Just who was Lavrentiy Beria? Most of us have heard his famous quote: "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime."
Beria was the head of the Soviet secret police beginning in 1938, and during his reign of that agency he conducted Joseph Stalin's purge of the old Soviet big shots who fell out of favor with Stalin. One has to figure that he made that quote while boasting about all the confessions and guilty verdicts he was able to obtain.
His famous quote comes up quite often when writers address over criminalization or seriously question the Democrats' search for impeachable offenses.
After Stalin died Beria himself became a purge target, was convicted of an assortment of crimes, and executed in 1953.
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Here's some book trivia.
The other day on this blog we talked about the novel, "Darkness at Noon," by Arthur Koestler, which was a fictional account of one such party big shot who became a victim of those Soviet purges. And the main character, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, was supposed to have been a composite of a few real people who had been subjects of those purges.
Beria is wearing pince-nez type of glasses in the photo. So it may not be a coincidence that there were at least a dozen mentions of Rubashov's pince-nez glasses in the novel.
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1:48 PM 10/26/2019
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