Prominent Russians: Lavrentiy Beria.

Prominent Russians: Lavrentiy Beria.Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was certainly one of the most vicious and mysterious figures of Stalin's era. He was born on March 29 (March 17 according to the Julian calendar), 1899, to a poor Megrel (an ethnic group of Georgians) family in the village of Merkheuli, Abkhazia. Drafted into the Russian Imperial Army, he briefly saw action during World War I at the Romanian front before deserting in 1917 in order to take part in the Russian Revolution. Having joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917, Lavrentiy participated in revolutionary activities in Azerbaijan and Georgia. Meanwhile he managed to receive an architectural degree from a technical college in Baku (Azerbaijan) in 1919 and even worked for a time as a building inspector in Azerbaijan but later preferred to become a Bolshevik Party activist. Very soon he was drawn into the intelligence and counterintelligence operations of the ‘Cheka’ – the Bolshevik secret police – and in 1923 became the head of Georgia’s Cheka division.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/prominent-russians--6677656/support.