-mill organizer at the time.
Yeah, now to note though, there is a revolutionary aspect
to even being run-of-the-mill as an organizer,
because this is still treason, right?
Right, yeah. Like this is illegal, you know?
Light treason, you might call it, but treason nonetheless.
You're still gonna get a visit by some dudes
who are gonna drag you into a dark basement.
Right, right, the okrana's not gonna be thrilled with what you're getting up to.
And by the time the big dub-dub Uno is underway, that's World War I.
Everyone hates it when I use those terms for them.
I gotta say I'm not a fan.
Nobody likes it. I don't like it, but I'm doing it.
Much like having a czar. It's just one of those things that can't change until there's a bloody revolution.
So, you know, take me on people.
I guess I'm gonna have to revisit Oregon.
Yeah.
Anyway, so by the time World War I starts,
he's 16 or so, and he and several fellow students
set up in a legal study circle,
pouring over the works of Marxist theory.
Beria is treasurer of the group,
and in March of 1917, he joins the Bolshevik party.
Now this only happens, he only becomes a Bolshevik after the revolution gets that czar out of
their hair, right?
They wash him out and prior to that point, Beria is into again radical politics, but
we don't have any evidence of him participating in like armed revolutionary activity.
So right after he joins the Bolshevik party,
he gets conscripted into the army
and he's sent to the Romanian front
to serve as essentially a combat engineer, right?
I think he's actually doing like hydraulic shit,
probably to make sure that troops have water
is as best as I can term it.
Make sure this water only has the minimum amount
of cholera necessary.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You don't want too little cholera, right?
Like, you know, a growing soldier needs some cholera.
Yeah, it makes it strong.
Like, World War I is one of those things.
It's like, there's so many episodes in that arc
that would make the world a much better place
if a bullet sailed just like five centimeters
to the left or the right.
Oh my God.
There's that sad, sad story about that British sniper who has Hitler in his sights.
And we know this is true because like he remembered it and Hitler's like, yeah, I saw this guy
get a beat on me.
And the Brit was like, well, the fighting was basically over.
They were in retreat and I was like, I don't want one more boy to die today.
And you can't blame a man for doing that.
But oh, if only.
If only you shot Hitler.
That motherfucker must have kicked his own ass
harder than anyone else.
It's one of those moments from history where it's like,
what is the lesson here?
Kill more teenagers?
Like, what do we take from this?
The lesson that I'm taking from this
is never take mercy on your enemies
because one of them might be Hitler.
It's like that woman who like stops Hitler
from committing suicide by trying to like talk him out of it.
And it's like, yeah, what do you get from this?
Like, where do you, where do we draw a conclusion?
She wrestles alongside Hitler, puts her arm around her like,
have you heard of better help?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don't learn lessons from history, people.
That's the primary lesson of this podcast.
Ignore everything I say and get on with your life.
Especially if you've got a motherfucker at your crosshairs and he has a weird little
mustache you have no choice.
Shoot anyone with a mustache.
That's really the lesson.
So by this point when Beria gets sent to the Romanian front, Russia is, you know, the Tsar's
no longer in power and the government that replaces Russia is, you know, the Tsar's no longer in power
and the government that replaces it
is essentially democratic, right?
The Bolsheviks are not in charge yet.
This is not the USSR.
It's kind of a socialist democratic state.
It's not a very functional socialist democratic state,
right?
Which is why some other things are going to happen.
What is the caucuses?
Right?
Yeah, and this is the caucuses.
So things are even like a little messier. But
this ailing new democracy is still fighting the czar's war. Right. Which is a bad call.
They probably should have done something besides continuing to fight World War One.
It seems like like like an easy self like an easy own goals. Like, you know, it's really
unpopular war that drove people revolution. I have an I have an idea. What if we keep
doing it?
Let's keep throwing down with the Germans.
What if we just fed another generation of our men
into a meat grinder to make some kind of multi-ethnic mush?
Yeah, yeah, great call.
So it doesn't go well, right?
And there's going to be a Bolshevik revolution.
I think we're all familiar
with kind of the broad terms of this. And this is when Beria kind of gets involved, right? And there's going to be a Bolshevik revolution. I think we're all familiar with kind of the broad terms of this. And this is when Beria kind of gets involved,
right? During this, this very chaotic period, he becomes the Bolshevik party representative
for his military unit, because all of the units have like effectively these unions and his is a
Bolshevik one. And when the war finally ends, he moves back to Baku where the Bolsheviks are now
ascendant and the rest of Azerbaijan, I think it's still more Menshevik, but like Baku, the Bolsheviks
are really starting to pick up a lot of steam.
And he gets a position on the staff of the head of the Baku Soviet of Workers' Deputies,
right?
So he's, it's kind of just because he's known as, and this again makes me think those things
about him not being a good student are not accurate.
He keeps getting positions that are kind of high
despite not having much experience
because the stuff he's doing is always like,
he's the treasurer, he's organizing.
He's doing like bureaucratic shit
because most people don't wanna do that.
And he's got that kind, he's got an organizer brain, right?
He's good at organizing like departments and shit. And he's willing to
do that kind of boring but necessary work to lay the grounds to like actually have a
large organization that does shit. And that's why he keeps getting put in positions because
like most people want to do the sexy stuff and Barry is like, I'll do the hard bullshit
paperwork stuff. It's not bullshit.
That's the key to power is doing the stuff that nobody else wants to do and doing it and Barry is like, I'll do the hard bullshit paperwork stuff. It's not bullshit. Like, you know.
That's the key to power is doing the stuff
that nobody else wants to do and doing it well.
Yeah.
Again, I say this a lot.
This is also the story of like Ceausescu.
If you overthrow the government
and are running a revolutionary party
and there's a quiet little dude who doesn't say much,
but he's always taking on bullshit work
and you know, really helpful, shoot that guy immediately.
Immediately. You know? he's always taking on bullshit work and really helpful, shoot that guy immediately.
Immediately.
He volunteers to run the people's DMV,
take that motherfucker out back immediately.
Yeah, exactly.
That man needs to end up in a fucking quiet little grave.
So this was not an auspicious time
to be helping to run the Baku Soviet.
Because with Russia, you know
Breaking out in revolution a lot of people are like trying to take advantage of this and one of the people's trying to take advantage Of this as a result of the war is Turkey, right?
And Turkey's like maybe we can have a little Azerbaijan as a treat
So they invade and they wind up in charge of Baku for a little while in 1918
They are not in power there long
Because spoiler after 1918 the Ottoman Empire doesn't do great a little while in 1918. They are not in power there long,
because spoiler, after 1918,
the Ottoman Empire doesn't do great.
No. Doesn't do very well.
Man, but they sure did a lot of damage
before they finally died.
They sure did.
They went out like heroes.
If heroes are constantly fucking up everything around them.
They went out like a dying empire, I guess,
is probably better to say.
So pretty soon, you know, the Turks are back out and the Bolsheviks kind of wind up in quasi power.
They have a lot of power in the city after the Turks leave. They're not in absolute power and
they're kind of fighting with another party for actual control of the city. Now, Beria being young
enough that he's not yet well known in politics is picked to be a mole for this party of the city. Now, Beria being young enough that he's not yet well known in politics
is picked to be a mole for this party,
the Musavat Party, that are kind of have turned themselves
into the primary opposition of the Bolsheviks.
And they are to this day,
the oldest party in Azerbaijan still.
They spend long periods of time kicked out of the area,
exiled, a lot of their people get killed,
but they still do exist.
And Beria being a pretty young guy and being this dude who he's had some prominent roles,
so he's got some trust in the Bolsheviks, but he's also not a face man, right?
He's somebody that is not super well known personally, is picked as a perfect mole to
infiltrate the Musavat party.
And I'm going to quote from that write-up in Global Security.
He worked as a clerk at the Caspian company White City,
performed various assignments trapped underground.
In the fall of 1919, Beria joined the counterintelligence
of the Committee of National Defense of the Azerbaijan Republic.
Subsequently, this period of Beria's life caused a lot of rumors.
It was said that he consciously worked on the Azerbaijani nationalists
and even was an agent of the British and you'll basically get
Claims that he was working every side of like the political conflicts in Azerbaijan in this period
He's a some people will say he was actually a musavat agent like spying on the Bolsheviks
He was a Bolshevik spying on the musavats. He was like spying for the British on everybody
There's no real evidence for most of that.
I think the likeliest thing here is that he is spying
for the Bolsheviks on the Musavat party.
But it's messy.
I do love the idea that a Georgian guy
is like a hardline Azerbaijani nationalist.
Yeah, yeah, he's like, he's going hard for that.
Which like, spoiler, he's not at all
an Azerbaijani nationalist.
He is going to kill a lot of Azerbaijani nationalists,
along with a lot of Armenian and Georgian nationalists.
That's gonna be his first real big gig for the USSR.
This is what happens when you give someone
from the caucuses power over the caucuses.
Because nobody hates us more than we hate ourselves.
Yeah, again, much like Texans.
Exactly. So, if you read more casual articles about Beria, they will all note that he's a member
of this anti-Bolshevik Musavat party.
And calling them anti-Bolshevik is like, not entirely, it's close enough if you're getting
like a broad summary of what's going on there.
But I think Amy Knight's biography does a better job of contextualizing who these folks
were and what Beria did with them.
Quote,
The Musavat Party had originally been formed in 1911 to 1912 by a group of intellectuals associated with the RSDRP.
It later shifted ideologically to the right and became the party of the rising Azerbaijani bourgeoisie.
After a period of cooperation with the Bolsheviks in Baku, during which they supported the Soviet,
the Musavatists increasingly opposed Bolshevik policies.
By late 1917 and early 1918, they had become the Bolsheviks' most formidable rivals.
In the autumn of 1919, Beria was assigned by the Bolsheviks to conduct counterintelligence
within the ruling Musavat government.
So you have this party that is, it starts as an intellectual party that's pretty left-wing,
but like social democrat, right?
And they're willing to work with the Bolsheviks in Baku
for a period of time, when kind of the most chaotic
post-revolutionary period.
But as the Bolsheviks start to gain power
and it becomes clear that they are not
willing to compromise or share power with anyone else,
the Musavatists, in part because they represent
a lot of people in the bourgeoisie,
but also because they just aren't a one party state, increasingly reform themselves as an
opposition party to the Bolsheviks. That's kind of what happens here.
Again, you can find sources who say Barry is working with them legitimately, and that
wouldn't be so weird because he's an opportunist and they are in power for a period of time.
It's not impossible that he is doing both,
that he's really trying to hedge his bets here.
He's feeding some information to the Bolsheviks
in case the Bolsheviks win,
but he's also trying to help the Musavatists
because maybe they're going to win.
And Beria is this kind of like, wherever the wind blows
is kind of where I'm gonna try to make a place for myself.
If he was alive now, he would just work for like the Young Turks Network or something. Yeah
Failed he just go work for Ben Shapiro, you know
He is one of these guys who like would absolutely have made a hard right turn if that had been the way to gain power
Right, but the the whites are never really like, I don't think there's ever a period
where they're like winning well enough where he is
that he would have considered that, right?
But it does kind of look like there's a period
where he's willing to maybe make his peace
with the Musavets, you know,
if that's gonna be who winds up in power.
But you know, we don't really know.
And certainly the Bolsheviks believe
that he is legitimately spying
on the Musavets for them, right?
And this is going to become a problem for Beria right away because
While he's going to get a bunch of other gigs spying, you know back in Georgia
The Bolsheviks are gonna keep using him as a spy in like 1920 not long after this period after the Bolsheviks win
He's gonna be tried by the Central Committee in Azerbaijan for being a moose of it It's spy and the case is resolved in his favor
But every time he gets in trouble within the party the allegations come back up because it's the easiest way to like fuck with
Him right is to point out that like well you did this at one point
We don't really know whose side you were on
That's it. That's a good example of like how he becomes the guy he is because he got
That's a good example of like how he becomes the guy he is because he got
Picked as a spy being disloyal or whatever it goes. Yeah goes to trial gets away with it. He's like in the future He's like well, that's never gonna happen again
Now one thing that definitely suggests he was a legitimate spy for the Bolsheviks is again
They keep using him as one and after the Bolsheviks kind of gain the upper hand in Baku, he gets sent back home to Georgia
to do some spying, right?
And in Georgia, in Tbilisi, the Minsheviks are in charge,
right, they are the dominant party when he gets sent there.
And the Bolsheviks are not cool with this.
So they have guys like Beria go among the peasants
to try to prod them into maybe overthrowing
the government again and seeing if that works out better
for everybody.
So Beria moves to Tbilisi where he constructs
his very first spying network.
And Joe, do you remember when you constructed
your first spying network to overthrow
the government in power?
Oh, I was but a young boy.
Yeah, yeah, you make a lot of mistakes, right?
We all make a lot of mistakes
when we're overthrowing a political party.
It happens.
This is a messy period for Beria.
I'm going to quote from Knight's biography here.
Not surprisingly, he was soon arrested, along with the entire Bolshevik Central Committee
in Georgia.
Thanks to the efforts of the Georgian Bolshevik Georgi Sturia, Beria was freed on the condition
that he leave Georgia within three days, but he remained, adopting false name, La Carabaya and working in the Russian embassy. So he like makes this
promise to leave and then instead of leaving, he flees to the embassy and he gets right
back to working as a spy to try to, to, cause this is the Russian embassy and the Russian
government is controlled by the Bolsheviks at this point. I know there's, this is a very
messy period of time, right?
This would have been what the first Georgian Republic period. So,
Right. Yes. Yeah. And so he is hiding out in the Russian embassy because that is a Bolshevik embassy
and still continuing to work to try to overthrow the Mensheviks in Georgia.
And kind of right around this time, the Russian government concludes a treaty with Georgia.
But like most treaties between Russia and a neighbor, it's more of a wink by the
Russians than a promise.
The Minsheviks take their side of the treaty seriously though, and they free all
of the imprisoned Bolsheviks that had just tried to overthrow the government.
And they even make it legal for the Bolsheviks to have meetings and publish
newspapers again.
The Minsheviks are really, this is again, another lesson.
Don't give anyone the benefit of the doubt in a revolution. You know like someone tries to overthrow the government. Maybe you like keep them in prison right yes
Maybe this is relevant in the United States. I don't know I read anything about our recent history
So when the latest Bolshevik plot to take power is revealed because they try again
Beria gets arrested again, and he goes on a hunger strike,
but it's like one of those,
he skips dinner hunger strikes, you know?
It doesn't last very long.
And he gets sent out of Georgia on a prison convoy.
By August, he's back in Azerbaijan,
and he gets back to being a student.
He kind of goes back to school for a while,
and he catches a side gig for the Bolsheviks,
who at this point are doing very well in Baku.
But Lenin has demanded at this point
that Azerbaijan be brought over
into what's becoming the USSR wholesale.
And the Bolsheviks in Baku start a serious effort
to do just that.
It's possible that this is when Beria meets Stalin
for the first time,
because Stalin is part of this effort
that Lenin's pushing,
gives a speech in Baku
in November of 1920.
Now at this time, Berry's specific job is
executive secretary of the extraordinary commission
for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie
and the improvement of working life.
They love titles.
They fucking love titles.
That's too long for a job title, right?
And what that job actually is, is he's taking shit
from like rich people and middle-class people for a job title, right? And what that job actually is, is he's taking shit
from like rich people and middle class people
and theoretically splitting it up among the working class.
Now, how much of that gets split up
and how much of that gets lost to rampant corruption?
Well, it's a Zerbejan, you know?
So-
That has changed.
Let's be fair, it's the Caucasus, right?
It's Eastern Europe.
Again, thankfully this no longer happens.
It's a place populated by humans,
so a lot of it disappears into corruption.
Knight writes of this period in his life,
this organization was charged with forcibly seizing property
on behalf of the Bolsheviks, a rather unsavory business,
and Beria again was doing the paperwork.
When the commission was abolished in February 1921,
Beria took the opportunity to persuade the central committee
to support him in his studies as an architect builder.
He received a stipend from the Baku Soviet,
but only after a couple of weeks,
the central committee made him abandon his studies
to work in the Azerbaijan political police,
the infamous Cheka.
And this is when he becomes a secret policeman.
And that's what we're gonna get to
after this next ad break.
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But cops of products, Sophie.
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Is it a cop or is it a spy or is it both?
Yeah, both.
Spy on these products,
whatever it takes to get them into your home, you know?
That's what we believe.
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Here's a clip.
All these girls were sent out into the world and they were told, try to meet important
men, try to attach yourself to important men.
The voice you're hearing is a Russian model agent telling me about spies sent out to seduce
men with political power.
The war in Ukraine is also being fought by all these girls that are all over important
cities.
For the first time, a military-trained seduction spy reveals how the Russian government turned
sex and love into a deadly weapon.
If you want to kill your target, it's easy.
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So the Cheka are the secret police in Georgia and in everywhere, right?
And they're going to go through several,
this is what ends up the different Czechas
all eventually end up as the NKVD, right?
Which all eventually ends up as the KGB.
You know, this is like a process, right?
If there's one thing the Soviet Union likes more
than titles, it's changing those titles arbitrarily.
Oh my God, so many.
I'm gonna call them the Czech for most of the period
before like Beria is in Moscow and the USSR
is fully settled,
but they go through some different names, right?
But it's generally,
everyone still generally calls them the Cheka
at various points,
because they're still the secret police, right?
Whatever titles they're picking.
Right.
This is the position where Beria is going to truly shine,
because the first big task the Bolsheviks need from him
is to overthrow the Armenian government
Now Joe have you ever tried to overthrow the Armenian government? I cannot legally answer that question
It's a whole thing right
It's this how we gotta do
I make it this long a life without knowing Berry it was involved in the overthrow of the first Armenian Republic
Absolutely. Yeah.
And of course he came from Azerbaijan to do it.
God damn it.
Yeah.
Well, at this point he's coming in from Georgia, but through Baku, right?
They're in the mix.
They're in the mix.
The bridge is there.
That's fine.
Yeah, it's clear.
So there's a lot that you have to do to overthrow the First Armenian Republic, and Beria, along
with several of his colleagues, put together different plans
for how they might make this happen, right?
And it's one of those things where, like,
there's a lot of, like, different pitches,
and Beria's is kind of the one that winds up being
the kind of basis for the plan they eventually execute.
Man, I've been in a lot of writers' room,
and I feel like a writers' room with Lavrenty Beria
would be the worst one ever. is it's a terrible writers room. He's always suggesting fucking bottle episodes
So Barry is boss is a guy named Mirka far Bagarov. He's just a 24 year old who's in head of the Baku, Cheka
He's got a reputation for brutality and he likes Barry because Barry is willing to do fucking anything
He is perfectly willing to get his hands dirty.
So at 21, Beria gets promoted to be Bagirov's assistant.
And this is the start of a fairly rapid series
of promotions because people are killing
and dying so rapidly, it's easy to move up
if you're really willing to kill.
And it's interesting, Bagiroov is kind of the only guy
other than Stalin, maybe, that Beria ever works under
without later overthrowing or killing, right?
This is like one of the very few people
who is Beria's boss that he does not murder
or otherwise help to destroy.
I wonder what the difference was,
because it wouldn't be like dirt.
Like, Beria was more than comfortable killing people who had dirt on him
Yeah, I think they may just maybe get along.
Maybe they were actually friends. There was like Barry was one friend.
Yeah, they might have just kind of been buds and also I think it's that like he knows
Baggarov is never really rising above a certain level so he doesn't need to right
He kind of can leapfrog over him without fucking him. And it's useful to have a guy like Bagirov
who like owes you a favor that you can trust.
As much as Barry trust you.
That sounds more likely than Barry having an actual friend.
Yeah, well like his one buddy.
Now Andrew Sangster argues that Barry begins in the Cheka,
quote, a lifelong habit of intrigue
against his own superiors
and the hope that he could destabilize them
to his own advantage.
His next boss, Ivan Pavlinovsky, pleaded at staff meetings for his deputy Beria to cease
intrigues against him.
So like during meetings, please stop plotting to overthrow me.
We're trying to do a job.
Stop it.
Oh God, it's a great complaint to have in your employee record.
Like I know personally, I have never been publicly told at like,
you know, like the firefighters board or whatever by my captain to please
stop plotting against it.
Please stop plotting my murder.
You can't you have to you can't do this anymore.
It is really funny.
You know, again, the death of Stalin, not wildly accurate to the direct history.
I do think it gets like the broad strokes
of the relationships pretty well.
Yeah.
But Armando Iannucci, the writer,
is also the guy who did a Veep,
and he did a show that Veep is kind of based on,
that was based on UK politics.
I always forget the name.
And he's like, I wanna see him do like a three season series about the early
Soviet politics and the caucuses
Because you could make a wildly entertaining comedy about this like a lot of people die
But everyone is such a piece of shit. There's all so much backstabbing and overthrowing each other
I would like a young Stalin treatment. Yeah, yeah. Like, Koba-era shit.
If you ever watched the...
There's a really good TV show,
um, The Great, which is about...
Oh, it's wonderful. Yeah, it's wonderful.
What's her name, The Great? Uh, fucking Catherine?
Yes. Um, yeah.
The... Who's a tsar... Tsarina?
Tsaritsa? I always forget the proper
term when it's the woman, but she's fully in charge.
Tsarina. Anyway. Tsarina. But one of the things that show gets really well, I always forget the proper term when it's the woman, but she's fully in charge and Zarina anyway
Zarina, but one of the things that show gets really well and again wildly inaccurate to the literal
Like steps of history, but it gets really well the kind of constant backstabbing and like overthrowing and shit in
That that's a long time
hallmark of Russian politics
Yeah, and to its credit it never even attempts to be accurate and even says like That's a long time hallmark of Russian politics. Yeah.
And to its credit, it never even attempts to be accurate
and even says like, this is not accurate
in like the ticker before the show starts every episode.
It's still fucking wonderful.
It's fun.
It's got some great performances by Nicholas Holt,
one of my favorite actors.
Good shit, check it out.
Three real solid seasons.
So Beria is going to prove no less brutal to his colleagues
than he is to the citizens of Azerbaijan
and Georgia and Armenia.
Sankster writes, quote,
"'The Czechas main task was to crush
any counter-revolutionary group
which was interpreted with the widest possible guidelines.
It was a time of festering chaos,
distrust and sheer brutality.
In 1921, the Troika system was announced,
which was a three-man committee
empowered to judge and execute on the spot.
And Beria played a major role in such proceedings
in his area of responsibility.
In his very early 20s,
he had become accustomed to having people killed,
not in the front line of war,
but dragged off the streets or out of their homes
and shot in police cells.
That's so much more personal though.
Yeah, yeah, it really is.
There's a difference between a guy who's, you know, seen a lot of conflict and kills
people in the trenches of World War One because that's largely impersonal and you know, a
soldier's mindset is much different than a guy who's murdering someone in a dang basement.
Yeah, you always you have at least on your conscience,
because obviously war fucks people up,
but yeah, I shot some people
because they were shooting at me,
it's different from I pulled this guy
away from his family during dinner.
This dude I'd worked with for years
and I shot him in the back of the head.
Right.
They can't fight back, they're in a dank basement.
Probably a lot of torture has happened before this.
Yes, and this causes a tremendous amount of paranoia, right?
Even among the winners in these conflicts, right?
It kind of breaks everybody's mind, right?
And the atmosphere grows paranoid enough
that occasionally the right people are arrested, right?
Sometimes that even happens.
Shortly after- When you arrest enough people, you'll right? Sometimes that even happens. Shortly after-
When you arrest enough people,
you'll eventually grab someone who's guilty.
Yeah, and one of those people is Beria.
Shortly after his appointment to the Cheka,
he gets taken into custody by the Cheka
under suspicion of anti-revolutionary activity.
Now this was right,
because he is executing a lot of revolutionaries.
But all of the people he's killing
pretty much are socialists, right?
But this is not accurate in the way they care about and he is set free and continues to
work killing revolutionaries.
Now I've noted a few times, I'm not wildly in love with any single source for these episodes,
largely because trying to do a biography of a guy like Beria is just this horrifying task
given how much disinfo is pumped out in his lifetime.
Knight's book seems pretty good.
I've definitely found a couple of conclusions in her book
that I've considered shaky.
I like Sangster's writing,
and I think he's reasonably careful,
but he also might be kind of a weird right-winger.
Like just looking at his bibliography,
I don't see anything overly insane,
but his book contains like a casual Jordan Peterson quote.
Oh, God. Yeah. So that was one of those things where I'm like,
well, fuck, and I looked into the guy
and I don't see anything inherently crazy.
Did he write any books on Rhodesia at any point?
Yeah, no, his biggest thing is he's obsessed with this guy.
Yeah, he's a professor,
and he writes this book about Alan Brooke,
Churchill's right-hand critic,
like this reappraisal of Lord Alan Brooke,
who's this World War II British military officer.
Like, I don't know much about Alan Brooke,
but I don't see anything that's like inherently crazy
about any of this.
So I don't know.
I just wanna let you know.
He's slipping a Jordan Peterson quote into-
That worried me, right?
Was that in his book about Baria?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where he like, it's the most out of let's feel
that could possibly be.
It immediately made me like backtrack
and check on a bunch of shit that I had.
And again, I didn't run into anything
that was like obviously wrong.
Most of what he said lines up with most of what Knight said.
And like, again, that point where like Knight's like.
Now I just wanna hear the whole biography done
in Jordan Peterson voice.
Right, yeah. The thing about the Frenchy biography done in Jordan Peterson voice. Right, yeah.
The thing about LaFrenty Barrier.
I didn't love it, yeah.
And I've got like a couple of different quotes from this, or books that I use for this.
Knights book, Sangsters book, there's another book called On Stalin's Team that I use a
lot later that's about like the whole gang around Stalin.
There's a little bit of-
The Stalin Hype House.
Yeah, the Stalin Hype House.
So like I tried to be broad with this.
And again, I didn't catch Sangster just lying about anything,
but you should know, you're not gonna find any like
perfect sources on a guy around whom
there's so much disinfo, right?
And broadly speaking, the two big,
I think the two big things that you can argue about in terms of like
what kind of guy Beria was
that you can support with a lot of evidence.
One is he was an absolute psychopath
and one of like the most unhinged, violent, evil people
within the Soviet government.
And the other is he was as violent and evil
as he had to be to survive within the system.
And he was a guy who wanted to maintain power
and was willing to do terrible things
to keep himself alive,
but was not wildly worse than most of his colleagues,
which doesn't mean he's good, right?
Those are kind of broadly speaking the two barriers
that you can make a case for.
I could see both.
Yes, I can see both too.
With the caveat of being like,
he was surrounded by just yeah
Human beings yeah, but there's not many people that rose to the the lengths that he did the Soviet Union yes
Asterix that we're aware of yeah did the things that he did on his own personal time
Yes, and that we will be talking about that later as well
It takes a bit to build with that because a lot of that starts to happen or at least we have documentation of the sex abuse
Stuff once he hits Moscow, which we're not at yet, right?
so anyway, I just wanted to like
FYI if you should know this about our sources, you know area has layers like an ogre
Yes
And so do his biographers and speaking of Sangster
You get lines like this during a discussion of how Beria and his fellow Czechists abuse their powers that I found interesting
Even modern-day police officers in an open liberal democracy
Sometimes query the activities of their next-door neighbors and it is understandable that in a ruthless society the sense of suspicion and doubt increases
exponentially and what he's not wrong in that like yeah that in a ruthless society, the sense of suspicion and doubt increases exponentially.
What?
He's not wrong in that, yeah,
modern police officers abuse their powers
to spy on women they're stalking
and their neighbors and shit all the time.
Not an uncommon thing.
Not to be fair, the NYPD would hire Lavrenty Barry.
Yeah, yeah.
That part of makes me think,
well, maybe the Jordan Peterson thing
was not evidence of anything sinister, because he is kind of being like
Modern cops are terrible in a lot of the same ways barrier was and I don't disagree actually
This is one of those horrible moments. Yeah, even the worst guy in the world is right
You know not not an not inherently an unreasonable
Caveat so many other quotes you could pick before you settle on Jordan fucking Peterson.
It's, you know, my dad likes Jordan Peterson
and my dad, for the record, like,
voted for Trump once and didn't the second time
and now considers the Republicans to be like
a very unhinged and dangerous anti-democratic,
like anti-democracy party.
But he still thinks Jordan Peterson's like,
he's not on Twitter
You know he doesn't see it. Does your dad have an opinion on the the the Chinese?
Dick sucking machines that Peterson posted about? No, he didn't believe me when I told him that so
You do have to keep in mind
There are some normies out there that like casually read Jordan Peterson's self-help book about cleaning your room
And we're like, great.
I come across that a lot.
Like a lot of a lot of on like when you when you meet somebody like for the first time
they and you ask them like what they're reading.
A lot of times it's that and it's very innocent and it's because they're not criminally online
like we are.
They just don't know or are not focused on politics at all and they just come across
a self-help book and they're like, wow, this is really interesting.
And it's like, oh, and then you have to give them the bad news about them.
You're like, actually.
Yeah, he believes the Chinese government is harvesting cum from prisoners.
I'm like, actually, sir, did you know?
And it also means they haven't listened to an interview from Jordan Peterson and right in the last several years
The book only thing I have some like friends who are not online and fairly nice people who like
Listened to Joe Rogan ten years ago, and they're like yeah, he seems fine, and it's like well
Yeah, yeah, like how much is it worth arguing
about this?
Like I myself, the first podcast I ever listened to
is Joe Rogan.
And I listened to it for a fair amount of time
until like Brett Weinstein and shit start coming on.
And I was like, ooh, this is too fucked up for me.
Yeah, yeah.
So I don't know, I haven't listened to Sangster's
podcast appearances, but like I haven't listened to Sengster's podcast
appearances, but like I haven't run into anything,
at least in his bibliography, that makes me think
he's like clearly insane, but people should be aware
of this caveat.
So even within the checkup, Beria is controversial.
He was accused of repeatedly convicting the wrong people
for political gain or plain mean-spiritedness
and for allowing actual political enemies
of the new state to escape, right?
Like he's constantly letting people
who are actually trying to like bring back the monarchy
to get out of jail and executing like socialists
who had fought against the czar.
When you put so much resources
into taking out your own political opponents,
you kind of miss the broader spectrum
of actual political opponents.
Right, right.
And in between executing and arresting basically whoever,
he engaged in some light pedophilia.
All right.
Yep, there we go.
We're not getting into like the most problematic stuff,
but this is bad.
He first met Nina Gagetchkori age 16
through one of her relatives
who was a prominent Georgian Bolshevik.
He had spent this guy, her relative, had spent time in prison with Beria and apparently told
Nina, hey, I was locked up with this weird murderer everybody's scared of.
You should go on a date with this guy.
I mean, that's how I met my first wife.
Sure, right?
Who wouldn't take that bitch?
I mean, yeah, it's one more thing. He hasn't common with Stalin. Yeah
It's what Georgians they both really like unraged girls
Instead of his his online dating profile instead of like holding up a fish. It's this like bloody dude
He's shot in the back of the head like I'm a check
To a pickup truck once again
Yeah, yeah, and it's his quotes from Jordan Peterson
pickup truck once again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Texting.
His quotes from Jordan Peterson.
So they go on a date or whatever
and Beria proposes soon after.
And when they get married in 1921, she is still a child.
Now, we get different accounts of what,
I don't know if you'd call it,
you wouldn't call this a meet-cute,
but we get different accounts of how they actually meet.
And none of them are from flawless sources.
One story comes from Stalin's daughter,
Svetlana Alilieva,
who was a bit of a mess herself,
although it is hard to blame her for that, right?
Stalin's her dad.
Stalin is her dad.
You get some grace from me for that.
She claims that Beria visited Nina's village
when he was promoted to the same job
that he'd had for the Cheka in Baku, but in Tbilisi.
Nina came to him to beg for her brother's release.
Quote, Beria had arrived in a special train.
Nina entered his car and never again saw her native village.
She was carried off, her beauty having caught
the police boss's fancy.
He locked her up in a compartment.
That was how she became his wife.
Now, that's a pretty horrifying story.
The timing of Beria's actual promotions
with when we know he met Nina doesn't quite match up.
Now it's very likely in fact,
that Svetlana might have the broad strokes right,
but have gotten some dates and stuff wrong,
you know, wouldn't be weird.
Sangster notes, quote,
the story Stalin's daughter relates
probably grew from the possibility
that they had eloped on Beria's train.
Despite his sexual predatory nature,
the marriage lasted, end quote,
she remained in love with her charmer for the rest of her life now many people get
whisked away in their own personal train you know right I mean that is pretty
romantic if you discount all of the horrible things you want to get on my
murder train baby girl yeah yeah who does who doesn't want a murder train
right I know I could go for a murder train so I have to settle for a public
train so yeah yeah can't kill a single person there get away with it rains. No, no, no, there's cameras. It's fucked up
Yeah, so Amy Knight provides a different accounting of events
She notes that Barry met Nina when Nina was 15 and she can't Nina comes to visit her relative in prison when he's locked
Up with Barry a Barry a from prison is enraptured by the beauty of this child and remains obsessed with her.
When the Bolsheviks take Georgia, Nina moves to Tbilisi with her adopted family and Beria
becomes a regular house guest.
Quote, Nina was still young and a lighthearted school girl.
She once carelessly joined other students in a demonstration against the Bolsheviks,
despite the fact that she was living in the home of a prominent Bolshevik.
She later recalled in an interview given when she was already in her mid-80s how on that
occasion she came home soaking wet because the police had sprayed the student demonstrators
with water. Sasha's wife, Mary, was furious, threatening to whip Nino because she had expressed
opposition to the Bolsheviks. One day, Beria stopped her on her way to school and asked
her to meet him later for a talk. Nino agreed, and when they met, Barry proposed marriage.
She recalled, we sat on a bench.
Lavrenti was wearing a black top coat
and a student service cap.
He told me that for a long time,
he had been very taken with me.
What is more, he said that he loved me
and wanted to marry me.
I was 16 years old at the time.
And so that's the version of events
that she would later give.
Nino would later, you see it both as Nino and Nina.
That's the version that she would give, right? And in this version of events, you know, Nino would later, you see it both as Nino and Nina.
That's the version that she would give, right?
And in this version of events, which like, I don't know which of these, all of these
are bad because she is a child in all of these.
Her recollection of events is that like, yeah, he kind of like sweeps her off her feet, right?
Noted romance, like hopeless romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic,
romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic,
romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, romantic, labyrinthi Beria. Romantic labyrinthi Beria. Now in this version of events,
Beria wanted to go to Belgium to study oil processing
for the Soviet government,
but they wouldn't send an unmarried man.
And she agrees to marry him because it's better
to have one's own family than to live in someone else's,
which is not an uncommon story that like,
and again, you have to think this is a different time.
She's like living with her parents and under her dad's roof
and is like, well, I would rather be the number two person
in my household than a child in my household.
So, you know, I'm not trying to give Beria any slack here,
but that's her recollection of why she makes the call.
16 for the era wouldn't have been too out of pocket
or anything
It was not the norm, but it was not something that most people would have considered really problematic either right it's not like you know
Like the story about Stalin's
Underage mistress is much more glaring because I believe she was either 13 or 14
Yeah, and he's there's a's gonna be a lot more problematic shit
about Beria and underage people
and just women in general that's coming later.
This is almost the most innocent thing about him
because at least it was romantic.
But at least that's how Nino recalls it, right?
Now again, I wanna really emphasize
every variant of the story here, including Nino's,
agrees that Beria deliberately sought out a child bride,
right, so calling him a child bride, right?
Pedophile very fair. Yeah. Yeah, I take back what I said gross her version of Vince Is that like I was down because it meant more freedom for me basically being
Number two in a household as opposed to a child which again, that's that's what she recalls and she gets to go to Belgium
Who doesn't like?
tragically That's what she recalls. And she gets to go to Belgium. Who doesn't like going to Belgium? Tragically.
Beria never winds up visiting Belgium.
This just doesn't happen.
In late 1922, he gets transferred to Tbilisi
as part of a plan by the Bolsheviks
to make their suppression of outlying territories
seem less like a foreign occupation
by having locals do the mass murdering of dissidents.
And again, this is part of why Svetlana's account
that he kidnaps her on a train doesn't quite work
because they have already met by the time
he's made head of the Cheka, right?
Or deputy head of the Cheka or something like that.
There's a lot of different titles he goes through.
So by this point, although still pretty young,
Beria's personality is fully formed
and his driving motivation seems to be the desire
to improve his own situation through cunning and brutal violence.
He becomes known for such quotes as,
when we Bolsheviks want to get something done, we close our eyes to everything else.
Never a good sign.
Good way to do some mass murdering, I always say.
Sophie will tell you, that's my catchphrase, baby.
Podcasters are the same way.
So, Georgia nationalism was still a major force in the area, which threatens Soviet
plans to unite it with Azerbaijan and Armenia as a single block within the greater USSR.
Beria is tasked with crushing this desire for independence.
Mensheviks are also murdered en masse, and by 1922, mass graves had become a common sight.
Sangster writes,
During these early years, Beria proved to be cunning and proficient
at seeking out and killing the opposition.
Whole families and villages, people with the same surnames
or the slightest connections were murdered
by the Cheka and the army.
There was no mercy.
It amounted to thousands upon thousands of victims.
Of his own participation in these crimes,
Beria would later write,
whatever cruelty that the Cheka had to carry out receded
in my youthful conception at the time into the foggy distance.
And I pictured only the difficult, dangerous obligations in the name of humanity's happiness.
This is accurate also to Sam Bankman Fried, who recently got sentenced to 25 years in
prison.
If you ever tell anyone anything that I do is justified because I'm doing it for the
happiness of humanity, again. You gotta shoot him, you know
You know the one thing that really improves
Humanity's happiness from my own personal experience is mass graves. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my god
Who doesn't love a nice mass grave? You can have a picnic on them. It'll be flowers. You're well flowers green grass
People talk about the downside of mass graves all the time,
but never any of the benefits, you know?
Everybody's so negative all the time.
Couple generations later, free bones.
Who doesn't like bones?
You know?
Skulls are expensive.
I know, my skull guy is fuckin'
takin' an arm and a leg outta me these days.
And you know, several generations,
you know, thousands of years in the future, boom, oil.
Uh-huh, that's right.
Again, it's almost green, Joe, you know?
It's about forward thinking.
Recycling, yeah, exactly, exactly.
You turn them from people who are using oil and polluting
to people who are generating oil and not using it.
Perpetual energy, baby.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
It's like a solar panel.
So, Berius Thuronness earned him the respect of Stalin,
who was known to deport several loyal Bolsheviks
to the East for the crime of not getting along with Beria.
In one case, Beria asked for a deported rival
to be recalled to Tbilisi,
so that he could beat the man for fun.
Other gifts given to Beria for his service in 1922
included a gold watch for courage
and a pair of browning automatic rifles
Which is a legitimately rad gift a pair
Yeah a pair can't just have one bar man. You gotta you gotta get you gotta double down on that shit
You got very a fucking bars akimbo, which is like
Fuck so by the spring of 1922,
the Federation of Trans Caucasian Republics,
which Beria and his colleagues had battered
into submission on Moscow's orders,
was inducted into the USSR as a single entity.
The actual road to this point was so brutal.
Again, they have to kill all of these Armenian
and Azeri and Georgian nationalist politicians
and all of these like kind of middle of the road
social Democrats who had wanted their,
wanted independent Armenian or Azeri republics, right?
Or Georgian republics.
You have to kill all of these people, right?
And this means that Beria and his colleagues
are murdering so many people that Lenin becomes aware
of how many people have been massacred to avoid,
and this isn't just to avoid them entering the USSR.
A lot of these people are killed
to avoid having them join the USSR
as separate caucuses states, right?
For whatever reason, this is important.
And Lennon gets kind of pissed off
and he demands the Cheka cease its violence in Georgia.
Now, this is going to be a pattern.
Every time there's like a mass purge
that kills a shitload of people
Whoever's running the ussr will have to once it ends punish the people who did the massacre in order to like
Try and make the survivors not rebel basically, right? It's kind of impressive because like lennon is a guy who really fucking hated the caucuses
Uh, and even he was like whoa whoa whoa slow down everybody
You killed how many people come on man and I think part of why he's pissed is that
like he is aware that a lot of the people who get killed were people who
like made the revolution happen right and then get murdered now by then most
of the people who might have provided resistance to an ambitious man like
Beria were dead and he used his position in Georgia as an engine to propel himself
upwards into the hierarchy of the USSR.
During this time, revolutionary fervor was still fresh, and men like Beria were expected
to live somewhat experimental lifestyles in line with their radical beliefs.
Private displays of wealth were frowned upon, and Beria eventually formally requested to
share quarters with his boss
because communal living was seen as proper communist stuff.
Again, not gonna go-
God, what a terrible roommate.
Yeah, horrible roommate.
He's planning to kill you constantly.
Actually, it's a lot like most roommates I've had.
Yeah, that's fair.
So he spends a significant amount of time
with lower-ranking Czechists,
which historian Antonov Ovsenko notes
was absolutely to spy on them.
Quote, at first everyone trusted
Lavrenty Beria completely, but upon knowing him better,
they were not able to be friendly with him.
He was a master of intrigue and enunciation.
Like no one else, he was able at the right moment
to unleash a nasty rumor in order to ensnare his rivals
on the way to the top.
Then he would persecute them one by one.
In doing so, the young Beria, whenever necessary,
would convincingly play the role of a good old chap,
simple and jolly.
That's how we remember him.
Jolly old Beria.
I always think of Livrenti Beria as a jolly old chap.
And then has this guy ever been in a room
with anyone he wasn't actively spying on?
Well, no, but you know, who amongst us hasn't constantly spied upon our bosses and subordinates
in order to...
Sophie!
Hey hey hey!
Present company excluded!
Ooh!
I mean, I have like three guys going through my producer's trash as we speak.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Normal stuff.
Speaking of normal, Joe! That's the end of part one of four.
What do you got for plugs to be plugged?
I I am the host of the lines of my donkey's podcast.
We talk about military disasters, crazy stories from military history
and also all around horrible shit, much like your show.
And I'm also a science fiction author
and you can find my newest series,
The Undying Legion anywhere that you procure your books from.
Yeah, well check out Joe's books, check out Joe's podcast
and you know, get really good at digging
if you intend to get into revolutionary politics
You know always good to be able to dig a big hole
You know a lot of things you can do with a hole a lot of things you can put in a hole
So the supervisors you can put in a hole supervisor boss roommate your roommate boss put them all in the hole
That guy in the hole the problems gone. Yeah, the guy you dislike that guy you like
in the hole the problems gone. Yeah, the guy you dislike, that guy you like.
Everyone goes in the hole.
Especially if you like them.
Yeah, yeah, that's the number one person to put in a hole.
Anyway, this has been Behind the Bastards.
Goodbye.
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