Most westernoids know about Beria is from the death of Stalin movie which is completely inaccurate so I’m asking is, are the rape accusations against him real, and are they even relevant?
Most westernoids know about Beria is from the death of Stalin movie which is completely inaccurate so I’m asking is, are the rape accusations against him real, and are they even relevant?
I am not an expert on the subject, and frankly it wouldn't shock me either way. However, it is interesting to note that Beria is the only one of Stalin's "team" whose files still haven't been declassified. Stalin, Molotov and Khrushchev archives etcetc are all open; Beria's is still sealed. It isn't even because of secret police classification: the preceding heads' archival stuff is also accessible to scholars. (Source on this is Sheila Fitzpatrick's On Stalin's Team.)
I will loosely repeat Furr since he mention this multiple times in many cases and i think he is correct: We do know that since 1956 Stalin era is being smeared by revisionists, and since 1991 capitalist Russia make this much, much worse. If those files were containing the shocking levels of depravity and crimes to prove that the anticommunist accusations are true, wouldn't people responsible for creating the black legends of Lenin, Stalin etc. actually relased that? Their politics are based on negating the past: Stalin in case of Khruschev and USSR as a whole in case of Yeltsin, why did they not do it?
And we have an example: when Stalin private correspondence was declassified, there was nothing suspicious in it, in fact, it confirmed that Stalin was honest and consistent between what he said in private and in public.
Speculation, but perhaps this is because they want to wait until the victims have passed? I suppose in that case though, they could just redact the relevant information, which to me implies a cover-up for political reasons? This feels kinda like I'm going a little of the rails, but in that situation, it only seems smart to cover that up for so long if it also implicates someone revered by the public, or I guess someone that laid out important ideological viewpoints they worried would be undermined in a dangerous way by the release of the info.
Sorry for the conspiracy theory, hope its not crackpot lol