TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051490/0514994.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT, Page 46

A Truly Terrifying Human Being

By ANDREI SAKHAROV


[From Memoirs. (c) 1990 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Translated by
Richard Lourie]


    [In July 1953, five months after Stalin died, Sakharov
noticed that the signs on Moscow's Beria Street had been
removed. Lavrenti Beria, long head of Stalin's massive secret
police apparatus and implementer of the country's Orwellian
control system, had been arrested; in December 1953, he was
executed. Sakharov met Beria in 1950 to report on the project
to develop a magnetic thermonuclear reactor.]


    I had been in No. 13, Beria's Kremlin office, many times as
part of a large group. This time I went alone. Beria was seated
as usual at the head of the conference table, wearing his
pince-nez, with a light-colored mackintosh-like cloak draped
over his shoulders. He asked me what I thought of one proposal
involving development of a magnetic thermonuclear reactor. I
answered. Then he suddenly asked, "Is there anything you want
to ask me?" I was unprepared for such a blanket offer.
Spontaneously, I asked, "Why do we always lag behind the U.S.A.
and other countries? Why are we losing the technology race?"

    Twenty years later, in a memorandum that two colleagues and
I sent to Leonid Brezhnev, we noted that insufficiently
democratic institutions of government and a lack of
intellectual freedom and free exchange of information were to
blame. At the time, however, I wasn't thinking of such matters.

    Beria gave a pragmatic answer: "Because we lack R. and D.
and a manufacturing base. Everything relies on a single
supplier, Elektrosyla. The Americans have hundreds of companies
with large manufacturing facilities."

    Beria offered me his hand. It was plump, slightly moist and
deathly cold. Only then, I think, did I realize that I was face
to face with a terrifying human being. It hadn't entered my
mind before, and I had been free in my manner. At my parents'
house that evening, I talked about meeting Beria, and their
fear made me conscious -- perhaps for the first time -- of my
own reaction.

    [After Beria's arrest, party officials gave Sakharov
startling information about his depravity.]


    In July 1953, I was shown a letter distributed by the
Central Committee to party organizations that explained Beria's
arrest. The letter was bound in a blood-red cover, so I
mentally dubbed it the "Red Book." It began by calling Beria
a bourgeois degenerate, a Mussavat [a Muslim democratic party
active in Azerbaijan from 1911 to 1918] intelligence agent who
had abused the nation's trust and committed vile crimes. It
described some of Beria's horrible deeds as Stalin's accomplice
and as a key part of the whole system of repression.

    The letter described the actions of Beria and his henchmen
in Georgia -- mass arrests, executions, cruel tortures. There
were several pages on Nestor Lakoba, chairman of the Abkhazian
Party Central Committee. After Lakoba was murdered by the NKVD
[a precursor to the KGB]  in 1936, his widow was arrested and
tortured to get her to confess to her husband's guilt. When she
refused, Beria's accomplices arrested her 14-year-old son and
began torturing the mother in front of the son and the son in
front of the mother. But they refused to denounce Lakoba, and
they were killed.

    The Red Book revealed that shortly after war broke out in
June 1941, Beria sent Stalin a list of political prisoners to
be executed; it contained about 400 names, including 40 or so
well-known party and government officials, many of them heroes
of the revolution and civil war. Stalin signed the list;
everyone on it was executed. A mention of Stalin in this
context was shocking at that time. (I was told that when this
part of the Red Book was read out at a party meeting in some
large factory, a great moan ran through the hall.) Now we know
that there were many such "preventive" and completely illegal
mass executions before and during the war. (The murder of
Polish officers at Katyn was of this nature.)

    Beria's deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, a former Ambassador to
Germany, liked to drive around the streets of Moscow looking
for women; he would rape them in his limousine in the presence
of his bodyguards and chauffeur. Beria was less crude about it.
He would walk near his house in Malaya Nikitinskaya Street and
point out women to his bodyguards, who would later deliver them
to his apartment, where he would force the women to have sex
with him. When one 14-year-old victim attempted suicide, Beria
spent the night at her bedside, but the girl could not be
saved.

    Political prisoners were often interrogated in Beria's
office. He would demand that everyone take turns beating the
victim -- the gangland practice of ensuring solidarity through
complicity. Following Beria's arrest, two truncheons were found
in the desk of office 13, where I had met him on several
occasions.

    Beria organized a "sincerity laboratory" where research was
apparently done on mind-altering drugs, and perhaps on the
technology of torture as well. The laboratory was run by the
same physician who carried out for Beria such delicate
assignments as disposing of people clandestinely, without the
formality of an arrest. The intended victim would be lured to
a secret apartment where the doctor would scratch him with a
poison-tipped cane. More than 30 people were eliminated in this
fashion. I was reminded of that story when I heard about a
Bulgarian political emigre's being murdered with a
poison-tipped umbrella.