Lavrentiy Beria, who replaced Nikolay Yezhov as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, reduced the scale of the Great Terror, and the repressions under him became more targeted and sophisticated. He became one of the symbols of Stalin's tyranny, so it is no coincidence that some publicists are trying to rehabilitate the "effective manager" of the repressions.

80 years ago, on August 22, 1938, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia and member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Beria was appointed First Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov, whose name is associated with the Great Terror, when from June 1937 to August 1938 more than a million people were arrested, of whom 680,000 were shot. Beria's arrival was the first stage in Yezhov's removal. Stalin and his inner circle realized that continuing the terror on the previous scale threatened to disorganize the country.

Yezhov's dismissal in November 1938 and subsequent arrest in April 1939, the trials of his associates and individual fanatical investigators were intended to shift responsibility for the repressions from the political leadership, which had approved the quotas for executions and arrests, to Yezhov personally and the "enemies who had infiltrated the NKVD." Some prominent military leaders and scientists were released from the camps at that time. Future Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, Colonel Generals Aleksandr Gorbatov and Vasily Yushkevich returned to the army and proved their loyalty to the Motherland on the battlefield. Aircraft designers Andrei Tupolev and Vladimir Petlyakov, and the future father of cosmonautics Sergei Korolev were transferred from camps and prisons to sharashkas, where imprisoned designers and engineers worked in relatively tolerable conditions.

Execution of the Red Army

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But this did not mean the end of repressions and reprisals. Already during the "Beria thaw" the Chekists cruelly tortured the outstanding director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Beria was one of the initiators of the execution of Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940. Corps commanders Maxim Mager and Yakov Pokus, released in 1938-1939, were arrested again and this time destroyed. The cases of the military were repeated periodically: on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, in the tragic summer of 1941, and after the defeat of the Nazis, when Stalin needed to "put in their place" the marshals and generals of the Victory.

From the end of 1945, Beria formally ceased to be the head of the NKVD, being the deputy chairman of the Soviet government, but continued to supervise the work of the special services and, at the same time, the atomic project. Many credit him with the successes of the Soviet atomic industry, but Beria's effectiveness as a manager was largely due to fear. Few could refuse to allocate resources to a man with a sinister reputation.

After Stalin's death, most of the leader's former comrades united against Beria, considering him a dangerous opponent. In July 1953, he was suddenly arrested and held illegally in an army air defense bunker. The charges of espionage and anti-Soviet conspiracy were fabricated, and the death sentence in December 1953 was predetermined. He himself became a victim of the repressive machine that he had previously controlled.

Beria is one of the symbols of the tyranny and lawlessness of the Stalin era. According to the Levada Center, his name is associated with the abbreviation KGB for 8% of respondents, the same number remembered Felix Dzerzhinsky, while only 2% remembered Yezhov. Another interesting thing: many publicists, following Stalin, are trying to justify Beria in the eyes of ordinary people, to relieve him of some responsibility for the repressions and to present him as a skilled manager, citing arguments about the falsification of documents by his opponents and "alternative facts", including falsified "memories" and "diaries".

Effective manager of repression