Lavrentiy beria biography definition

Soviet political figure under Joseph Stalin and head of the Soviet secret police.

Born to a poor peasant family in 1899, Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria was, like Joseph Stalin, a Georgian by nationality.

Joining Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party in March 1917, Beria participated in the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war (1918–1920) in the Red Army and in various revolutionary administrations.

By the end of the civil war Beria was working in Bolshevik intelligence organizations, and during the 1920s he rose through police ranks to become chief of the secret police in Soviet Georgia and Transcaucasia in 1930.

This position probably brought him to Stalin's notice during the dictator's holidays in that region, and in 1931 Stalin put the thirty-two-year-old Beria in charge of the entire Georgian Communist Party in the dictator's home region.

In 1938 Stalin brought Beria to Moscow to take over the Soviet secret police (NKVD) from Ni