The execution of the “bloody” Stalinist People's Commissar 65 years ago was staged. Khrushchev and Malenkov hid their former comrade-in-arms in South America, researchers say.

According to the official version, Lavrenty Beria was arrested on June 26, 1953 in the Kremlin and in the same year on December 23, by a court verdict, he was shot in an underground bunker in the courtyard of the headquarters of the Moscow Military District.

However, there is a lot of darkness in this story. There is a document about the death of Beria. It was signed by three officials - Colonel General Batitsky, Prosecutor General of the USSR Rudenko and Army General Moskalenko. The document has the title: “Act. 1953, December 23 days.”

The document does not raise doubts about its authenticity, unless, of course, it is compared with other, similar documents. Now such an opportunity has arisen. And, as the archives show, official data from those years too often diverges from reality. Therefore, the attention of historians is also attracted by other versions about the fate of Beria, living in the form of rumors. Two of them are especially sensational.

The first assumes that Beria somehow managed to avoid the trap prepared against him during the conspiracy of his former comrades, or even escape from the arrest that had already happened and hide in Latin America. And thus he was able to stay alive.

The second rumor says that during the arrest of Beria, the marshal and his guard resisted and were killed. They even name the author of the fatal shot, namely Khrushchev. There are those who say that the pre-trial execution took place in the already mentioned bunker almost immediately after Beria’s arrest in the Kremlin.

Which of these versions should you believe? Especially in light of the fact that no one has ever seen Beria’s ashes, and no one knows where he is buried. Not long ago, two versions were confirmed that Beria had survived after all.

Marshal's Trap

As noted by a famous researcher Soviet history Nikolai Zenkovich, Khrushchev loved to tell his foreign interlocutors how the action against Beria was carried out. The plot, with some changes, is basically the same.

According to one of Khrushchev's stories, Beria's end was like this. Khrushchev convinced first G.M. Malenkov and N.A. Bulganin, and then the rest of the members of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, that if Beria was not eliminated in June 1953, he would send all members of the Presidium to prison. Everyone probably thought so, although everyone was afraid to say it out loud. Khrushchev was not afraid. The only thing that was difficult was the technique of carrying out the operation against Beria. The normal procedure - open discussion of the accusations against the marshal in the Presidium of the Central Committee or at the party plenum - was no longer necessary. There was a danger that as soon as Beria found out about the accusations against him, he would immediately carry out a coup d’etat and shoot all his rival comrades-in-arms. According to one very widespread version, Beria intended to arrest the entire Presidium of the Central Committee at the Bolshoi Theater, at the premiere of Yuri Shaporin’s opera “The Decembrists.”

The action was allegedly scheduled for June 27. Although, as N. Zenkovich notes, these rumors could have been spread with the aim of convincing the public that the villain Beria himself was preparing a conspiracy against the leadership of the USSR, and the “core” of the Party Central Committee had no choice but a preemptive strike.
Thus, in the fight against Beria, the conspirators had only one option left: to deceive and lure him into a trap. According to one version, the operation against Beria was timed to coincide with the beginning of the army’s summer maneuvers (interestingly, there is no mention of the maneuvers in the memoirs of the military themselves). Several Siberian divisions were also supposed to participate in the exercises of the Moscow Military District (MVO) (just in case there were supporters of Beria in the Moscow divisions). At a meeting of the Council of Ministers held on June 26, the leadership of the Ministry of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff reported on the progress of the maneuvers. A group of military men led by Marshal Zhukov (he had already been transferred from Sverdlovsk to Moscow and served as Deputy Minister of Defense) and the commander of the Moscow Military District, General K. S. Moskalenko, was also present in the hall.

Malenkov declared the joint meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers open. And he immediately turned to Zhukov so that he “on behalf of the Soviet government” would detain Beria. Zhukov commanded Beria: “Hands up!” Moskalenko and other generals drew their weapons to prevent provocation from Beria.

The generals then took Beria into custody and took him to the next room, next to Malenkov’s office. At Khrushchev’s suggestion, they immediately relieved him of his post as Prosecutor General of the USSR and appointed Rudenko, Khrushchev’s man, in his place.

Then the Presidium of the Central Committee discussed the issue of future fate Beria: what to do with it next and where to put it? There were two solutions: keep Beria under arrest and conduct an investigation, or immediately shoot him, and then retroactively formalize the death sentence legally. Making the first decision was dangerous: Beria had the entire state security apparatus and internal troops behind him, and he could easily be released. There were no legal grounds to make the second decision - to immediately shoot Beria.

After discussing both options, we came to the conclusion: Beria still needs to be shot immediately to eliminate the possibility of a riot. The executor of this sentence is in the same next room– in Khrushchev’s stories, General Moskalenko spoke once, Mikoyan on another, and even Khrushchev himself on the third (he added: further investigation into the Beria case, they say, fully confirmed that he was shot correctly).

Where is Beria buried?

Russian researchers N. Zenkovich and S. Gribanov collected many documents about the fate of Beria after his arrest. But especially valuable evidence on this matter was discovered in the archives by Hero Soviet Union, intelligence officer and former head of the USSR Writers' Union Vladimir Karpov. Studying the life of Marshal G. Zhukov, he put an end to the dispute over whether Zhukov participated in the arrest of Beria. The secret, handwritten memoirs of the marshal he found say directly: he not only participated, but also led the capture group. So, the statement of Beria’s son Sergo that Zhukov had nothing to do with his father’s arrest is untrue!

In the opinion of historians, Karpov’s find is also important because it refutes the rumor about Nikita Khrushchev’s heroic shot during the detention of the all-powerful Minister of Internal Affairs.
Zhukov personally did not see what happened after the arrest and therefore wrote what he learned from hearsay, namely: “After the trial, Beria was shot by the same people who guarded him. During the execution, Beria behaved very poorly, like the very last coward, cried hysterically, knelt down and, finally, soiled himself all over. In a word, he lived disgustingly and died even more disgustingly.” Note: this is what Zhukov was told, but he himself did not see it.

And here’s what military journalist S. Gribanov managed to learn from the “real” “author” of the bullet for Beria, then Colonel General P. F. Batitsky: “We took Beria down the stairs to the dungeon. That’s when I shot him.”

Everything would be fine, notes researcher Nikolai Dobryukha, if other witnesses to the execution, and General Batitsky himself, said the same thing everywhere. Although, inconsistencies could also occur due to negligence or the literary fantasies of researchers. One of whom, for example, the son of the revolutionary Antonov-Ovseenko, wrote that they allegedly executed Beria in the bunker of the Moscow Military District headquarters, in the presence of Prosecutor General Rudenko, who read out the verdict. The marshal was shot by General Batitsky. After the doctor examined the body, “Beria’s body was wrapped in canvas and sent to the crematorium.”
Everything would be fine, the researchers note, but where are the documents confirming the execution and burning of Beria? What remains a mystery, for example, is that, as follows from the execution act dated December 23, 1953, for some reason the obligatory doctor in such cases was not present at Beria’s death. And the lists of those present at the execution published by different authors do not coincide. No one saw another act - cremation, as well as the body of the person shot. Of course, with the exception of those three who signed the act. So, the question arises: “Was it Beria who was shot?”
These discrepancies could have been ignored if Beria’s son Sergo had not insisted that Shvernik, a member of that same court, told him personally: “I was part of the tribunal in the case of your father, but I never saw him.” Even more doubts were raised in Sergo by the confessions of a member of the court, former Secretary of the Central Committee Mikhailov, who stated more frankly: “A completely different person was sitting in the courtroom.” But then he explained: either an actor was put in the dock instead of Beria, or the marshal himself changed beyond recognition during the arrest? It is possible, some researchers suggest, that Beria could have doubles. ((A man with a mustache from Argentina
And now about the South American trace of the post-execution biography of Lavrentiy Beria.
In 1958, Beria's son Sergo and wife Nina Teymurazovna lived in Sverdlovsk under the wife's maiden name - Gegechkori (immediately after her husband's arrest, Nina Teymurazovna ended up in Butyrka prison). One day, in her mailbox, Nina Teymurazovna discovered a photograph in which Lavrentiy Beria was depicted with some lady on May Square in the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires. The photo was taken against the backdrop of the presidential palace. As N. Zenkovich describes, after seeing the photo, Nina Teymurazovna said: “This is the husband.”

In the mailbox, along with the photo, there was also a mysterious message: “In Anaklia, on the shores of the Black Sea, a person with very important information about your father will be waiting for you.” Nina Teymurazovna invented an illness for herself, received sick leave and flew to Georgia to meet with the unknown bearer of the news. However, no one came to the meeting. Probably, the anonymous person wanted to see Beria’s son, Sergo.

The story of the mysterious photo did not end there. Many decades later, archival documentary footage of one of the squares of Buenos Aires fell into the hands of Russian documentary filmmakers. On it, against the background of the monument, surrounded by idly walking passers-by, a walking man in a light raincoat and a dark hat is clearly visible. At the moment when he passes directly in front of the camera operator, he momentarily turns his head towards the camera and looks straight into the lens. At the same time, his face, mustache and pince-nez on his nose are clearly visible. The first reaction of everyone who saw these footage was almost the same: “This man looks like Beria!”

To make sure that the newsreels were not a skillful fake, the filmmakers turned to specialists. After a thorough examination of the film, video editing experts stated that there were no traces of artificial editing of frames and images - the filming was real.
Then the film was shown to specialists who compared the external data of the person filmed in Argentina with the data of Beria, so that they could give an opinion on their possible similarity, or vice versa. Using computer analysis, experts studied the face of the mysterious “Argentine” and Lavrentiy Beria and concluded with a probability of more than 90% that this is the same person.

To avoid a possible mistake, in the event that the man from Argentina could turn out to be a double or simply a person very similar to Beria, the film was also given to psychodynamic specialists to study. Based on a special technique that makes it possible to identify it based on normal human movements mental characteristics and on this basis to determine the psychotype of a person as a whole, experts, having compared the footage of the Argentine shooting with the footage of Beria’s lifetime, came to the conclusion that they depict the same person. It is simply impossible to fake movements so skillfully, even if desired, experts say.

It turns out that Beria, who was allegedly shot, in fact, after his official death, for a long time remained alive and living safely in Argentina? Who and for what purpose filmed Beria in Buenos Aires (if it really was him) remains a mystery. Although, there is by no means a coincidence of the place and time of the shooting and the fact that, while passing by the operator, the man turned his head and “looked” straight into the camera lens. This gives reason to assume that the shooting was done intentionally.

For what purpose could this be done? Probably in this way to remind those who continued to govern the Soviet country at that time about the existence of Beria. But why then, one wonders, did the leadership of the USSR need to create the greatest hoax with the execution of Beria, as well as release him alive in South America? The most likely version here is that many of the comrades of Stalin and Beria, who stood at the helm of the USSR after the death of the leader, were themselves afraid that Beria, having for many years had enormous opportunities to collect incriminating evidence on the entire Soviet elite, would expose their old ones, “ bloody” “sins” before the people, starting with participation in mass repressions. On the other hand, it was also impossible to leave Beria inside the country: many people had too much fear of his former power. Apparently, this is why Stalin’s heirs and Beria’s former comrades agreed on a “neutral” option: to save the marshal’s life, but send him to live as a private person away from the USSR, as was previously done with Leon Trotsky.

Is this the reason why Malenkov was silent about the events of those years? Even his son Andrei lamented that even after a third of a century his father preferred to avoid talking about what happened to Beria?
So where is the grave of the “bloody” marshal?

Prepared by Oleg Lobanov
based on materials from “Soviet Belarus”, Zenkovich N. A. “Attempts and stagings: from Lenin to Yeltsin”, Sergo Beria. “Evening Moscow” “My father is Lavrentiy Beria”, TRC “Russia”

Vladimir Tolts: He was shot on Western Christmas Eve. December 23, 1953. Although Sergei Lavrentievich, his son, assured me and many other journalists and historians that his father was killed back in June. He, the son, repeated this in his memoirs. But now, thanks to hundreds of documents published on the Beria case, it is clear that this, like many other things composed by his son, is very far from reality.

Finding myself in the West in the early 1980s, where Christmas was celebrated everywhere and, in comparison with current politically correct times, much more magnificently, I wondered why in the USSR, an atheistic state, the execution was timed to coincide with the eve of the Christmas holidays in the West? Did you want foreign public attention, focused on the upcoming celebrations, not to be particularly attracted to it? Or is this just a coincidence? Or another thing: how was the “company” of his accomplices formed, who were executed on the same day? After all, many others were sentenced already next year?... And this is only part of the questions that we will try to find answers to today - exactly 59 years after the execution on Christmas Eve of 1953 of one of the Soviet leaders Lavrentiy Beria and six of his associates...
So, executions at Christmas. 59 years later.
Now, it seems, it is clear to everyone interested in the past why Beria was so afraid of his fellow party members of the Areopagus. And why, if he was really as powerful as they imagined, he was the first to be destroyed after Stalin’s death. Even 16 years ago, while discussing these issues in one of Svoboda’s programs, Professor Rudolf Pihoya, a researcher on the history of state power in the USSR, explained to me:

Rudolf Pihoya: Why were they afraid of him? - I think that they were afraid of him not only because he exercised this total control - we can judge the degree of this total control by the way he was arrested. Obviously, he could no longer exercise this total control at this moment.
Another thing is - for what reasons? Beria had a very serious drawback for a party and statesman of the Soviet Union - he had a lot of ideas at that moment.
He interferes in domestic politics. He is actively involved foreign policy, he gets into interethnic relations...
And in this sense, it becomes inconvenient for everyone.
Secondly, well, don’t discount the fact that he’s the head of this colossal information system, which was called the Ministry of Internal Affairs, plus also the MGB. Beria did not forget that he instructed his archival department to collect materials about Malenkov’s activities, including activities related to repression. They feared Beria because he, having information, could actually blow up the then Presidium of the Central Committee.
But why was he arrested first? Because in this “circle of friends” called the Presidium of the Central Committee, relations were always quite tense, and this series of endless crises that began in 1953, ultimately ending with the October Plenum of 1964, testified that it was always a “terrarium” friends."
But Beria in this situation was the weakest link among the entire top party and state leadership. This may sound somewhat unexpected, but I want to draw your attention to the fact that Beria moved to the Ministry of Internal Affairs 8 years after he worked in this department. After 1945, he returned in 1953. People changed, the situation changed, he no longer had the control mechanism that he had before.
In addition, Beria united the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the MGB. Formally, this strengthened the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the MGB, but it brought there all the contradictions that had accumulated over the years of the independent existence of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the MGB. By that time, these departments had existed independently for 10 years and, let’s say, they lived very difficult among themselves, and at times they were simply in open confrontation. That is, his trench - his Ministry of Internal Affairs was not too deep and not too protected. In addition, Beria, of course, did not have support in the party apparatus; in the state apparatus they were afraid of him. All these circumstances made Beria very vulnerable as a figure.

Vladimir Tolts: Now that many of the documents that once could only be seen by the former chief archivist of Russia, Professor Rudolf Pihoya, have become available to us, we can try to clarify: the point is not that the “Beria trench” - the united Ministry of Internal Affairs turned out to be weakened by the internal contradictions of the security officers and the cops among themselves. Judging by the documents, the arrest of Beria turned out to be a brilliant military operation, as a result of which the army outplayed the Emvedeshniks. However, as is now clear from the declassified materials of the investigation, the latter did not offer any resistance and quite soon and without any of the torture they were accustomed to, of which many of them were masters, they began to surrender their arrested boss “in full.” And if the power had been theirs, they would have just as zealously dealt with those who decided on the anti-Beria conspiracy. So the military operation was not in vain!
Despite the considerable distance, the tank regiments of the Kantemirovskaya and Taman divisions were able to quickly and secretly reach the capital and occupy key positions there before the divisions of the internal troops responded. (Actually, they did not react.) Air support was organized just in case. - Fortunately, it was not needed... The commander of the Moscow Military District, Colonel General Artemyev, who was at command and staff exercises in Kalinin, was promptly removed and replaced by General Moskalenko, loyal to the conspirators. The neutralization of the Kremlin guards and other organizational changes took place just as quickly and smoothly - Beria’s ministerial office was taken over by his deputy Kruglov, and the removed Prosecutor General Safonov was replaced by Rudenko, who immediately took up investigative actions and legitimizing the anti-Beria conspiracy.
It has long been known that not everything went so smoothly. - Although the arrested Beria was quickly and easily taken out of the Kremlin, the original place of his imprisonment - Aleshkinsky barracks - was considered unsafe and vulnerable. We had to move the prisoner to the Moscow Military District guardhouse...
Much less known and analyzed are the problems of formulating the charge, the course and tactics of the investigation, determining the circle of accomplices and their arrests and the conduct of the trial...

June 26, 1953. PRESIDIUM OF THE SUPREME COUNCIL OF THE USSR.
DECREE“About the criminal anti-state actions of L.P. Beria"
Due to the fact that recently the criminal anti-state actions of L.P. Beria, aimed at undermining Soviet state in the interests of foreign capital, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, having considered the message of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on this issue, decides:
1. Deprive L.P. Beria's powers as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
2. Remove L.P. Beria from the post of First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and from the post of Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR.
3. Deprive L.P. Beria of all titles awarded to him, as well as orders, medals and other honorary awards.
4. The case of the criminal actions of L.P. Beria to be submitted to the Supreme Court of the USSR for consideration.

Vladimir Tolts: That's it - transfer it to court before investigation. (The criminal case, as we now know, was opened only on June 30).

From minutes No. 12 of the meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of June 29, 1953.
1. Entrust the conduct of the investigation into the Beria case to the Prosecutor General of the USSR.
2. Oblige Comrade Rudenko to select the appropriate investigative apparatus within 24 hours, reporting on the personnel to the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, and immediately begin, taking into account the instructions given at the meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee, to identify and investigate the facts of hostile anti-party and anti-state activities of Beria through his entourage ( Kobulov B., Kobulov A., Meshik, Sarkisov, Goglidze, Shariya, etc.), as well as to investigate issues related to the removal of Comrade Strokach

Vladimir Tolts: Timofey Strokach, the former Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, who was demoted by Beria after the death of Stalin to the post of head of the Lviv regional department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, wrote already on the 30th in the name of Malenkov that Beria and his henchmen were collecting dirt on the party nomenklatura, and Amayak Kobulov, whose name appeared in the minutes of the Presidium The Central Committee (he was shot almost a year later by Beria) allegedly even said that the Ministry of Internal Affairs would no longer be dependent on party officials.
Well, before the investigation began, Lavrenty Pavlovich himself managed to scribble out several letters to his former comrades Malenkov, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Molotov, begging for mercy, repenting, emphasizing his merits... In response, yesterday’s comrades ordered to take away his pencil, paper and pince-nez...
But the Kremlin had no time for his prison messages. It was urgent to neutralize the people closest to Beria who could organize resistance. Within 24 hours, already on June 27, Beria’s 1st deputy Bogdan Kobulov and former 1st Deputy Minister of State Security of the Union (in Beria’s “big Ministry of Internal Affairs” he headed the 3rd department) Sergei Goglidze, 30th Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and Georgia were arrested Pavel Meshik and Vladimir Dekanozov. The other two of those shot at Christmas 1953 - the head of the investigative unit of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs Lev Vlodzimirsky (he was arrested only on June 17) and the Minister of State Control Vsevolod Merkulov, who found himself in Butyrka on September 18, were much more limited in terms of their ability to organize resistance to Beria’s Kremlin opponents. That’s why they weren’t arrested right away. Although the former Minister of State Security of the USSR Merkulov was among the people listed here closest to Beria. - The co-author of an essay signed with the name of Beria and the author of a brochure praising Lavrentiy is the only one of his accomplices who addressed Beria as “you.” Which, however, did not prevent Vsevolod Nikolaevich from signing up as a speaker at the Central Committee plenum that opened on July 2 on the Beria case. He was not allowed to speak. But another long-time comrade of Beria, Mir Jafar Baghirov, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, spoke and branded, as expected (“ Beria is a chameleon, the worst enemy of our party. I couldn't figure it out." But this did not stop him from being shot as Beria’s accomplice. True, already in 1956.
In general, at this plenum, all yesterday’s comrades and colleagues spoke quite unanimously. But since the investigation had not yet begun, they operated with emotions rather than facts.

Vladimir Tolts: Some authors claim that among Beria’s closest collaborators in the post-war period, there was still one person who categorically refused to support the chorus of his “friends”-accusers at the Plenum. This is the “father” of the Soviet atomic bomb Academician Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov.
Immediately after Beria was imprisoned, arrests began of those who became accused in the near-Beria trials and were convicted and sentenced later. 3 days after Beria’s arrest, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Solomon Milshtein, who had previously been a big shot in the Gulag system, was arrested (Executed in October 1954.) On June 27, Deputy Minister of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs Konstantin Savitsky was arrested, on August 12 - the deputy head of the investigative unit for the Department of Internal Affairs of Beria’s “big” Ministry of Internal Affairs Georgiy Paramonov, September 25 - former minister GB of Armenia Nikita Krimyan. All of them, together with Alexander Khazan, who was arrested in the same case, were before the war investigators of the Georgian NKVD, who tortured more than a dozen people there under the leadership of Beria. They all gave extensive testimony against him, his accomplices and each other. All of them were executed after the trial in Tbilisi in November 1955...
Another group of those arrested, whose testimony was regarded by the newly appointed prosecutor Rudenko as extremely important for the upcoming interrogations of Beria, was Pyotr Shariya, who had previously been arrested in the “Mingrelian case”, but after Stalin’s death was completely rehabilitated and became Beria’s assistant in the Council of Ministers (sentenced in September 1954 to 10 years in Vladimir prison), head of department in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia Stepan Mamulov (15 years in prison in Vladimirka), Boris Lyudvigov - head of Beria’s secretariat in the Ministry of Internal Affairs (15 years in Vladimirka, but pardoned and released in 1965), Grigory Ordyntsev - head of Beria’s secretariat in the Council of Ministers (in 1954 sentenced to 8 years of exile, released in 1959) and Beria’s personal secretary, Colonel Fyodor Mukhanov, arrested for “failure to report.”
And in the summer of 1953, arrests followed of the “special contingent” - former illegal immigrants engaged in espionage and terrorist acts abroad. Among them it is necessary to name, first of all, the leaders of the operation to assassinate Trotsky, Naum Eitingon and Pavel Sudoplatov. Eitingon had already been arrested in 1951 in the “case of a Zionist conspiracy in the MGB,” but after Stalin’s death he was released, rehabilitated, and Beria appointed him head of a department in the new Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1957 he was given 12 years. He was released only in 1963. Sudoplatov was arrested on August 21, 1953 and he left the Vladimir prison, where he feigned madness, exactly 15 years later, on August 21, 1968, the day when soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia.
From the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR dated September 12, 1958:

A special laboratory, created to carry out experiments to test the effects of poisons on a living person, worked under the supervision of Sudoplatov and his deputy Eitingon from 1942 to 1946, who demanded from laboratory workers only poisons tested on humans. After the liquidation of the special laboratory, on behalf of Sudoplatov, testing of a new drug with poison was carried out several times on living people.

Vladimir Tolts: It is impossible not to mention another “grandmaster” of special operations - Yakov Serebryansky, arrested at the end of July 1953. Before this, he, a former Socialist Revolutionary, famous for the daring kidnapping of the White Guard general Kutepov in Paris, was arrested twice - in 1921 and in 1941. But each time he was released and amnestied. The authorities needed specialists in secret murders!.. But this time it was not possible to be released: Yakov Isaakovich died in Butyrka during interrogation...
And also, at least briefly, about one group of arrested persons, whose interrogations began even before Beria’s first interrogation. These are his and other accused relatives. Only one list of relatives of those executed on December 23, 1953 includes 35 names and surnames of Tam and an elderly mother, sister, sister’s husband Beria, wives and children of the other six executed. Everyone was not only interrogated, but also expelled from Georgia and the capitals. It is clear that both the son and wife of Lavrenty himself were arrested. On June 29, she wrote to her husband’s former friends - Malenkov, Khrushchev, Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich:

On the 26th of this month, they took my son [Sergei] and his family (two children, 5 and 2.5 years old, and a 7-month pregnant wife) and I don’t know where they are. I also don’t know what happened to Lavrentiy Beria, whose wife I [have been] for more than 30 years.<…>Therefore, I ask you to call me and talk to me for at least a few minutes. I can perhaps clarify some of the events that compromise him. I can’t stay in this state and ignorance for long!
If Lavrentiy Beria has already made an irreparable mistake, causing damage to the Soviet country, and his fate is predetermined, give me the opportunity to share his fate, whatever it may be.
I ask you only one thing. Spare my son.

Vladimir Tolts: Deprived of awards, scientific degrees and titles, who admitted during interrogations that his dissertations were largely the fruit of the labors of sharashka prisoners, Sergei Beria, after a year and a half in prison, was exiled to Sverdlovsk with his mother...
***
The first interrogation of Lavrentiy Beria took place only almost 2 weeks after his arrest. It was led by Prosecutor General Rudenko. Excerpts from the protocol:

“Question: You have been arrested for anti-Soviet conspiratorial activities against the Party and the Soviet state. Do you intend to tell the investigation about your criminal activities?
Beria: I categorically deny this.”

Vladimir Tolts: Rudenko started from afar: from Beria’s service in the Mussavatist counterintelligence service, which, as the investigation believed, was connected with the British. Beria retorted:

The issue of working in counterintelligence was raised by Kaminsky in 1937 at the Party Central Committee, and this accusation against me was considered unfounded. This issue was also raised in 1938 in the Central Committee of the party, and also this accusation was not confirmed.<…>
Question: In her testimony, Sharia claims that Bonapartist, dictatorial habits have been noticeable on your part recently. Is this correct?
Answer: This is absolutely not true! I can’t explain in any way why Sharia says this. I have no personal accounts with Shariya.

Vladimir Tolts: But during this interrogation, as well as during the following ones, Beria gradually admitted something. Mainly episodes and acts that could not result in “capital punishment”.

Question: Do you recognize your criminal moral corruption?

Answer: There is little. This is my fault.

Question: Do you know Sarkisov? Is this your confidant?

Answer: Yes.

Question: In his testimony, Sarkisov says that he mainly played the role of a pimp. Is it so?

Answer: Did something. I won't deny this.

Vladimir Tolts: And then in many interrogations the same plot with variations - “about venereal disease”, about mistresses at different stages life path, about “raped - not raped”...
But there were worse things. During one of the interrogations, Beria was presented with the testimony of the head of the toxicology laboratory of the NKVD-MGB, Grigory Mairanovsky, who was arrested in 1951 in the case of “a Zionist conspiracy in the MGB” and in February 1953 sentenced to ten years in prison for illegal possession of poisons and abuse of official position:
During my experiments in the use of poisons, which I tested on those sentenced to the Highest Measure of Punishment<…>, I came across the fact that some of the poisons can be used to identify the so-called “frankness” of persons under investigation. These substances turned out to be chloral-scopolamine and phenamine-benzedrine (Cola-s).
When using chloral-scopolamine (CS), I noticed that, firstly, its doses indicated in the pharmacopoeia as lethal, in fact, are not so. I have tested this many times on many subjects. In addition, I noticed a stunning effect on a person after using the CS, which lasts on average about a day. At the moment when complete stupor begins to pass and glimpses of consciousness begin to appear, then at the same time the inhibitory functions of the cerebral cortex are still absent. When carrying out the reflexology method at this time (pushing, pinching, pouring water), a number of monosyllabic answers to briefly posed questions can be revealed from the subject.
When using “Cola-S”, the subject develops a strong excited state of the cerebral cortex, prolonged insomnia for several days, depending on the dose. There is an uncontrollable need to speak out.
These data led me to think about the use of these substances during the investigation to obtain the so-called “candor” from the persons under investigation...
...For this purpose, Fedotov assigned five investigators, whose names I don’t remember (one of them seemed to be Kozyrev), as well as three types of defendants: those who confessed, those who did not confess, and those who partially confessed. I conducted experiments on them together with the investigators. The investigators briefly informed me about the circumstances of the case and the issues that were of interest to the investigation...

Vladimir Tolts: When this testimony was read out to Beria, he was indignant:
“This is a heinous crime, but this is the first time I’ve heard about it.”

Vladimir Tolts: He heard a lot during the investigation, and allegedly for the first time at the trial. About the falsification of investigative cases and the torture of those under investigation, in which his accomplices and himself took part, about secret murders and extrajudicial executions... Well, and a lot of absurd and unsubstantiated things, too. For example, that he is an English spy. Or that he was trying to undermine the Soviet Agriculture. He denied many things to the end. He tried to blame the other on his accomplices:

I remember that when talking to me about the case of Meretskov, Vannikov and others, Merkulov presented it from the standpoint of his achievements, that he had uncovered an underground government, almost organized by Hitler. I believe that the main culprit in the fabrication of this case is Merkulov, and he should bear full responsibility for this.

Vladimir Tolts: This is from the protocol of Beria’s interrogation dated October 7, 1953. By the way, it has not yet been published. As archivists tell me, they probably still haven’t declassified it. However, Khrushchev spoke about the “secret” of the Meretskov case in his memoirs:

Beria, even during Stalin’s lifetime, talked about the history of Meretskov’s arrest and took credit for his release. “I came to Comrade Stalin and said: “Comrade Stalin, Meretskov sits like an English spy. What kind of spy is he? He is an honest man. The war is on, and he sits. I could command."<…>And so, he continues Beria - Stalin said: “That’s right, call Meretskov and talk to him.” I called him and said: “Meretskov, you wrote nonsense, you are not a spy. You are an honest man, you are a Russian man.” Meretskov looks at me and answers: “I said everything. I wrote with my own hand that I am an English spy. I can’t add anything more.”<…>[Beria:] “Go to the cell, sit still, think, sleep, I’ll call you.”<…>Then, on the second day, I called Meretskov and asked: “Well, what did you think?” He began to cry: “How could I be a spy? I am a Russian person, I love my people.” He was released from prison, dressed in a general's uniform, and he went to command the front.

Vladimir Tolts: But no amount of “merit” could save Beria and his accomplices who surrendered him. They were all doomed...
***
All serious newspapers wrote about their execution in the West. But at that time it attracted much less attention than reports of Beria’s arrest. It's Christmas after all. Not before... And besides, there was also news that fit much more into the usual “Christmas format”. For example, the visit of the British Queen to New Zealand and the enormous train accident that happened in that distant country. And Russian-language newspapers were busy with other things there during Western Christmas. One of the news of those days was the birth of the heiress of the Russian Imperial House, Maria Vladimirovna...
We have no documents confirming the hypothesis that Beria’s execution was specially timed to coincide with Christmas in order to reduce its resonance abroad. Most likely, for the New Year. - Normal Soviet stereotype: finish the job by the holidays and report. And celebrate it.
My now deceased colleague, who served in the British Embassy in Moscow in the first half of the 1950s, told how the Kremlin’s receptions, starting on New Year’s Day 1954, amazed her and her colleagues with their unprecedented freedom, relaxedness and jubilation. The Kremlin celebrated their victory and freedom from fear. Few of the jubilant winners knew then that this was only the end of the first round. And in the next years, many of Beria’s victors, who joyfully raised their glasses on New Year’s Eve, a week after his execution, will fall victim.

Rescued diaries and personal notes. The most complete edition of Beria Lavrentiy Pavlovich

Personal Archive Beria. Political testament genius of power

My archive Manuscripts are birch bark, Stones are drafts. Large letters On the river bank. I don't need paper, Instead of it - forests. They are not afraid of moisture: Tears, rain, dew. The tree holds the lines: A yellow steep tree, Filled with light juice of Sticky hot tears. That's reliable

PERSONAL ACCOUNT I have seen the best minds of my generation - killed by madness, exhausted, hysterical and naked... Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" A psycho is a person who has just realized what is going on around him. William S. Burroughs That: Year of the Monkey. The last day before the new year, 1968

Personal search Search. They found poems and a prison diary. They drag me back to the psychiatric department. Two police officers take me into an empty cell and order me to strip naked. And the cell door is open into the corridor, where the prisoners, orderlies and guards stand. - Close the door! - I beg

Excerpts from the article by M. A. Fonvizin “On obedience to the highest authority, and what authority should be obeyed” (1823) ACCESSION OF NAPOLEONHAPPY HEIR French Revolution, Napoleon, gradually achieving higher power, changed the modest title of consul into a magnificent title

Myth No. 117. Stalin had a passion for power, he usurped power in the party and state and established a regime of personal power in the Soviet Union. These myths have been circulating since the very day when, at the suggestion of Lenin, on April 3, 1922, Stalin was elected general secretary of the party.

STUDENT OF GENIUS AND TEACHER OF GENIUS What is high mathematical talent? Where does a child get a craving specifically for the world of numbers, formulas, parabolas, hyperbolas? Innate or nurtured? Alexis Clairaut, at the age of twelve, wrote a scientific work devoted to the study

The vertical division of power and the regional horizontal power The vertical division of power, in other words, between the Federation and the constituent entities of the Federation, has become a real achievement of Russian democracy, our greatest democratic breakthrough. In accordance with

PERSONAL TABLE At first, the conversation quickly and cheerfully floats along a wide, deep river. And suddenly, somehow imperceptibly, he is carried into a narrow, dull, motionless backwater. “So, after the day off, let’s get to work.” There is no need to put it off, the matter is worth it. - Please follow me

Personal Epilogue Each of us has favorite memories. So be it, I will share my memories of Grace. Saturday, the afternoon before the last Christmas of her life. All morning she baked butter cookies in the shape of stars, Christmas trees, Santa Clauses and

Cardinal Richelieu Political Testament, Or Principles of Government Dedication to the King Sovereign! When Your Majesty was pleased to involve me in the management of your affairs, I set myself the goal of remembering everything that could depend on my

Personal question When Gibson was working in Turkey, in the company of his brother Archie, he met his friend, a correspondent for one of the English newspapers, and the young man’s girlfriend. She turned out to be from Chisinau, which then belonged to Romania, but to everyone she was Russian

Archive Newspaper clipping from my mother’s archive My mother, until her last day, was characterized by distrust of official history. In violation of the Main Commandment of Orwell's Ministry of History, she kept newspaper clippings, typewritten manuscripts, and copied by hand.

Personal magnetism Thoughts flash and disappear in the brain like sparks from a fire. They are replaced by hundreds, thousands of thousands of new information, images, facts, ideas. In most cases, regardless of our consciousness, colossal work of the brain is going on. And somewhere in the recesses of the mind they are deposited,

Archive During his lifetime, Vysotsky himself had no time to put his manuscripts in order. Priceless autographs lay in disarray in the drawers of the desk and on the bookshelves. On the day of Vysotsky’s death - July 25, 1980 - the first person to take care of the archive was Yu. Lyubimov. He

ARCHIVE From the notes of Gaira Veselaya In 1956, having received a message about my father’s rehabilitation, Zayara and I first went to Pokrovka to visit Uncle Vasya, he still lived there with his wife and children. Grandfather and grandmother have already died; grandfather during the war, grandmother in 1948. I waited until the last days

Decline of a genius. The authorities offer a choice: medicine or prison? By 1950, Turing had become an outcast, a kind of Trotsky of the computer revolution. Around the same time, work on Enigma also paid off: “I created a small program on a Manchester computer using only

For the “secret” classification to actually appear, the state needs compelling reasons. Most of these cases are state secrets. But many personal archives of famous people become secret at the request of heirs who do not want their ancestors to appear in an unflattering light.

The most secret documents became in 1938

A radical change in the matter of classifying information occurred in 1918, when the Main Directorate of Archives was organized under the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR. The brochure “Save the Archives” published by Bonch-Bruevich was distributed through ROSTA Windows to all government agencies, where there was, in particular, a provision on the secrecy of certain information. And in 1938, management of all archival affairs passed to the NKVD of the USSR, which classified a huge amount of information, numbering tens of thousands of files, as secret. Since 1946, this department received the name of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, and since 1995 - the FSB. Since 2016, all archives have been reassigned directly to the President of Russia.

Questions for the royal family

The so-called famous Novoromanovsky archive of the royal family has not been fully declassified. most of which was initially classified by the Bolshevik leadership, and after the 90s, part of the archival documents was made widely public. It is noteworthy that the work of the archive itself was strictly confidential. And one could guess about its activities only from indirect documents of employees: certificates, passes, payroll records, personal files of employees - this is what remains of the work of the secret Soviet archive. But the correspondence between Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Fedorovna has not been fully disclosed. Palace materials concerning the relationship between the court and ministries and departments during the First World War are also not available.

KGB Archives

Most KGB archives are classified on the grounds that the operational investigative activities of many agents can still cause damage to counterintelligence work and reveal the methodology of its work. Some successful cases in the field of terrorism, espionage, and smuggling have also been mothballed. This also applies to cases related to intelligence and operational work in the Gulag camps.

Stalin's affairs

1,700 files compiled in the 11th inventory of the Stalin Foundation were transferred from the archive of the President of the Russian Federation to the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, of which about 200 cases were classified as secret. The cases of Yezhov and Beria are of considerable interest, but they were published only in parts, and there is still no complete information on the cases of “executed enemies of the people.”

Confirmation that many more documents remain to be declassified is the fact that in 2015, at four meetings of the Interdepartmental Expert Commission on the Declassification of Documents under the Governor of St. Petersburg, 4,420 cases for the years 1919-1991 were completely declassified. Party archives are also “secret”. Of considerable interest to researchers are the resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars, the resolutions of the Council of Ministers, and the decisions of the Politburo. But most of the party archives are classified.

New archives and new secrets

The main task of the Presidential Archive established in 1991 Russian Federation was a consolidation of documents from the former archive of USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, and then the subsequent period during the reign of Boris Yeltsin. The Presidential Archives contains about 15 million different documents, but only a third of them, five million, are in the public domain today.

Secret personal archives of Vladi, Vysotsky, Solzhenitsyn

The personal funds of Soviet leader Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vladimir Vysotsky and Marina Vladi are closed to the general public. Do not think that documents are classified as “secret” only with the help of government officials. For example, the personal fund of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, stored in the Russian state archive literature and art, is in secret storage because the heir, the writer’s wife Natalya Dmitrievna, personally decides whether or not to make the documents public. She motivated her decision by the fact that documents often contain poems by Solzhenitsyn that are not particularly good, and she would not want others to know about this.

In order to make public the materials of the investigative case in which Solzhenitsyn ended up in the Gulag, it was necessary to obtain the consent of two archives - the Ministry of Defense and the Lubyanka.

Plan for "secrets"

The head of Rosarkhiv, Andrei Artizov, said in one of his interviews: “We declassify documents in accordance with our national interests. There is a declassification plan. To make a decision on declassification, three or four experts with knowledge are needed foreign languages, historical context, legislation on state secrets.”

Special Commission on Declassification

In order to declassify materials, a special commission was created in each archive. Usually - from three people who decided on what basis to give or not give wide publicity to this or that document. Secret materials are of unconditional interest to a wide range of people, but historians warn: working with archives is a delicate matter and requires certain knowledge. This is especially true for secret archival materials. Not many have access to them - thousands of documents from time to time Russian Empire and the Soviet Union are classified for various reasons.