Beria and women
During the trial of Lavrenty Beria, the many rapes he committed were mentioned. Beria raped many young women, whom his bodyguards grabbed from the street and brought to the boss's mansion. Through threats, he persuaded the wives of Soviet officials to have sex.
According to open Soviet archives, Beria committed "dozens" of attacks on women during the period when he was at the head of the NKVD. Stalin's biographer Simon Sebag-Montefiore writes that Beria proved to be a sexual predator who used his power to enjoy constant debauchery.
... An inventory of the contents of the table of Lavrenty Pavlovich, made after his arrest, reveals the interests of Beria. He was attracted to power and sex. In his office, Beria kept clubs for torturing prisoners and a mountain of women's underwear, sex toys, pornography. Eleven pairs of silk stockings, eleven teddy bears, seven silk nightgowns, women's sportswear, blouses, silk scarves, an endless number of indecent love letters, and a huge amount of male debauchery were found on him.
Despite the fantastic amount of work, Beria found time for an active sex life. Everything was equal in it: love, rape, and perversion. The war provided Beria with the opportunity to significantly surpass his predecessors in terms of sexual exploits. Secret police chiefs have always had an implicit license for sexual permissiveness. Lavrenty Pavlovich had the right to follow everyone. Only SMERSH could watch him. It turned out that Beria had the right to do literally whatever he wanted.
Previously, it was believed that the scale of the sexual life of Lavrenty Pavlovich was exaggerated. However, the disclosure of the protocols of his interrogations stored in the archives, as well as the testimonies of witnesses and victims of rape, indicate the opposite. These documents reveal a sexual predator who used power to fulfill perverted desires. It is often very difficult to divide the victims into two categories: those whom he seduced and raped when they came to ask for the lives of loved ones, and those whom he kidnapped and raped. There were, of course, such mothers, and quite a few who were engaged in pandering. They gave their daughters to a sex maniac in exchange for cars and privileges.
Lavrenty Beria, when he wanted to, could well create the appearance of a gentleman. With some of his mistresses he treated so tenderly and affectionately that they never criticized him. These women were silent even when they made the main Blue Beard of the Soviet Union out of Beria.
Muscovites are accustomed to seeing an armored "Packard" that slowly rolls through the streets of the capital. “Beria went hunting again,” they whispered. The People's Commissar regularly ordered Caucasian bodyguards, Colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraya, to put women he liked in the car. The colonels performed their tasks with great reluctance, but preferred to keep quiet. Sarkisov wrote down all the perversions of the boss in order to snitch on him to Stalin.
Women and girls were usually brought to Beria's city mansion, where, like a parody of Caucasian chivalry and hospitality, a rich Georgian table with wine was waiting for them. On the way back, one of the colonels always gave the victim a bouquet of flowers. If the abductees resisted, they were often simply arrested and thrown into prison. Actress Zoya Fedorova was seized by Chekist colonels when she was still breastfeeding a small child. She was brought to a big party. There was a set table in the room, but there were no guests. Then Lavrenty Pavlovich came out to the guest. Fedorova begged to let her go, because the actress had chest pains after feeding. Beria was furious. She was later arrested.
At the end of the war, Beria invited film actress Tatyana Okunevskaya to speak to members of the Politburo, but instead of the Kremlin, he took him to his dacha. He intensively gave the guest wine to drink, often pouring it over her knees. After dinner he undressed. Folds of fat and bulging eyes made him look like a disgusting toad.
“You can scream, but it doesn't matter,” he warned. “Better think and behave yourself.
Then the People's Commissar raped the actress. Shortly after this meeting, Okunevskaya was also arrested. She was put in solitary confinement, then sent to Siberia. She felled the forest in the taiga and, if not for the kindness of ordinary people, she would never have survived in the camp.
Violence against women was only the tip of the iceberg of the moral decay of the people's commissar of internal affairs. Beria's priapic energy was just as overflowing as the official's activity. “During the war, in 1943, I think I contracted syphilis,” he later admitted. “I had to be treated.”
After the war, Vlasik and Poskrebyshev, who had not forgotten about Bronk, told Stalin about Beria's syphilis. The sexual maniac Beria carefully recorded his victories on the love front. His colonels also kept score. Some say that there were thirty-nine names on the lists, others say seventy-nine. “Most of these women were my mistresses,” admitted Lavrenty Pavlovich.
Beria ordered Sarkisov to destroy the lists, which he did. But, being a true Chekist, he kept one copy and later used it against his master.
Some of Beria's mistresses, for example Sofya and Maya, students of the Institute of International Relations, became pregnant very inopportunely. And again, work was found for Colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraya. They arranged an abortion for them in the medical unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. If Beria still had children, the colonels handed them over to an orphanage.
Stalin tolerated the antics of his courtiers as long as they remained politically loyal to him. During the war, Lavrenty Beria pulled on himself half of the economy of the USSR. When the leader was informed about his sexual exploits, the general secretary answered with a condescending smile: "Comrade Beria is overworked and tired." But the less he trusted Beria, the less tolerant he became of licentiousness and permissiveness. Having learned one day that [his daughter] Svetlana is at Beria's house, Iosif Vissarionovich suddenly panicked. He immediately called her and told her to leave immediately. "I don't trust Beria," he explained.
When Beria noticed that Poskrebyshev's daughter was as beautiful as her mother, the head of Stalin's office said to the girl:
- Never get into the car to Beria if he offers you a lift.
The wives of the leaders Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria hated. Ashkhen Mikoyan refused to go to a banquet or any solemn event, if the people's commissar of internal affairs could also be there.
“Tell me that I have a headache,” she said to her husband and remained at home.
Beria's wife, Nina, confessed to Svetlana and other close friends that she was very unhappy. “Lavrenty is constantly away from home,” she complained. “I am alone all the time.” But her daughter-in-law claims that Nina Beria, in spite of everything, still loved her husband. She, of course, knew that he had other women, but she decided to treat this with the inherent tolerance of Georgians. Before her husband came home for the weekend, she spent hours doing manicures and makeup. Nina lived downstairs in her room. When Lavrenty arrived, she moved to the second floor to share the marital bed with him. They sat comfortably by the lit fireplace and watched Western films, most often westerns about cowboys and Mexican bandits. The favorite picture of Lavrenty Pavlovich was the western "Viva Villa!" about a Mexican national hero. The couple spoke affectionately in the Mingrelian dialect.
Nina refused to believe in all the horrors that popular rumor attributed to Beria. At least she didn't believe in all his crimes. “I don’t understand when only Lavrenty finds time to seduce these hordes of women? she asked incredulously. “He spends his days and nights at work.” Therefore, I concluded that all the women they talk about are just secret agents of Beria ... (S. Sebag-Montefiore Red Monarch: Stalin and War.)
A bouquet of flowers was given to the women raped by Beria not in vain. If the victim accepted it, then it meant that the sex was consensual. Refusal to take the flowers entailed arrest. Sarkisov reported that one woman brought to his boss rejected all harassment and ran out of the office. Sarkisov mistakenly gave her flowers, and Beria, having learned about this, announced in a rage: “Now it will not be a bouquet, but a wreath! She can leave him to wither on her grave!" That woman was arrested by the NKVD the next day.
Inclining Tatyana Okunevskaya to have sex and offering to release her father and grandmother from prison for this, Beria deliberately lied: he knew that Okunevskaya's relatives had been executed a few months ago.
Having shown interest in Marshal Voroshilov's stepdaughter during a party at their summer dacha, Beria relentlessly followed their car on the way back to the Kremlin, terrifying Voroshilov's wife.
Beria himself later admitted the fact of his infection with syphilis during interrogation. And on January 17, 2003, the Russian government recognized the authenticity of Sarkisov's handwritten "list", but decided not to disclose the names of Beria's victims until 2028.
There is evidence that Beria not only abducted and raped women, but also killed some of them. His former mansion in Moscow (28/1 Malaya Nikitskaya Street) is currently occupied by the Tunisian embassy. During work on its territory in the mid-1990s, the bones of several young girls buried in the garden were found. According to Martin Sixsmith in a BBC documentary, “Beria spent his nights with girls and girls who were kidnapped from the streets and brought here to rape him. Those who resisted were strangled and buried in his wife's rose garden."
Beria's former mansion in Moscow on Malaya Nikitskaya Street
The testimonies of Sarkisov and Nadaraya are partly corroborated by Edward Ellis Smith, an American who worked at the US Embassy in Moscow after the war. He reports that Beria's female adventures were well known to the embassy staff, because his house was on the same street as the residence of the Americans. Those who lived in it saw girls brought late at night to Beria in a limousine.
