Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Beria: Stalin's Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer
Episode Date: April 16, 2024Robert and Joe get into the meat of the Beria story: the invasion of Poland and start of World War 2.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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Welcome back to our epic four-parter on the Vrinti Beria,
everybody's second favorite Georgian
who went on to commit crimes against humanity.
Yeah, that seems about right.
Even the people of Georgia's second favorite.
Yeah, yeah, definitely the people of Georgia's
second favorite.
He is not quite winning against against our buddy Stalin
But who is winning today is our guest in this fine podcast Joe Kasabian Joe
Welcome to the pro
Graham hey, thanks for it. I'm happy to be the second Joe mentioned so far in this episode
Yeah, it's it's good to be back
the second Joe mentioned so far in this episode. Yeah, it's good to be back.
Yeah, I mean, if you're going to want to become like the unquestioned head
of the USSR, you're going to need a pithier last name than Kasabian.
It's just not going to sell.
I mean, just like Joseph Stalin had to change his last name.
I have to change mine.
Have you considered a different alloy?
Joe Tungsten, that could work.
You know, more like a man of aluminum type guy. Depending on the year, that could work. You know, that's a- I'm more of like a man of aluminum type guy, you know?
Depending on the year, that could be very valuable.
Useful, but not all that reliable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Speaking of useful, but not all that reliable,
let's get back to the story of Lavrenty Beria.
When we left off our buddy,
he had kind of finally worked his way
into Stalin's good books.
He had succeeded Yezhov,
the man that everybody called a homicidal dwarf,
despite the fact that he was five feet tall,
which is a normal human height, I think we can say.
It's like when everybody says Napoleon was short,
he was just normal sized.
It's more fun to think of evil people as short because then they're you know kind of adorable and innocent
Yeah, as opposed to someone with millions of people's blood on their hands
I don't know why we think it makes it better, but I guess people did but anyway sure yes
I was out he's gonna be killed pretty soon after this because he's a guy who lost his job as a secret policeman in the Soviet
Union and that's what happens when you're a secret policeman.
Yeah, severance packages are normally,
I don't know how much a Tokarev bullet costs,
but it's worth about that much money.
Yeah, the severance packages are measured in millimeters.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A polite to back with him.
Yeah.
And that's more or less what happens to Yezhov.
So by kind of the late 1930s, 37 or so,
Beria is 38, like late 1938. Beria is the head of the NKVD. He's gotten close to Stalin by
becoming his mom's nurse and then attending his mom's funeral in lieu of Joseph Stalin, which is great. Stalin,
at least two biographers I've read say Stalin always felt bad about this.
I don't know that I believe Stalin felt bad about things.
Maybe he did.
I don't think Stalin ever felt bad about anything.
Yeah, perhaps.
How could he?
Maybe it's like a Darth Vader thing
where he's like doing the big like cheesy no as he,
did Stalin have a powered body armor
that acted as a life support system?
I assume so.
I, it worked all the way until he collapsed into a pile of his own piss in his office.
Yes.
Yeah.
So November of 1938, NKVD head Yezhov had been forced to resign, citing his health and
the strain of being overworked.
Lavrenty Beria replaces him and he does the normal thing you do
when you take over for the secret police,
which is purge all of the guys
who had been loyal to the dude before you, right?
Now, one of the things that happens
whenever this goes on is that you wind up purging
all of the people who had done the last round of purges,
which Beria does,
and that's really kind of the safe move, right?
You want the people who are really good
at carrying out a purge out of there
because that's not gonna benefit you at all
if they're sitting around with their finger on any triggers.
Yeah.
It's like any company, however,
that has like a complete 100% turnover rate in three years.
You gotta start getting a little bit worried about,
worried, like the only way to secure,
to make sure that you don't end up in a ditch
is to put everybody else in a ditch. Yeah. I'm sure you're really ditch. Yeah, it's an Amazon.com kind of situation. Yeah, maybe he he does assume
This is how every Amazon warehouse works, but with robots
And like an Amazon warehouse his first job is to hound his predecessor's wife into suicide, which he does of course
She's taking poison that is supplied by his old boss, Sergo, who has also been killed
by this point's widow.
So Sergo's wife is like, I know the plan.
Like, look, your husband got fired.
You should probably just take this poison.
I promise it's better to eat this
than what Lavrenty has planned for you otherwise.
It is 1938 in the Soviet Union.
Things aren't gonna get better anytime soon.
You really don't wanna be around
for the next like seven years.
It's all bad.
Maybe we should take our daily vitamin suicide pill.
Yeah, yeah, just go ahead and take this.
You'll miss out on some bad times.
So the rate of arrests and executions
does decline after late 1938, but not by as much
as you'd think.
Like people will generally agree this is the end of the terror, but they're still executing
quite a few people.
And now it's Beria kind of doing the executions.
Three arrested Politburo members are killed in early 1939 and Beria handles those executions.
But these proved to be the nadir of this particular level of fear, at least for high ranking Soviet
officials.
The next thing Beria is going to do is follow in his former boss's footsteps, purging Red
Army officers.
And since all of the really good ones are gone, he's not even purging the top guys at
this point, right?
He's taking out random lieutenants who looked at him wrong. There's one marshal here,
right after he moves to Moscow to like take over the NKVD,
he's going to wind up like torturing Marshal Blucher,
B-L-I-U-K-H-E-R is how it's usually anglicized.
And Beria, he's not great at,
he's not as good at torturing as he's gonna be.
So he kind of accidentally beats this guy until he loses an eye
And dies a few weeks later from his injuries
We need on-the-job injuries, you know, it's a bummer, you know, you're not supposed to torture them quite that much
But what do you do when you've accidentally killed this guy too fast you torture his wife, right?
Sure, that's what it says in my employee handbook right here.
Yeah, that's the norm for podcasters.
And this Marshall's wife is later going to claim she felt that Barry had tortured her
just for sadistic curiosity, kind of because he had killed her husband too early.
I don't know how well to judge that.
He's got to get better at it.
He needs on the job training.
You need 10,000 hours of torturing to get really good at it.
That's what that Malcolm Gladwell book is about
if I'm remembering it properly.
I think it might actually have been.
Yeah, that book is torture, so I get it.
Now, as the killing receded,
a sense of cautious optimism emerged
among the men of Stalin's inner circle,
and Beria is now officially among them.
At the 18th Party Congress in March of 1939,
the gang was met with
thunderous applause and Stalin announced that the recent purges had made the USSR
more resilient than ever in the face of ongoing fascist pressure. Again, this is
the justification guys like Molotov are gonna be parroting until literally 1980,
that this great terror that kills all of the officers who know how to do anything
in the army was necessary because you didn't want unreliable men around
when this inevitable conflict with fascism starts out.
Everybody knows the first step of every emergency
is to take the nearest firearm
and just shoot the tip of your own dick off.
Yeah, yeah.
Just so the enemy can't.
You don't want that dick getting in the way.
Yeah, now they can't shoot you in the dick.
You've already suffered the worst that you can suffer.
Exactly. That is kind of the worst that you can suffer. Exactly.
That is kind of the logic they're working on here.
It's one of those, you know, it's fair to say
that Stalin at least always expresses
that war with the Nazis is inevitable.
And obviously Hitler believes that war
with the Soviet Union is inevitable because he starts one.
That said, not everybody is convinced
that this is in fact the case.
And kind of some of the evidence for this is that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany
are kind of engaging in war games and joint training exercises through the mid thirties.
And a much more direct threat to actual Soviet territorial integrity in the late thirties
is the Empire of Japan.
And they're actually going to wind up fighting the empire of Japan well before they wind up
in a direct conflict with the Nazis.
Yeah, Mongolia, right?
Yeah, yeah, over Mongolia, that's right.
Cause you know, the Japanese army has occupied Manchuria
since 31 and they're kind of continually expanding
through the thirties, which eventually locks them
into a series of border conflicts with the Soviets.
This kind of culminates in the Battle of Lake Kasan in 1938.
That's kind of the really big engagement in this series of clashes.
And then there's a series of kind of lower stakes battles until the calamitous battles
of Kulkin Gol in Mongolia.
That one was real bad.
It's really bad.
Yes.
The Soviets built an entire rail line
just to get all of their supplies there
while Japan made all their dudes march
hundreds of miles on foot.
And it's, by the way, not easy to make
the Russian army look efficient,
but the Japanese manage it during this fight.
It's a sizable battle for the time.
By like World War II standards,
this is like a skirmish, right?
There's like tens of thousands of men
and hundreds of tanks on each side,
which does not make it hugely noteworthy
within the conflict that's going to happen.
But this is one of the first massive tank battles
in history, right?
And it's where Georgi Zhukov
is going to earn his reputation.
And Zhukov is gonna be a big player
in the war that's coming up, right?
I think I've heard of him.
Yeah, yeah, he's kind of noteworthy.
The Japanese Sixth Army is defeated.
And it's kind of clear to everybody that like
the Empire of Japan is probably going to keep doing
Empire of Japan stuff, right?
So again, within sort of the gang
that's running the USSR at this point,
there's a lot of concern about Hitler planning an invasion,
but you could be forgiven for being like,
well, maybe Japan's kind of the more immediate threat
at this stage, because I mean, they are.
It's not the first war that they fought.
There was the Russo-Japanese war as well.
That's right.
Disastrous.
Yeah, and this is kind of like,
you do have to look at also like,
if you're these guys who have overthrown
and replaced the Tsar, it's pretty good for them to be like,
well, when we fought Japan, it went to hell of a lot better.
Yeah.
We didn't lose the whole Navy.
Even at the end of World War II,
the Soviet Union would be retaking things
that the Empire of Japan took during the Russo-Japanese War.
So it was all like petty grievances 40 years later.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, and again, within kind of the gang of people
around Stalin, there's still overall much more
of a focus on Hitler, which is gonna prove
to be pretty wise in the long run.
Although how they actually prepare for war with Hitler
is not wise because they don't really prepare
for war with Hitler, you know?
See, Robert, I disagree.
They prepared plenty by murdering everyone who knew what they were doing. Mm-hmm. Yeah
Fight a war except for Zhukov thankfully over in Mongolia
Now there's a couple of different plans that they kind of have for how to play this
Stalin's first idea is to try and develop a situation wherein Britain and France invade Germany and he just sort of chills, which if that had worked, would have been a much
better plan for the Soviet Union, right?
Hard not to see why you would prefer that.
Now, since 1935, the general policy of the Soviet Union had been the popular front against
fascism and a lot of officials thought this meant that kind of inevitably we're going
to wind up
in some sort of alliance with Britain and France, right?
Because they are clearly like,
obviously just based on World War I,
not hard to see why you would expect
that that's how things are gonna break down, right?
But it's not gonna wind up being that simple,
as Sheila Fitzpatrick writes.
When Britain put its negotiator on a slow boat
to Leningrad in August, 1939,
Stalin and Molotov had had
enough.
Molotov was offended that the British had sent a foreign office official of the second
class, William Strang, to negotiate.
And Strang, like other Western diplomats who encountered him in his first months as a foreign
minister, was struck by Molotov's lack of diplomatic technique as well as social finesse.
He had no sense of negotiation.
The British ambassador later recalled and would just stubbornly and wouldn't leave, repeat his own point of view and ask innumerable
questions of his interlocutors.
And you know, Molotov, because of the pact with the Nazis that's going to come out of
this, I think has this kind of reputation for being a good negotiator. He's certainly
not at this point. And again, it's also not hard to see why his his immediate kind of reaction to the these Western powers isn't going to be positive
Because these guys had been enemies of the USSR since the Civil War right?
Since before it's like settled as a state
So it's not really surprising that one of the things that's happening in this period
Contrary to what's gonna happen later is there is some serious talk of allying with the things that's happening in this period, contrary to what's gonna happen later, is there is some serious talk of allying with the Nazis.
That is probably never, that's certainly never Stalin's plan,
but it's something Molotov thinks
actually might happen for a while.
I mean, you also have to remember,
like during and after the Russian Civil War,
the British, the French, the Americans, and the Japanese,
all were actively invading Russia. Yes, exactly. This is the Americans, and the Japanese, all were actively invading Russia.
Yes, exactly.
This is not like, and also historically,
it's not weird, right?
Otto von Bismarck had worked very hard
to develop an alliance with the Russian Tsar
because Bismarck, being reasonably intelligent, is like,
well, if we have an alliance with the Russians,
we just can't be invaded.
Like, you can't take Germany if Russia is backing it up.
Like it's just not really realistic, you know?
It's pretty safe.
How do you fight that war, right?
And obviously like the fucking Kaiser
fucks all of that up,
which is part of why World War I goes the way it does.
Again, Stalin has never liked or trusted Hitler.
He sees some sort of conflict, a war as pretty inevitable,
but there's definitely a period where even Stalin is like, we might have, we might be able to like temporarily have some sort of an accord
with the Germans that will give us time to rebuild the red army, which I know I kind
of fucked up, right?
And this is what leads to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which is, you know, one of the like
three treaties everybody learns about in high school.
Now the terms in broad are that neither state
is going to attack the other
or help with someone else's attack on the other.
That's the public stuff in this pact.
And this is a pretty major reversal
from the popular front against fascism, obviously, right?
You can't call this a popular front against fascism.
And now it's a popular front with fascism.
Yeah, with fascism.
Because there's secret agreements of like,
you know, let's, I have this cake shaped like Poland.
How would you like to divvy it up a bit?
Yeah.
Yeah, and we'll get to that there.
But the fact that there is this dissonance
between the old popular front against fascism
and this new pact, this is like severe enough
that it causes some real issues
within sort of the Soviet power structure.
And these are serious enough
that Stalin has to kind of take them seriously
and he actually sits down with a lot of his underlings
to try to explain the necessity of the move.
Beria's son would later claim
that this never works on Beria
and that he's privately unenthusiastic about the pact
I don't know how seriously to take that you know the keyword is certainly private and was he really?
Enthusiastic about anything other than murder yeah
Beria have marrying teenagers you know
Yeah beating people until they go blind.
Yeah.
Obviously Beria knows that his new position in Moscow
is still pretty shaky and all the comfort that it brings him
relies on continuing to suck up to Stalin.
Khrushchev in this period describes Beria
as constantly manipulative and always working
to ingratiate himself with Stalin
and provide dirt on his colleagues.
Stalin, who does have kind of a sixth sense
for when people are kind of getting too far up his ass,
would regularly, whenever kind of Beria would get too close,
would do something to try to remind him of his place.
And we get a good example of this in September of 1939,
when at a dinner Beria kept pushing
the German embassy counselor, Gust Hilger to drink to excess
Hilger later claimed
Stalin soon noticed that Beria and I were in dispute about something and asked across the table
What's the argument about when I told him he replied well if you don't want to drink no one can force you
Not even the chief of the NKVD himself
I joked whereupon he answered here at this table even the chief of the NKVD has no more say than anyone else
Which is I just assume song is gonna make him go visit his mom again. Yeah, go see my mom again
Oh, she's dead at this point fuck off go hang out at her grave. I'm sick of ya
Get out of here, Beria
I mean this is Barry is kind of doing to this, what Stalin had him do to kind of the other guys
in the Soviet power structure,
which is he's kind of the dude at their dinners
who's often pushing people to drink more,
which Stalin likes to see.
But Stalin doesn't get anything out
of making this Nazi get hammered, right?
He's still trying to keep good relations with them
at this period.
So he's kind of just like, Barry, what the fuck, man?
Like, we don't benefit from this.
He wants to get the Nazi really drunk so he can kind of just like, Barry, what the fuck, man? Like, we don't benefit from this.
He wants to get the Nazi really drunk
so he can draw dicks on his face.
You know?
We're gonna watch cowboy movies,
you're gonna pass out,
and then you're gonna wake up
and I'm gonna laugh really hard.
Yeah, tomato in your pocket
and a cock on your cheek.
So, however he felt.
I forgot about the tomato in the pocket.
It's my favorite.
It's so fucking strange.
It's hard not to like that part of Stalin, right?
That's just such a fun little prank.
It's something like a 12 year old boy would do.
OK. I kind of did something similar when I was I wasn't necessarily a kid.
I was like 16, maybe 15 going to house parties, getting drunk.
And one of my favorite things to do was like when one of my friends had like a dog or a cat or whatever is like find where they had the cat or dog food and then like slide my hand into people's pockets
and deposit fistfuls of dog or cat food into their pockets
without them noticing.
I have no idea why I thought it was so funny.
I think a lot of us have our like little psychopathic thing
we did to our friends when they were,
I used to light my friend's pants on fire, you know,
just a little bit, not all that much, right? pants on fire, you know, just a little bit, not all that much, right?
As a bit, you know, as a fun bit.
Yeah, it's not bad if you're like,
ha ha, I got you, as you're fucking,
I don't know, Jinko's jeans are going up in flames.
And if you can't have them executed
for not laughing at the bit, right?
I think that's key.
That is the ultimate punchline.
Yeah, throwing someone in a mass grave.
You will laugh or else.
Yeah, so however Beria feels about this pact
with the fascists, he presides over a purge
of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs
to wipe out any diplomats who have a strong
anti-German history.
As soon as Stalin is like, we're gonna be friends
with the Nazis for a little while
Barry is like well, it's time to kill every diplomat who doesn't like the Nazis, right?
That's gonna be a problem when you just had like the coalition against fascism like right
I was like everybody in the diplomatic office like wait, wait, I thought anti-fascism was our thing. I'm sorry
Where are we on this? Yeah, and this is, I mean, the main purpose of this
is not just to get rid of anti-Germans.
It's largely an opportunity to take out any diplomats
who are not totally committed to Stalin, right?
Because there's a lot of diplomats
in the foreign policy chunk of the USSR
who are just like diplomats, right?
And that's the thing that they actually wanted to do
is like be a functional diplomats.
And what's happening in this period is the NKVD is gaining what's going to be semi-permanent
oversight over like the actual foreign services, right?
Beria is going to have men in there for most of the rest of the time that he's alive.
And so that's kind of what they're doing in this period.
And one of these guys, one of these anti-German diplomats
is a dude named Litvinov, who had supported forming
an anti-German bloc with the West.
Litvinov is one of the guys who's like,
well, Stalin, you keep saying,
we're gonna fight these Nazis.
We should probably have a thing set up
with the British and the French.
That just seems like good business, you know?
We probably need this on paper and not just vibes.
Yeah, not just a vibe thing.
And Barry is going to respond to that by having the NKVD surround Litvinov's house.
And Litvinov, you get the feeling he's kind of like a cool customer.
Because when he sees he's entirely surrounded by the secret police, he calls Barry on the
phone and he's like, what the fuck are you doing?
And Barry responds, you just don't know your worth, man.
I gotta protect you.
You're in danger, right?
Yeah, I do seem to be in danger.
That is correct.
I will agree with you.
This seems unsafe.
Now another arrestee in this moment is a diplomat named Nazarov who gets busted on charges of
spying for Italy, not because he had actually spied for Italy,
but based on the undeniable fact that he had been born in Genoa. And he'd been born in Genoa because
his parents were longtime committed communist revolutionaries who had to flee after the
revolution, right, in 1905. Which is like really unfair to this guy, you know? Your parents are
like so committed to the cause that they have to go into exile. And then people are like,
well, you're clearly an Italian spy.
You're trying to steal.
We have two pieces of evidence against you.
He's trying to steal our sauces for their goddamn pastas.
You were born in Genoa and you only eat pasta.
Fuck.
You cannot be trusted.
This passage from Amy Knight's book gives good context
on how brutal some of these arrests tended to be
and just the sheer level of like bullying
that dominated them, right?
Quote, Gennadyn, who's one of these guys who gets arrested
recalls how he was taken to Beria's office
after he had refused to confess to the espionage charges
that Kobolov had accused him of.
When he continued to deny the charges,
Kobolov, who weighed more than 300 pounds
and his assistants began beating him on the skull as Beria sat complacently watching.
Then Beria impatiently ordered Ganadyn to lie on the floor, where he was kicked repeatedly
by several prison employees.
Ganadyn had one final session with Beria, who at first adopted a thoughtful, cultured
manner, asking Ganadyn calmly if he had finally decided to confess.
Again, when Ganadyn steadfastly asserted his innocence
He was brutally beaten Barry his last words to Gainaden were with such a philosophy and such provocations
You only make your situation worse
Christ oh what good would have it done to like even if they are innocent most time
I'm going to assume they're probably innocent. It's like okay. You got me. I'm guilty. I did all this shit
I'll be just gonna die anyway you might as well make it work for it assume they're probably innocent. It's like, okay, you got me, I'm guilty, I did all this shit.
Well, you're just gonna die anyway.
You might as well make it work for it.
You're still gonna kill me,
but you're gonna kill me tired.
Yeah, I mean, that is often the decision people are making.
It's like, well, if I admit it,
it'll hopefully be over faster, right?
Of course, of course.
But some of these people believe things.
The reason why torture doesn't work
is an interrogation tactic.
Like, I'll tell you whatever you want,
as long as you stop pulling out my fucking fingernails.
Yeah, and that's why I am kind of amazed
by the few people it doesn't work on
who are like, torture me all you want.
The one thing I have is not giving in on this, you know?
And you do run into a couple of those guys,
not many of them, obviously,
because most people, for understandable reasons,
don't hold up under that forever.
But there are a couple
Anyway, very very yeah. Yeah, at least tougher
Beria was given a dacha on the outskirts of Moscow that had once belonged to the former chairman of the USSR who'd been arrested in 38 and executed that year
It was furnished by the same architect Stalin used who was later sent to a gulag and killed in 39
Like most powerful men in the USSR Beria's dacha had a movie theater.
Svetlana, Stalin's daughter, claims that on Sundays at the dacha, Beria would relax
by shooting at targets and then watching American and German films in the evening.
Afterwards, he would disappear to, quote, no one knew where.
We'll probably never know precisely how Beria spent his off hours,
but the largest allegation you'll hear involves
that he was committing rampant rape, often of children.
Now-
I was about to say, at any point,
there's a long period of time
where nobody can pinpoint Beria's location.
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Abusers in Hollywood are as old as the Hollywood sign itself
And while fame is the ultimate prize in Tinseltown,
underneath it lies a shroud of mystery.
Binge this season of Variety Confidential from Variety,
Hollywood's number one entertainment news source and iHeart podcasts.
Six episodes are waiting for you right now to dive into what lies beneath the glitzy image of Hollywood's golden age
and all the sex,
money, and murder that's been swept under the rug for decades.
Using the Variety Archives, each episode offers a rare glimpse into little-known casting couch
stories that have long lived in the shadows.
So join us as we navigate the tangled web of Hollywood's secret history with host Tracy
Patton, along with expert Variety reporters and correspondents, as they discuss the secret We're back, and we're talking about Beria's extracurricular activities.
Now the fact that Beria is like a rampant sex criminal is often taken as a given by
people discussing his life.
It is worth hammering home that a lot of what's alleged about him comes from fellow members
of the inner circle who again wanted to pin
all of the blame for Stalin's excesses on Beria.
This is in like 53 after Stalin dies.
After his arrest, Beria's bodyguard is going to produce a list of 39 women who Beria was
said to have had sex with.
And this is presumably a mix of just actual consensual affairs and non-consensual stuff.
Another bodyguard made this allegation,
summarized by Knight, quote,
another bodyguard, Naderia, confessed at his trial in 1955
that he and Sarsikov picked up young women off the streets
and transported them to Beria's house
where he would rape them.
According to another source,
young women in Moscow came to be terrified
just by a glimpse of Beria's pictures in the press.
Stalin, who was a professed aesthetic in sexual matters, must have heard what Beria was up to, but apparently
chose to ignore it." And again, it's really hard. I don't doubt this, but it's also like you do have
to keep the province in mind, which is other guys who are being tortured to confess. I 100% believe that there is truth to both sides of this.
Or Barry was absolutely a monster in his personal time as well,
especially because like, look where they kept finding skeletons, for example,
as well as everybody making him seem like, you know,
100000 times worse than he actually was, which is not a defense.
I mean, like especially Stalin totally knew when,
like I think we already talked about,
he told his daughter to never go near Barry alone.
Yeah.
Like, he did that for a reason.
Yeah, and I don't think, like the fact that Svetlana
seemed to have always been aware
that there was something unsafe about this guy
is some of the best evidence we get, right?
Because I don't see why she would necessarily,
like why she would not have felt that way, right?
If there wasn't an actual danger.
It does make me wonder when it started,
because he's had a fair amount of power
for quite a long time.
And I highly doubt he waited until he, you know,
he's the head of the NKVD to flip a switch,
be like, all right, now I'm gonna do this for fun
on my free time.
Like there had to be something we just don't know about,
you know?
Yeah, I can see it being a situation where just like,
when he's earlier in his career, still in Georgia,
there's just not enough good info left from that period of
time that we have many of these stories because of how many people get purged, right?
Right.
And so it's when he gets to Moscow and there's more survivors from that time that we get
these stories.
That seems plausible to me.
Yeah.
One of the stories you'll hear from his bodyguards is that they were ordered to hand each of
his victims a flower bouquet as the victim left Beria's house. And the implication was that this made it consensual. And if they refuse
the bouquet, they would be arrested and probably don't have to guess what would happen then.
One of Beria's bodyguards, Sarkisov, reported that a woman who had been brought to Beria
rejects the flower bouquet and flees his office. and sarkisov hands her the flowers anyway, and Barry is like
No, it's not a bouquet now. It's a wreath and may it rot on her grave
So yeah again. I don't really have trouble believing this I don't either it seems. Yeah, it's kind of his thing
Yeah, it's it's it's probably you know
Yeah kind of his thing. Yeah, it's it's it's probably, you know,
yeah, I don't have trouble believing it. And when you when you hear the same story from so many different sources.
Yeah, it is convincing.
And there's no reason like, yeah, it makes sense that they would lie
and should make Barry look worse to cover their own asses.
But it makes no sense for them to lie and come up with incredibly
elaborate flower based murder reasons.
Right. That feels really specific.
Right. That's not something someone just pulls out of their ass. It would be very easy for them to
lie and be like, yeah, he was a rapist and a murderer. Not suddenly he has a flower game involved.
He has this flower based system. Yeah. I don't know. Now there are some folks who will say that
this is all bupkis. One former NKVD employee has stated he thinks it's unlikely Beria would have had time to
do this because he had so much self-control and he was so busy.
Beria's wife says the same thing, which like, and maybe she's honestly saying this, her
claim is that he was always working.
Where would he have found the time to do this?
And it's like, well, but he was very powerful and it would have been easy for him to lie to you about this.
And you know,
and she would have, she would hardly be the first serial killers, spouse, no idea that
they were doing what they were doing. I mean, he was killing so many other people. How would
she even notice that she, that he killed 38 or so other people as like a side gig?
Yeah. And that's kind of where I land is like yeah
You can you can find people from the United States in the 70s who were married to someone who was committing like serial murders
And didn't know it I don't have trouble believing that the head of the NKVD could get away with a version of that
You know like the Green River killers wife had no idea that he was the green killer
Yeah, yeah
I don't need to actually think that she's trying to cover up something to think that like,
she's not right when she states that, you know?
And I don't feel like Barry is the most open soul
when it comes to having deeping, meaningful conversations
with their spouse.
Yeah, I would not be surprised to hear
that he was not great at communication
with sort of his relationship, yeah?
Probably a fair assessment, you know, yeah
So anyway, this is a thing that is debated and it's kind of worth talking about the degree to which some of this is uncertain
Knight concludes the argument around it this way even if the stories circulating in Moscow were exaggerated
They almost certainly had some foundation
They were corroborated by Edward Ellis Smith a young American diplomat who was serving in the US Embassy in Moscow after the war.
Smith noted that Beria's escapades were common knowledge among embassy personnel at the time
because his house was on the same street as a residence for Americans.
And those who lived there saw girls brought to Beria's house late at night in a limousine.
So there you go.
But like Knight says, I think it's almost certain that he was committing what we would
consider to be a pretty huge number of sex crimes.
That seems easy to argue.
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, like a well regarded journalist, Grover Furr would probably disagree.
So on November 30th, 1939, the USSR invaded Finland. This would prove to be not the best idea
that ever happened out of the Stalinist era.
Um, largely because Finns are notably bullish
on remaining Finns.
This kind of goes badly.
The USSR gets expelled from the League of Nations,
although that's not really a huge loss for them.
Uh, but they do suffer Titanic casualties,
which further contributes to the kind of collapse of the Red Army,
which appeared so total in 1940 that Hitler grew convinced
he only needed to kick in the door to cause the whole house to collapse. And obviously Hitler is not accurate here.
But the Red Army's not looking good after the invasion of Finland.
For his part- A small plug here, my show, we did a series on the Winter War a little while ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good one to listen to, to figure out how Finland can hold off the Red Army and inflict what,
like around a million casualties?
It didn't go great for the Soviets.
Yeah.
Yeah, don't piss off guys who are into butterflies.
It turns out that ends badly.
For his part, Beria did crucial work on the Finnish front. Largely
he established the NKVD ensemble of song and dance to ensure the young boys being sent
to die to finish snipers had one last night of very mid entertainment. That is such a
imagine being sent to get shot to death by lepidopteris and your last relaxing experience as the NKVD song
and dance unit?
This sounds like the most depressed song and dance.
Like, what is the goth version of theater kids?
That's the kind of energy I expect to be brought here.
Everybody's dancing, no smiles on any faces.
Their music listing, all ska. No smiles on any faces there. Yeah, and you there there
Music listing all ska. Yeah. Oh, hey now
If it's good ska brings some real big fish out there before you get murked on the finish front
Like their horn player barely knows how to play nobody's skanking
They're just doing that fucking Mighty Mighty Boss Stones album about George Floyd. Oh, what a horrible time.
Hey look, there's a landmine.
Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.
Pick it up, pick it up.
So Barry also spends a lot of time fucking up his new position as the center of foreign
affairs.
Now that the NKVD is basically overseeing the foreign affairs office and watching over
every diplomat's every move, Beria found the temptation to fuck with things too great to
endure.
As part of the German Soviet pact, the Nazis sent a battle cruiser to Russia as payment
for raw materials.
Beria had his men try to entrap the Nazi naval officer who brought the ship.
The goal was to turn him into a double agent,
but they were really bad about this and Hitler found out and complained to Stalin and Stalin's like,
What the fuck are you doing? Like, we needed this boat. Why are you doing this?
Nobody told you to fuck with
them this way?
Barry is such a weirdo. He can't even honeypot someone correctly.
No, he's far too weird for that. So the Nazi Soviet Treaty was publicly just a non-aggression
pact. But like any good treaty, it included a bunch of secret protocols. And these laid
out how, when the Nazis carried out their invasion of Poland, the Red Army
would be allowed to move into Eastern Poland and some of the Baltic States, right?
And this doesn't happen kind of all at once.
They move into Poland first.
The Baltic States kind of stay independent on paper for a while and the Red Army moves
into the Baltic States.
But this process starts in September 1939.
And when it does, Beria finds himself presiding over a vast number of captured Polish officers and soldiers something like 200,000 men
Oh, no, that's never a good sign
No, no, you certainly don't want to be one of these Polish officers now
I don't think anybody loves a good protocol quite like the Russian secret police at any given era of time
They're loving good protocols.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, you, uh, you don't want, I mean, none of this is going to be a good situation.
Now about half these 200,000 guys are freed pretty quickly because holding
prisoners is expensive and kind of a pain in the ass.
You got to feed them and shit.
You got to feed them.
You got to take it.
It's just the logistic problems.
But this is going to quickly turn into a very ugly situation as Timothy Snyder lays out
in this passage from Bloodlands.
Lavrenty Beria had come to a conclusion, perhaps inspired by Stalin.
Beria made it clear in writing that he wanted the Polish prisoners of war dead.
In a proposal to the Politburo and thus really to Stalin, Beria wrote on 5th March 1940 that
each of the
Polish prisoners was just waiting to be released in order to interactively into the battle against
Soviet power. He claimed that counter-revolutionary organizations in the new Soviet territories were
led by former officers. Unlike the claims about the Polish military organization a couple of years
before, this was no fantasy. The Soviet Union had occupied an annexed half of Poland
and some Poles were bound to resist.
Perhaps 25,000 of them took part
in some kind of resistance organization in 1940.
True, these organizations were quickly penetrated
by the NKVD and most of these people arrested,
but the opposition was real and demonstrable.
Beria used the reality of Polish resistance
to justify his proposal for the prisoners,
quote, to apply to them the supreme punishment, shooting.
So they take this chunk of Poland, a chunk, about a quarter of the people they initially
take prisoner, engage in some kind of resistance activity, like you do when your home is invaded
and occupied.
And Beria uses the resistance that's there to justify shooting as many of these guys
as we possibly can.
Now there's debate, is this a thing that Beria proposes and Stalin rubber stamps?
Is this a thing that Stalin made clear in a conversation like, Beria, I want you doing
this?
And then Beria just carries it out.
You get this kind of debate with a lot of the stuff that Beria does.
Is this a thing that-
I'm going to have a hard time believing he's committing such a wide scale massacre without some kind of debate with a lot of the stuff that Beria does, right? Is this a thing that- I'm having a hard time believing
he's committing such a wide scale massacre
without some kind of official approval.
Certainly some kind of official approval,
but I also, Stalin's doing enough
that I wouldn't be wildly surprised
if it's Beria saying, hey, I think this is a good idea
and Stalin going, yeah, man, let's fucking,
let's go for it, you know?
That's what I pray it probably was,
much like there's no written order from Hitler
to commit the Holocaust. Right, right. It's like, yeah, go ahead. It's not really how the guy worked, you know? That's what I pray it probably was, much like there's no written order from Hitler to commit
the Holocaust.
Right.
It's like, yeah, go ahead.
It's not really how the guy worked, you know?
He's got a lot on his plate.
Regardless, it is Beria who is in position and is going to take responsibility for the
massacre of a great number of Polish captives.
To do this, he had to revive the logic and tools of the great terror.
A new Troika system was established to go through the files of every Polish POW.
Most of these men had already been interrogated and generally shown to have been nothing but
soldiers who had done their duty. Beria instructed the Troikas to ignore all previous conclusions
and issue new verdicts. They would not actually need to interview any of these prisoners to
do this, of course. As in the terror, Beria gave his men a quota.
In all, 97% of the nearly 15,000 Poles in various camps were put to death, along with
6,000 Polish officers held in prisons and another 1,305 who were arrested in April of
1940.
This was disguised until the last moment, with prisoners who were evacuated being told
that they would be sent back to their homes.
It's likely many of them realized something was fishy, but there was little to do but
queue up for the buses and trains that eventually took them to a train station.
Snyder continues, quote, there they found themselves disembarking from the train into
a cordon of NKVD soldiers with bayonets fixed.
About 30 of them at a time entered a bus, which took them to the goat hills at the edge
of a forest called Caton.
There, at an NKVD resort, they were searched and their valuables taken.
One officer, Adam Solsky, had been keeping a diary up to this moment.
They asked about my wedding ring.
The prisoners were taken into a building on the complex, where they were shot.
Their bodies were then delivered, probably by truck and batches of 30, to a mass grave that had been dug in the forest.
This continued until all 4,410 prisoners
sent from Kozelsk had been shot.
The 6,000 some odd Poles held in prisons
in Belarus and Ukraine were executed indoors
rather than in a field.
Snyder tells one hideous story of an NKVD officer
shooting the shit, just kind of bullshitting
with an 18 year old boy
while he waited for the executions to start.
He asked the kid like, what was your job in the Polish army?
The kid says, telephone operator.
He's like, how long did you do it?
The kid says six months.
And then he goes and shoots the kid in the back of the head.
Christ.
This kid and 6,313 other prisoners at least were handcuffed in a soundproof cell and shot
in the base of the skull.
So this is like pretty bad stuff, you know?
It's not good.
Being, you know, it's the NKVD found him guilty
of a high crime in the Soviet Union, which is being Polish.
Being a Polish dude, yeah.
Now one of Barry's main trigger men
is a guy named Vasily Blokin.
Vasily had been an NKVD executioner during the terror, and he had done the deed on some
of the highest-ranking prisoners that were purged.
Today, Blokin holds the official Guinness World Record for most prolific official executioner.
What a high award.
What a high honor.
Did he escape being purged himself?
He does, I think, eventually get purged, honestly, I don't have that on here
I probably should have but I what I do have on here Joe
I found his official Guinness website page for his world record and boy howdy
Does the website design of the Guinness website seem inappropriate for hosting an article about this guy check this shit out
So he's got to put the most prolific official execute
They didn't even capitalize every the first letter and every word of that. Oh my god
It's like it's like most prolific official execution or above like an image
That's just like a cut of like the tallest man in the world. Yeah people like the
Photoshop a lady with long fingernails a guy balancing a bike on his chin and meanwhile no picture of him
This are what is happening? Yeah, you think he leg right?
It's fucking incredible
This is one of those records that like Guinness wouldn't have up anymore for fear of someone attempting to break it
But like this one. I feel like we're safe on this one guys
You know that Joe immediately after this pretty grotesque graphic comes the note this record is currently inactive and no
Applications are being accepted for it
They closed this one. And here I thought Jeremy Renner would finally beat a Guinness World Record.
We don't know what he's doing in his spare time.
This could have been his.
Oh god, that is sad though folks.
I know someone at home has a dream to beat the Silly's record
and I am sorry but the Guinness people have made up their minds some poor civil servant that
Works for the state of Texas immediately got let down
There's a postal worker driving around listening to the show who's just like our rats
Damn it. I guess I have to go back to growing my fingernails now. It would not if you're paying for your own bullets
This is not a cheap world record to meet because they estimate this guy's kill total at some 7,000 people
So you can't do that anymore these days bullets are too expensive because of woke
He's an interesting guy
Vasili he wears a leather cap apron and long gloves to keep clean
He uses German pistols if you're gonna mass execute people you're gonna want a German handgun, right?
So you certainly don't want a Russian one.
No, you definitely don't want a Russian one, right?
You know, in 1911 probably would have been great
for field executions,
but I understand maybe they were hard to find.
I'm guessing a Mauser, pretty reasonable gun to use
for that at this period of time.
Small caliber, less splatter,
but he is wearing an apron.
The man is well prepared.
He has his merit badge in preparedness.
You have to assume he was good at this, right?
Yeah, otherwise he wouldn't have been fired after,
like, I don't know, a dozen.
No, no, he keeps doing this, and he's during this massacre
of these Polish officers, he's in just other soldiers.
It's not all officers.
He's gonna execute about 250 men each night, personally.
Which is a lot. Christ. Yeah, that's a lot of dudes to shoot on your own.
He's gonna get a repetitive stress injury
in his trigger finger.
He gets a fucking carpal tunnel.
He has to wear one of those little wrist guard things
before he goes to bed at night.
Gets like whatever their purple heart is
for repetitive stress injuries in the field of genocide.
Yeah.
Christ.
That's good.
That's nice.
It's really sad that he probably survives World War II,
right?
Like that's unfortunate.
I think he, well, yeah, you know what?
I'll edit that in here when I look it up.
But first, Joe, you know what I don't have to edit?
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I'm really glad that your ad finally sold me the proper wrist support I need for pulling the trigger hundreds of times
Yeah, yeah, look if you're going to be like the silly bloke in you need a wrist brace
It's just irresponsible to kill 7,000 men without one are you makes it to 53? Oh that motherfucker
He makes it out to the end of Stalin. Yeah, he does he does he's forcibly retired after Stalin dies
He gets stripped of his rank during the de-Stalinization process by Khrushchev
And then it does seem like he dies maybe just as a result of being super unhealthy and say he kills himself officially
Final execution
been a heart attack and yeah
It may have been a heart attack and yeah Well, I don't know. The only person who can kill me is me the guy who knows how to do it the best
Yeah, I will say living to 60 when you're this guy is not bad
Yeah, I mean it's bad cuz he's bad
But that's impressive for the guy who shoots 7000 people. Normally the death squad guy isn't the one that survives this long
No, no, that's a good span for the Death Squad guy.
The stars that burn the brightest burn the fastest.
Yeah.
So while all of these prisoners are still alive, Beria had allowed them to communicate
with their families, like send letters back and forth, not out of humanity, but because
again, he's about to do another crime against humanity.
He wants to collect the names and addresses of their family members.
And after he executes all of these people, he takes the friends and family that they had been communicating with
and he rounds them up and deports them to Kazakhstan.
This winds up being something like 60 something thousand people.
And in NKVD transport documents, they're described as family members of quote, former people.
Oh God.
I mean, I believe this is around the same time
the Soviets support large numbers of Chechens
and Dagestanis to Kazakhstan.
A lot of deportations are happening right at this time.
This is kind of like, he's sort of breaking the seal
on doing mass deportations.
And Beria is the mass deportation guy, because he's good at logistics, right?
He's brutal.
A lot of people are dying during this, but he's good at moving lots of people.
And again, I probably don't have to labor on the fact that this is a miserable situation
for the people being deported.
These evacuees, to use the Nazi term, were not properly cared for or fed. They were put to an
unfamiliar land. They were separated from their homes and their support networks and thousands
of them die. Their situation is so bad that on May 20th, 1940, a group of these Polish children
write Stalin a fawning letter swearing, please Stalin, we will be loyal communists and then
begging, it's hard to live without our fathers.
So that's bleak.
I really hope Beria doesn't read that.
And he's like, okay, well, I'll send you to your fathers then.
Is that how Beria would read that letter?
Yeah, it's probably good that he didn't get access to this.
Now, these NKVD executioners and the guys who manage the deportations,
Beria does make sure they get a cash bonus,
cause he's a good boss at least.
You had mentioned the other deportations,
there's a lot of them.
In March of 1940, Beria had ordered the deportation
of any Poles who refused a Soviet passport,
arguing that they had rejected the Soviet system.
Now there are good reasons to not want this passport
because this passport and this passport, and this passport
system is pretty new at the time, lists your ethnicity.
And that has been used to target members of national groups, right?
The vast majority of people deported in this first wave of deportations are Jewish refugees
who had fled to Eastern Poland from Western Poland, making the best choice they could
at the time, which is like, well, the communists
are probably better for us than the Nazis, right?
And they are-
And that's a rough fucking choice to have to make.
It's not a lot, it's not like as much better
as you'd hope, right?
Because the Nazis are going to try to kill everybody
and Barry is just gonna force all of these people
further to the East, where a lot of them die,
but not all of them, right?
And the Soviet passport, by the way,
never takes your ethnicity off of it
the entire length of the Soviet Union.
No, that is always a major thing.
And it's going to be, there's also a lot of these guys
who are like Western Polish Jews are like,
well, we're refugees, we had to flee here to not die,
but like, I'm not a Soviet citizen.
I don't want to be a Soviet citizen, right?
I wanna go back home at some point,
which is why they, you know,
but that scene is like a sign
that they're not reliable of disloyalty
rather than a pretty normal response
to the situation that they're in, right?
Now that said, you know,
at least a lot of these people do survive
and maybe they wouldn't maybe they probably wouldn't
have if they'd stayed in Western Poland.
So I don't know.
I don't know where you want to place that.
It's a rough time.
It's like trying to pick which kind of shit is the best or the worst.
Yeah.
At least maybe you live through this kind of shit.
Now at the same time, Barry is managing all these mass deportations.
They get much broader than this, right?
Again, a lot of, not too long from now, a lot of Chechens are going to be deported.
Like this, this is a pretty widespread program.
Barry is also presiding over the vast expansion of the Gulag system.
Now Gulag is an acronym and it stands for main administration of corrective labor colonies.
But you know, whatever that is in Russian, you know, I don't, I don't speak it. Gulag is an acronym and it stands for main administration of corrective labor colonies.
But you know, whatever that is in Russian, you know, I don't, I don't speak it.
By March of 1940, as Beria expelled Jewish refugees from West Poland, the Gulag system
included about 53 full camps, 425 corrective labor colonies and 50 colonies for children.
In total, I think something like 1.6 to 1.7 million people are interned
everybody knows those numbers have a little flex right everybody knows like a
good policy for any good Empire is to have prison colonies for children yeah
that puts you on the right side of history and there's no debating that
yeah why wouldn't you want camps just for little kids to be forcibly separated from their families?
Their little fingers can get into machinery.
Right, right, right.
That you have, I mean, that is kind of where this goes
because like any sort of large scale labor camp program,
these are largely an economic incentive, right?
Like that's what the Gulag system is in large degree.
Now, some historians like Alex Nove will argue
that you should include people in prisons and so-called NKVD special
settlements as well in the number of people in gulags. If you do that it
brings the number of human beings incarcerated under various nominal
supervision to something like three and a half million by the outbreak of war.
Again it's debated how you should consider this. One Soviet source puts the
number, it is still terrifying, 2.3 million. This is a lot of people.
That's a population number larger than several Soviet satellite countries.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a significant amount of people are in various camps and prisons that
Beria is running. And the Gulags are not death camps, right? Most people who are in turn there do survive.
And that's important because these are not the same
as what the Nazis are doing, but they are not good, right?
You know, something can still be shit
and not be a death camp.
Right, right.
The goal is not to wholesale exterminate populations,
but that's really the only nice thing
you can say about them, right?
A lot of people still die there.
Between 34 and 53, probably about a million people die in Gulags.
This is debated.
It's not a small number though, right?
I think during the worst-
But also I imagine those numbers are quite unreliable.
It's not like they're keeping track of how many people that died.
Right, right.
You're not going to get a precise count.
And how deadly these places are varies based on
what's happening in the rest of the USSR and with the war.
During the worst years of the Gulag system,
some accounts will say like a 25% mortality rate, right?
It was usually under 10%.
Now, both of those are bad, right?
Neither of those is a good situation.
I'm not trying to mitigate it,
but it changes in terms of how deadly it is
based on what else is going on, right?
Right.
Now, and again, when I say the purpose of these Gulags
is not to eliminate people,
it's because the purpose is to profit from their labor.
And you can really only do that
if they're well enough to work,
or at least if most of them are, right?
And I'm gonna continue with a quote from Amy Knight's book here. labor and you can really only do that if they're well enough to work or at least if most of them are, right?
And I'm going to continue with a quote from Amy Knight's book here.
The most important economic activity of the NKVD was construction of roads, railways,
waterways and power stations.
Some projects were undertaken directly by the NKVD and some by Gulag workers contracted
out to other commissariats.
Mining of gold and non-ferrous metals and lumbering were other key areas of production
for the Gulag.
To have such a vast economic enterprise under his control was an awesome responsibility for Beria,
though he left the day-to-day administration to his lieutenants.
According to most accounts, Beria's group was more effective in the utilization of camp labor
than Yezhov's had been. In an effort to raise productivity and more rationally exploit forced
labor, Beria improved physical conditions
in the camps and increased food supplies.
As a result, camp death rates declined from what they were under Ezov, and forced labor
became a more productive element of the national economy.
So you could argue, compared to how they had been under his predecessor, broadly speaking,
Gulags are less deadly and miserable under Beria.
And this is pretty consistent with how he treats,
for example, captured Nazi scientists,
not out of the goodness of his heart,
because he needs work from them, right?
And he's a rational enough guy to know that-
Looks like he said he's good at logistics.
He's good at logistics.
He's like, well, people who are starving to death
don't work as well, and I want them to produce
economic value for me, right?
Right.
The evil of arithmetic, you know?
Exactly, exactly.
And again, these are still not nice places.
In 1941, an internal report showed that prisoners at the Gulags lacked soap, water, clothing,
and food, and were often made to work 12-hour shifts with regularity.
You don't need soap if you're building roads for 16 hours.
Right.
Why would you need soap, you know?
No need.
Yeah. In October of 1941, nearly 1,500 people died at just two NKVD railway construction camps.
Former Gulag prisoner Antov Antonov Ovisenko later described Beria's influence on the Gulags
this way.
The Gulags existed before Beria, but he was the one who built them on a mass scale.
He industrialized the Gulag system.
Human life had no value for him.
And you know, I might add human life didn't, labor did,
but I don't think you give him a lot of credit for that.
Right?
Yeah, of course, of course.
That's the point.
It's not that he made the Gulags more humane,
is he made them more efficient.
Right, he made them work better, you know?
Because why wouldn't you in his
situation? But you know what works really well, Joe? Oh, no. You as a podcast host and
author, you want to tell people where they can find your work? Yeah, I am the host of
the lines up by donkey's podcast. We talk about military history, disasters, and also
occasionally assholes like Barry. We also did a series on the Winter War and we did a series in the Battle of Stalingrad
and several other things that are loosely connected to this topic.
I'm also an author.
I'm currently in the middle of writing a military science fiction trilogy and you can find it
anywhere you find your books.
It's called the Undying Legion. Hell yeah.'s called the Undying Legion.
Hell yeah. Check out the Undying Legion,
check out the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.
And look, if you ever wanna start
a system of forced labor camps,
I don't know, maybe have a sandwich instead.
See if fixing your blood sugar maybe makes you less wanna
run a series of labor camps.
I thought I wanted to make a forced labor camp system.
It turned out my blood sugar was just low.
I was just kinda hungry.
Had some fruit loops.
Feeling a lot better now to be honest guys.
If only.
Anyway everybody, go to hell.
I love you.
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