Lavrenti Beria was the most powerful and feared of Joseph Stalin's secret-police chiefs, the ruthless administrator of mass terror who oversaw the Soviet gulag and came within reach of supreme power before his own violent downfall. Born in Georgia, like Stalin, he rose through the secret police in the Caucasus, proving himself a capable and merciless operator.
In 1938 Stalin brought Beria to Moscow to head the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, where he presided over the system of forced-labor camps, conducted purges and executions, and ran a vast apparatus of surveillance and repression. During the Second World War he managed huge swaths of the Soviet war effort, and afterward he directed the crash program that built the Soviet atomic bomb.
A man of legendary cruelty and personal depravity, Beria was both indispensable to Stalin and increasingly feared by his fellow leaders.
When Stalin died in 1953, Beria moved swiftly to consolidate power and even posed, briefly, as a liberal reformer releasing prisoners. But his rivals in the leadership, terrified of falling under his control, struck first. In a dramatic coup, Beria was arrested at a Kremlin meeting, secretly tried, and shot before the year was out. His execution marked a turning point — the end of the era when the secret police could terrorize the Soviet elite itself.