This is the first comprehensive biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant. Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been known about his long and tumultuous career. Now, drawing on sources made available since glasnost, Amy Knight describes in chilling detail the story of Beria's climb to the top of the Stalinist system, his complex relationship with Stalin, and his bitter struggle with Khrushchev after Stalin's death. The myths that once circulated about Beria in the absence of factual information created an unbalanced picture of his career, and obscured, among other things, the immense influence that he exerted over Stalin. "Our Himmler, " Stalin called him in an exchange with Roosevelt at Yalta, and Knight reveals that the astute and intelligent Beria was just as important to Stalin as Himmler was to Hitler, if not more so. Born in 1899, twenty years after Stalin, Beria was not part of Stalin's generation of revolutionaries who fought against the tsar. But he was, like Stalin, a Georgian, and as police chief and later party chief of Georgia and Transcaucasia, he won Stalin's confidence. Moving to Moscow in 1938 to head the dreaded NKVD, Beria became responsible for all intelligence, counterintelligence, and domestic security during the prewar and war years. He also commanded the vast slave labor network of the GULAG, oversaw the evacuation of defense industries as the Germans advanced, andeventually took charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Knight sees Beria's skill at psychological manipulation as the key to his relationship with Stalin. Insecure even among his closest associates, Stalin surrounded himself mostly with malleable bureaucrats who lacked the insight
