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by: Amy Knight
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 947.0842092
EAN: 9780691032573
ISBN: 0691032572
Label: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 338
Publication Date: November 15, 1993
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Sales Rank: 790151
Studio: Princeton University Press
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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 previously published about his long and tumultuous career.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma....
Amy Knight's biography of Beria deserves a place in the pantheon of post-Soviet analysis of the Soviet Union. Knight is a serious scholar and doesn't suffer from the excesses seen in other works about the Soviet Union written in the last ten year. Unfortunately, this serious approach also has a limiting factor in discussing somebody so thoroughly reviled like Beria. Unlike Stalin, who even Knight admits still maintained his followers even after he was denounced in Khrushchev's 1956 speech, Beria ... Read More
Rating:  - INFORMATIVE AND WELL RESEARCHED BOOK
I could not put this volume down. The most incredible discovery I made after reading this book was that it was the bloody monster Beria--of all the Stalin's henchmen in Kremlin-- who tried to De-Stalinize the Soviet system after Stalin's death. Khruschev's unforgetable reaction to that was an attempt to put brakes on this process. Eventually, he succeded in presenting himself as the man "who opened window to the West". Speaking about the truth in history...
This book deserves a much more popularuty ... Read More
Rating: - Laventrii Beria Outshines Joseph Djugashvili Stalin
Laventrii Beria by far outshines Joseph Djugashvili Stalin by far. As Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels was to Adolf Hitler, Beria is to Stalin, perhaps he went one better than the Nazi Minister of Propaganda? The closest person to Beria's stature today is Richard Perle, the man in the White House who influences George Walker Bush ("Junior"), 43rd U.S. President (2000-2004), like he did former president George Walker Bush ("Senior'), 41st U.S. President. Like Stalin's and Hitler's regimes, the Bush regime bears a striking ... Read More
Rating: - Don't like office politics? Read this book, then!
Having just read this, the only book-length biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's most powerful henchman, I wondered if I would have survived in Beria's world. Office politics in the Stalinist USSR was not just about bitching by the water cooler and trying to suck up to the boss (although such elements were also present, writ large). Even surviving in such an environment required degrees of political acumen and sheer nastiness that very few people need to demonstrate in our herbivorous times. Even as an apparatchik ... Read More
Rating: - Georgian Monster in Glasses
My only reservation that this book is almost as much about Georgia as about Beria. It portrays the monster of the Soviet police state who loyally did Stalin's bidding and acquired such ferocious reputation that, when Stalin died, the new leader Khruscheve thought it necessary to kill Beria to protect his own power. Well-research, this book is a valuable addition any library on Soviet politics or history.
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