Lavrenty Beria

Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (; ; (29 March, 1899 - 23 December, 1953), Soviet politician and police chief, is remembered chiefly as the executor of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s, although in fact he presided only over the closing stages of the Purge. His period of greatest power was during and after World War II. After Stalin's death he was removed from office and executed by Stalin's successors.

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Beria was born, the son of a peasant, in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi in the Abkhazian region of Georgia. He was educated at a technical school in Sukhumi, and is recorded as having joined the Bolshevik Party in March 1917 while an engineering student in Baku. (Some sources say that the Baku Party records are forgeries and that Beria actually joined the Party in 1919. It is also alleged that Beria joined and then deserted from the Red Army at this time, but this has not been established.)

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