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?
There are two lines that emerge on Beria:
One is that he was a defender of the USSR, the CPSU, and did the dirty work necessary to protect the USSR from threats.
[CW: CSA]
The other line is that Beria was an untrustworthy figure who was an opportunist that wormed his way into a position of power in the USSR, who was responsible for the excesses of the purges, who would murder and torture his opponents, who was a child rapist that Stalin wouldn't allow his children near, and who was complicit in allowing Stalin to die rather than getting him urgent medical assistance upon experiencing a life-threatening stroke that would ultimately kill him.
I understand that one side of this is given much more weight than the other due to the accusations but it should be noted that western lib historians definitely took up the charge of popularising these accusations in the west whereas the side in defense of Beria is much smaller and less vocal. It should also be noted that things like the events of Stalin's death are wrapped up in some bold, if not outrageous, claims about how the CPSU functioned.
This is further complicated by the fact that there was an NKVD defector pipeline with figures like Orlov who would spin tall tales to sell books and to popularise narratives made from wholecloth. I don't have any particular evidence of this but I strongly suspect that this opportunistic grift was either done at the behest of western intelligence agencies like the CIA and the IRD or at the very least it was signal-boosted by these sorts of agencies. The fact that the KCIA has a DPRK defector pipeline that exists today and produces such luminaries of truth-telling as Yeonmi Park isn't some quirk of history or some relatively recent innovation imo but rather it's part of a long history of doing exactly this with detectors and the KCIA is just the most recent iteration and a refinement of tactics that have long been deployed in the service of anti-communism.
I've put Beria on a list of matters that I feel I would need to dedicate a good deal of time to investigating before I'd feel comfortable committing to any particular position tbh. He's definitely one of the more controversial figures and he is clouded by anti-communist rhetoric, by anti-Stalin rhetoric both external to and internal to the CPSU, and it's very difficult to get a good read on the situation imo.
This is my stance on it with an inclusion on the fact that the definitive truth on the man and his actions is trapped within the Russian archives, therefore we can never be truly certain one way or another.
Yeah.
If you want to get tin-foily with me I could see there being a conspiracy to keep Beria's actions and the reasons for them sequestered away in the archives out of reach of anyone because revealing the truth would run counter to the prevailing narratives and this info would vindicate Stalin and Beria.
I know this next bit is a line that needs to be dropped on libs more than it does on socialists but it's always worth keeping in mind that propaganda is less often inventing a fictitious narrative than it is in creating a high noise:signal ratio or in curating the narrative by selecting what gets emphasised, at least in the way we're exposed to propaganda in the west today. With that in mind it'd be pretty funny if the reason why Beria's stuff is still sealed is because there's incontrovertible evidence that proves that the Doctor's Plot was real or that the Katyn Massacre was done by the Nazis or that the purges were absolutely a necessity. That sort of thing.
I doubt we're ever going to know the truth about this but when there was a massive airing of grievances against Stalin beginning with the "Secret" Speech and Beria was privy to a whole lot of the excesses of the USSR, if not enacting them directly himself, so it does seem like a glaring inconsistency that they didn't unseal his stuff.
On the other hand it could just be that there's sensitive stuff and state secrets that the USSR and Russia didn't want going public but that's a far less salacious take so it's less fun to speculate about. (Heck, call me a true believer but there's no reason why it couldn't be both...)
Isn't there a third line on Beria, namely the conspiracy theory put forwards by Hoxhaists that he was part of a plot with Khrushchev to assassinate Stalin, and was disposed of by Khrushchev after the fact as a loose end/potential threat?
That's one that I haven't encountered but honestly I haven't put effort towards understanding Hoxha or Hoxhaists yet.
I have definitely heard the line that Beria was intentionally undermining the CPSU by creating an extremely hostile culture that essentially strangled the USSR, though and I guess this is either an extension of this line or it's a direct parallel to it.
The story as I've heard it is that Enver Hoxha became distraught on hearing of Stalin's death and immediately jumped to the assumption that Beria and Khrushchev had assassinated him, contributing to Albania isolating from the USSR and the whole bunker thing aimed at making it impossible for either NATO or the Soviets to invade.
On Hoxhaists in general, as I understand it "Hoxhaist" as a tendency came about following Deng's reforms in China, with some Maoist parties elsewhere redefining themselves as Hoxhaists and making denouncing revisionism their whole thing. Like if you ever run across a Hoxhaist talking about something you'll immediately know because a third of the text will just be the word "revisionist" attached to every single noun in it. Like "revisionist China made the revisionist mistake of seeing the revisionist USSR as equally wrong to the USA, leading to their revisionist policy of cooperation and trade with the USA," (I'm paraphrasing from memory, but that's an actual Hoxhaist argument that I've read) which is on the one hand a cogent criticism of post Sino-Soviet Split Chinese geopolitics but also suffers stylistically from overusing "revisionist" like that.
This is false i think, Beria presided over the late Stalin liberalisation which he continued after Stalin died. Though i think i can understand hoxhaist calling any liberalisation of CPSU "creating extremely hostile culture". Also it might have been even simpler, if you look at both men, Khruschev was extrememly good with handling people and influences, his career is one of a well oiled snake, Beria was far from this level so personal relations might have played a significant role.
What he would gain by murdering Stalin who was very ailing and not working any much anyways by then? Khruschev disposed of Beria because after gaining support of Zhukov he was only man with real power to stop Khrushchev.
And also in the process i learned how petty shit Zhukov has been about that and im' feeling pretty bad about this.