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?

  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]
    ·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • ReadFanon [any, any]
      ·
      9 months ago

      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...)