KIlled in His own house / Lavrenty Beria’s son tells
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| Pages | 218 |
| ISBN | 978-9941-9724-5-4 |
9,98 ₾
He describes life at home with a man usually remembered as a prolific murderer and insatiable womaniser: ‘He liked history and loved books. He had a very good library. All of us were educated people.’ A rocket scientist by training, Sergo remembers the family mansion on Vspolny Lane, where they lived after moving from Tbilisi to Moscow in 1938, as a sanctuary of civilised conversation. Vistors, he said, included the Cambridge spy, Kim Philby, the American nuclear scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, and Golda Meir, Israel’s ambassador to Moscow. A frequent caller was Stalin’s daugher, Svetlana, whom he remembers fondly as a lost little girl but whom he also criticises for turning against her father, whom Sergo never refers to as Stalin but always by the more cosily respectful Josef Vissarionovich.
His father was Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD from 1938 until 1946 and overall chief of perhaps the most ruthless security apparatus ever assembled until Stalin’s and then his own death in 1953. After he died, owners of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia were invited to paste over a glowing entry on Beria with a substitute text on the Bering Sea.
‘I am not trying to rehabilitate my father. No one in that regime can be rehabilitated but things should be known,’ says Sergo, who has just published his memoirs in Russian: My Father: Lavrenti Beria.
