Channel One launched a series in the genre of documentary drama about Soviet leaders, the authors of which made an attempt to clear their names of the fictions that appeared under Khrushchev and during the years of perestroika.
The first episode is dedicated to Lavrenty Beria, who appears not in the image of a mad executioner familiar to post-Soviet discourse, but as a “foreman of the state”, who carried out the most important assignments of the Soviet state, from the defeat of the Islamists in Transcaucasia at the beginning of his career to the creation of the nuclear shield of the USSR at its zenith .
At the beginning of the film, Beria appears as a gifted, hardworking, disciplined young man who joins the Bolsheviks on the eve of the revolution, impressed by the oppressive social inequality in Russian Empire. After this, thanks to his talents, Beria makes a brilliant career in the state security agencies of Azerbaijan and Georgia, and then moves to the all-Union level.
The most poignant moment of Beria's biography - his appointment to the post of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR after Nikolai Yezhov, who organized the Great Terror - was presented by the authors of the film without hysterics. Facts show that with the arrival of Beria, the number of executions decreased sharply, hundreds of thousands of people were released, and the organizers of abuses on an unprecedented scale were punished, including the death of Yezhov himself.
During the Great Patriotic War Beria became a member of the State Defense Committee and was responsible for the production of aircraft, engines and weapons.
After the war, he was given the task of fundamental importance for the survival of the USSR - to eliminate the US nuclear monopoly, creating conditions for scientists and gunsmiths for maximum efficiency in working on the creation of a Soviet atomic bomb. This assignment was carried out brilliantly, and the Americans abandoned plans to bomb the cities of the USSR as was done with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 1953, Lavrentiy Beria was defeated in the struggle for power after Stalin's death by a group of supporters of Nikita Khrushchev, who had the foresight to enlist the support of the army. As a result, Beria was shot after an extremely dubious trial, and his name was blackened and erased from Soviet officialdom. They remembered Beria only during the years of perestroika, but only then to finally turn him into a scarecrow in the image of a bloody executioner.
Despite all his public services, in May 2002, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court Russian Federation finally recognized Beria as not subject to rehabilitation due to his involvement in mass repressions and organizing the deportation of peoples.
The release of the film about Beria did not go unnoticed on social networks.
I rarely go into history on my blog. At the same time, history is perhaps one of my main hobbies, which has never let me go. Countries and peoples, strong and weak, victories and defeats... and people, people, people... so different and so similar everywhere, at all times!
There was a time, in my youth, that I was much further to the left than I am now. And I read quite a lot about the era of Lenin - Stalin, including reading with a pencil - psst both. I never liked Lavrentiy Beria, due to the fact that I always saw in him a careerist, and not a left-wing romantic.
Of course, I read a lot about the “Mingrelian affair”, about how Lavrentiy formed the state security system, how he acted in Abkhazia (I understand perfectly well the hatred of the Abkhazians for Lavrentiy!), how he dealt with the “bomb”, what he thought about foreign and domestic policy, and could Beria shoot after Stalin... I was also interested in why Zhukov and Bulganin sided with the fool Nikita... and you know, I see the logic in the action of Zhukov, whom I respect!
Quite by accident I came across a film about Lavrenty on Channel One.. Here is Sudoplatov’s phrase, and tales about the sexual appetites of a bald man in pince-nez, and his petty-bourgeois aspects on the one hand, but also.... on the other, that Beria is not only some kind of fairy tale about a terrible monster, but also a great official who played a fairly serious role in the red empire, who lost everything in one moment...
And those who are really interested in Lavrenty will not lose anything if they add this brushstroke made by Channel One to their portrait.
Did this film add anything to my perception of Lawrence? No. None positive feelings I don't have anything to do with him. I categorically do not accept this type of people. But, on the other hand, I’ll be honest, what came after Stalin - the Ukrainian buffoon - was an outright disgrace, which any wise observer, no matter whether he was an enemy or a friend of the red idea, could say only one thing - the red empire had been sentenced to death - it’s just a matter of time... how long she will die.
Documentary historical cycle films telling about key figures in the leadership of the Soviet Union in the period from 1917 to 1953. Felix Dzerzhinsky, Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Budyonny, Vyacheslav Molotov, Andrei Zhdanov, Victor Abakumov, Lavrentiy Beria. Their names are known throughout the country today, but few people remember how they went down in history and what they did for their state. They were in the midst of civil strife and social upheaval, changing the course of history. Cities, streets and mountain peaks were named in their honor, monuments were erected to them, their victories were taught about in schools, but they could not know that years later their biographies would be carefully edited, and all achievements would be consigned to oblivion.
Heroes of the cycle “Country of Soviets. Forgotten leaders" - military leaders, government and party leaders, whose fates became a reflection of the era. February Revolution, Civil War, “Red Terror”, repressions, the Great Patriotic War - these complex and sometimes terrible events for the country run like red lines in the biographies of the “forgotten leaders”, shape their characters and explain many actions. These difficult times were not just the background of life for the heroes of the cycle, they became their very life.
Seven people. Seven lives. One era. What is behind their decisions, and what price did they pay for their actions?
The first hero of the documentary-historical cycle - Lavrenty Beria. Throughout last decades In official historiography, Beria is presented as one of the darkest figures in the entire history of Russia. In the minds of generations, a vengeful tyrant is depicted, drowning in the blood of his enemies. He is known only as the head of the NKVD and the organizer of repressions, although the scope of repressions under him decreased significantly. As a business executive, economist and even a builder, Beria is practically unknown, although these were the main areas of his activity.
During the Great Patriotic War, Beria oversaw the work of Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence, was responsible for the production of weapons and military equipment, took over the defense of the Caucasus and was able to stop the Germans on the approaches to strategic oil reserves. In 1944, during the war, Lavrentiy Beria was appointed curator of the Soviet “atomic project”. While working on the project, he showed unique organizational skills, thanks to which the USSR acquired an atomic bomb much earlier than its opponents expected in the Cold War that had begun by that time.
On December 23, 1953, Lavrentiy Beria was sentenced to death penalty and was shot in the bunker of the Moscow Military District headquarters, but the circumstances of his arrest and death are still the subject of debate.
How and why Channel One, demonstrating Star movies Media, filmed with money allocated by the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, glorifies Stalin’s executioners as outstanding statesmen?
The historian is discussing researcher IRI RAS Igor Kurlyandsky, author of the script for the film about Lavrentiy Beria in the television series "Country of Soviets. Forgotten Leaders" Alexander Kolpakidi, historian, co-author of the book "Lavrentiy Beria. Bloody Pragmatist" Lev Lurie, historian, associate professor at Russian State University for the Humanities Yuri Tsurganov.
Conducts the program Mikhail Sokolov.
Mikhail Sokolov: The TV series “Country of Soviets. Forgotten Leaders” began airing on Channel One. This is a documentary historical series of seven films produced by order of the Russian Ministry of Culture by the Military Historical Society and the Star-Media studio. Both the Ministry of Culture and this society are headed by the same politician - Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky. The authors of this work are Alexander Kolpakidi, Vasily Shevtsov and director Pavel Sergatskov. The heroes of the series are Felix Dzerzhinsky, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Budyonny, Andrei Zhdanov, Viktor Abakumov. And Lavrentiy Beria is the first film. As Channel One reports, “these names are known throughout the country today, but few people remember how they went down in history and what they did for their state.” So we’ll try to figure out why government funds are now being spent on films about Stalin’s comrades. In our studio there are historians: senior researcher at the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences Igor Kurlyandsky, historian, associate professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities Yuri Tsurganov, co-author of the script for the television series “Forgotten Leaders” Alexander Kolpakidi. And Lev Lurie, a historian and co-author of the book “Lavrentiy Beria. The Bloody Pragmatist,” will be with us from St. Petersburg via Skype. What task did the customers set for you as a screenwriter or did they not set any task at all?
Alexander Kolpakidi: No task was set. Obviously, knowing my views on the Soviet era, that’s probably why they turned to me. I didn’t see the customer in person, I talked to them over the phone. I don’t know Medinsky, I haven’t seen the director. They called me and said: write a text. I wrote the text and sent it. As far as I understand, they shot it close to the text. The most interesting thing in this story is that it was a very long time ago - this is not a recent work, it was filmed at least two years ago. Therefore, I don’t think that we are talking about some kind of government order here.
Mikhail Sokolov: Is it government money?
Alexander Kolpakidi: I mean that this is not some kind of state action, similar, for example, to the restoration of the cross to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich.
Mikhail Sokolov: Isn’t it a task to carry out the rehabilitation process of one of the bloodiest leaders?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Certainly not a task. And then I personally don’t understand at all why any kind of rehabilitation of Beria is needed, what kind of rehabilitation is needed by the Decembrists, what kind of rehabilitation is needed by Radishchev, what kind of rehabilitation is needed by the Narodnaya Volya? Funny. History has already rehabilitated. The reaction to this film on the networks is one hundred percent positive. Everyone who writes, bloggers and others, they praise him, they say that they finally found out the truth, finally the story is shown not like the story about an elephant and the Hindus who pulled its tail and thought it was an elephant, but the whole thing is shown an elephant, with a trunk, with thick legs and a tail, naturally, and with long large ears, that is, the picture is given in its entirety.
Mikhail Sokolov: You believe that in its entirety. Igor Kurlyandsky, who wrote online about your script and film, tried to figure out where there is truth and where there is untruth. What are your first impressions?
Igor Kurlyandsky: My first impressions, to be honest, are negative, because I have been studying history for a long time Soviet era, however, in relation to the history of the confessional policy of the Stalinist state. For my last book, which is ready now, I also dealt with the problems of the so-called Beria Thaw. The data that was presented in this film did not satisfy me at all.
Mikhail Sokolov: The Beriev Thaw is, relatively speaking, the arrival of Beria to the People's Commissariat after Yezhov and the release of some people to freedom.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Here I just saw some details that surprised me.
Mikhail Sokolov: Do you think everything is wrong there?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I think it gives an incorrect picture of events. Firstly, the general message is given that Beria came, after Yezhov, he restored order, I quote the film, “he fired everyone who was connected with Yezhov’s crimes.” This is wrong. The filmmakers themselves cite data that is also in the KGB documents, 23% of those fired - this does not mean that they were all repressed, some of them were repressed, some later returned to service, some remained dismissed. If you look at the reference book that the historian Nikita Petrov published, led it, the NKVD, the MGB, the last large reference book, then you can also see that if you take the corps of perpetrators of the Great Terror, then the main part not only survived, it continued to make a career, became big bosses and so on.
Mikhail Sokolov: By the way, I would note that in the film there was such a phrase, as it were, positive about these people: “Those who ensured the security of the country during the Great Patriotic War came to the authorities.”
Igor Kurlyandsky: The second point: it is said that the education of personnel has increased, 10% had a higher education, it became 39%. You need to figure out what kind of education it was. People came there from different party groups, including under Beria. If you look at the same reference book by Nikita Petrov, then, firstly, there are many different higher party schools, institutes, communist universities or various branch institutes of communications, transport, national economy, and so on. That is, not directly related to the specifics of the special services. What kind of education was it, firstly. And the third very important objection is the size of the so-called Beria rehabilitation itself.
The film shows a table: 630 thousand people convicted of political charges during the Great Terror were released, only half in 1938. There are studies by Biener and Junge, studies on the Great Terror, there are studies by the same Nikita Petrov, that one and a half million were repressed, half were convicted, half were shot, about a hundred thousand were left without a sentence when the "troika" was abolished." The process of rehabilitation began, it was connected precisely with the abolition of the "troikas". When these cases went to the courts, they began to fall apart there. The main percentage of rehabilitation was not from those who were convicted, but from those who were not convicted in the "troikas". A small part was actually released. from prisons.
Mikhail Sokolov: So you have doubts about 600 thousand?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I have no doubt that this is not true. Nikita Petrov, Roginsky, Khotin write that 100 thousand were released during the Beria Thaw. I have doubts about this figure. This is under a counter-revolutionary article. It is very important here not to add into this figure those whose sentences have expired, those who served 5, 10 years, or were released in 1939-40, there is such a mistake. For example, I managed to find out that the famous church historian Shkarovsky incorrectly classifies Bishop Joasaph (Chernov) as one of those rehabilitated during the Beria Thaw. In 1940, he simply left because his term had run out.
Mikhail Sokolov: Yuri Tsurganov has just watched the film and can also speak out with fresh impressions. Maybe you can tell us about the ideological basis of this film, as you understand it?
Yuri Tsurganov: You predicted the angle, the direction of what I would like to say. Yes, of course, very much important task count, if possible, all those repressed, compare the era of Beria with the previous one of Yezhov, with the subsequent leaders of the Soviet State Security. But what do we see at the conceptual level? On the one hand, the film is unexpected, on the other hand, it is generally natural. There is an aphorism, more than an aphorism, that if there is a God, then there must be a Devil. In Soviet propaganda, in Soviet historiography, the role of God was, of course, assigned to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin, and Beria was chosen as a counterbalance to the negative. I don’t think that Beria was very different from his colleagues in the 1930s-40s and, accordingly, in the early 1950s. He probably had more sins than Molotov and so on, although these are comparable.
Mikhail Sokolov: Although Molotov signed so many execution lists that there are more in number than Stalin’s.
Yuri Tsurganov: Maybe. In fact, these figures are comparable. The man who initially connected during the years of the revolution and civil war his fate with Bolshevism, it cannot but be in the context of everything that happened later. This film is aimed at preparing the moral rehabilitation of Beria, it leaves me with no doubts. He tries to be objective, but nevertheless, it is clear where the dominant is.
Mikhail Sokolov: A dominant is a major statesman. Let us ask Lev Lurie, especially since Lev is the author of the book about Lavrentiy Beria, a man who not only wrote based on some archival materials, but even specially traveled to Georgia for new material, which was also included in his book. What are your impressions? It would be very interesting to speak about the concept of the film?
Lev Lurie: I only watched the first episode, it seemed to me that we were seeing Beria in the style of the 20th Congress, such a scoundrel that the rest pale in front of him. It made an impression. IN artistically The film leaves much to be desired.
Mikhail Sokolov: I think Alexander listened and wants to speak out.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I'm very happy with what I heard. Mr. Kurlyandsky said that not all security officers were fired. Yes, those who committed crimes were fired. Many were reinstated, the so-called violators of socialist legality. The main group is the so-called “Evdokimov group”, North Caucasians and people who came with Yezhov from the Central Committee - Shapiro, Zhukovsky and so on. These groups were completely exterminated, except for Litvin, who shot himself in Leningrad. These are the people who carried out the Great Terror together with Yezhov. Lyushkov escaped, there is still a dispute, by the way, we don’t know what he told the Japanese, Uspensky escaped, he was caught and also shot. Some small security officers in the field who actually remained.
Mikhail Sokolov: The heads of departments remained.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Very little. It was precisely the check that was carried out; most of those involved were shot. Some of them redeemed themselves during the war, as they say, on the fronts, behind enemy lines. This has all been described more than once; we are talking about hundreds of security officers who died and became heroes. These are violators of social law, who were not shot immediately, but were convicted. By the way, there are many scouts among them. The second point is education. I don’t understand how Beria can be compromised by the fact that the security officers he brought in did not have a very good education.
Mikhail Sokolov: Not very accurate data can compromise your film, that's what I say. And Igor Kurlyandsky spoke about this.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Issued sizes. Even in the basic measure of values in modern world, in the most recent source of knowledge in the modern world on Wikipedia, and it is written that the data is different on the number of issued.
Mikhail Sokolov: If you increase their number by 5 times, then you naturally give a plus to Lavrentiy Beria.
Alexander Kolpakidi: This controversial issue. The main thing is that people were released, and it was Beria who released them. Now, I don’t agree with what Mr. Tsurganov said, he was very different from, for example, Khrushchev, the beloved figure of our liberal intelligentsia. Because Beria was the leader of his republic, and Khrushchev led the Moscow party organization, and then the Ukrainian one. The percentage of those repressed where Khrushchev was is much higher than the percentage in Georgia. If you read the Jung you mentioned and so on, the percentage of those repressed in Georgia is very average. But everyone who more or less knows the history of our republics understands that in Georgia they should have shot the most people, because Georgia was filled with nationalists, former Mensheviks, the uprising of 1924, the struggle over the creation of the Soviet Union precisely because of Georgia .
Who did Ordzhonikidze hit in the face? To the Georgian member of the Central Committee Kabakhidze, who called him a Stalinist donkey. And he didn’t calm down, he continued, and all these people continued this squabble. The Georgian party organization was simply a thorn in Stalin's side. Of course, if Beria had not been different, he would have shot as many as Khrushchev. But he was precisely different - he was a moderate man, he understood that it was impossible otherwise. By the way, there is this Georgy Mamulia, a Georgian emigrant who lives in Paris and works there, he has an article, the only scientific article about repressions in Georgia, he writes there in black and white several times that Beria is not responsible, that Beria was forced to do this .
Mikhail Sokolov: And he is so poor, unhappy.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Now you can be ironic as much as you like, but then people had no time to laugh.
Mikhail Sokolov: Let's give Lev Lurie the floor.
Mikhail Sokolov: Yuri, what do you say? It turns out that Lavrentiy Beria is a moderate communist leader in the same Transcaucasia, do you agree with this?
Yuri Tsurganov: No, I don't agree. My interlocutors give different figures, but not only is everything measured by the number of corpses, there were more or less of them. In any case, this person bears responsibility for broken destinies, for interrupted lives. If he had been a truly decent person, he would not have associated himself with Bolshevism in principle. In the conditions of the civil war there were alternatives.
Mikhail Sokolov: He worked in the Musavatist counterintelligence, we still don’t know whether he was sent by the Bolsheviks or whether he joined this regime, for example, and then managed to reorient himself.
Yuri Tsurganov: One of the very memorable phrases of the film is “we will never know.” There are many things we will truly never know. He could have gone with the Mensheviks, he could have become a political emigrant in the early 1920s. There were many ways.
Alexander Kolpakidi: And he went with his people.
Mikhail Sokolov: In your film, the vocabulary is this: if the people rebelled against the terrorist Bolshevik regime, this is a rebellion. Everything that is presented against the Soviet regime is in negative terms.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Soviet power is people's power. Everyone who goes against Soviet power goes against their people.
Mikhail Sokolov: Where did you get the idea that it is popular?
Alexander Kolpakidi: The majority of the population thinks so. Last week, a survey of students and network users was conducted, and it turned out that 45% would vote for the Bolsheviks in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, twice as many as voted in 1917. These are students, the most fooled people in our country.
Mikhail Sokolov: Question about polls. We have a survey conducted by the Levada Center: for recent years The number of people who approve of the repressions and approve of Stalin’s activities is growing, which was inevitable. This ratio is changing. I think, Alexander, this is due to you and the films that are being made that 36% are ready to justify human sacrifices by the results achieved during the Stalin era, only 26% consider Stalin a state criminal. The number of Russians who consider Stalin's repressions a crime has decreased over five years from 51 to 39%. This is the result of such remarkable activities of Mr. Medinsky, the Military Historical Society, Channel One and screenwriter Kolpakidi.
Alexander Kolpakidi: We are on a liberal forum, who spoke strongly negatively about this film the day before? "Tsargrad". It turns out that we have only two population groups - the obscurantists-Black Hundreds, 10% of the population, and 10% of liberals. 80% against. At Tsargrad there was a rather funny discussion, they insisted that even if one person was shot innocently, Beria means he is an executioner, a tyrant and all that.
Mikhail Sokolov: He also raped women.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Lev Lurie will refute it, I’m sure. Yuri Zhukov says: “Tell me, name at least one innocent person.” The presenter says: “Here you go, I have friends - Hmayak Nazaretyan.” He is a major Bolshevik, at one time he headed Stalin's secretariat. I immediately went to Wikipedia: shot in Moscow, arrested in Moscow in 1937. What does Beria have to do with it?
Mikhail Sokolov: Who arrested and killed Meyerhold, who killed Babel? Dozens of such names.
Alexander Kolpakidi: We all know very well, let’s not lie, that the majority, peak, huge percentage of repressions are the work of Yezhov’s gang.
Igor Kurlyandsky: There was one Stalinist gang, and there were various artists– Yezhov’s, and others Beria’s. The Berievskys arrested and shot fewer people, because the political situation was already different, the Great Terror had passed, the mechanism of terror had slowed down, although it continued.
Lev Lurie: It seems to me that both sides are wrong. As for Alexander Kolpakidi, we must still remember that the investigation in the Georgian NKVD was harsher than in any other, where prisoners sentenced to death were beaten before death, where they invented a hot punishment cell, where people were boiled alive, where people were slaughtered in droves interrogations. You are talking about the Georgian Communist Party. Indeed, the percentage of people arrested in Georgia is somewhat lower compared to other places. If we take the percentage of arrested communists, it is simply colossal. Essentially all members of the Communist Party with experience up to approximately 1920-25, all former leaders Beria were destroyed one way or another. So to say that there is no blood on Beria is simply meaningless. He personally took part in the torture, he had blood on him like no one else, because he was a hard-working, responsible person.
On the other hand, it makes no sense to deny that there was a Beria Thaw. Beria really did produce, although they began to plant an order of magnitude less in 1939 compared to 1937-38. Therefore, the question here is this: it is possible and necessary to make films about Beria and Molotov - these are figures of Russian history. As for the objective view, it seems to me that we should not cry or laugh, but establish the truth, but instead we are engaged in clarifying some relationships, and not looking at the sources.
Mikhail Sokolov: What is important for you then in connection with this film, do you think that this is some kind of signal to society? There are poll results, society loves Stalin more and more.
Lev Lurie: How can you believe in the results of the surveys, the results of the surveys, we know how are done. And this is a completely strange idea that the majority of people are on the side of those who defended Soviet power and did not betray it. Has Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin betrayed Soviet power? Did Anatoly Sobchak betray the Soviet regime? Did Nikolai Ryzhkov betray Soviet power? Everyone betrayed Soviet power, except Comrade Zyuganov, and even then everything with him is very difficult. So what you say does not stand up to criticism at all. Under Soviet rule, they didn’t say anything about Beria, they didn’t talk about anyone else, they didn’t talk about Stalin.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Let's think like historians and politicize this story less. Actually, in the film it sounded like Beria came as a restorer of justice after the Yezhov gang and so on. But Beria did not have such an independent role as the head of the punitive authorities; he strictly subordinated to the political leadership of the Central Committee and Stalin. Of course he was in to a greater extent pragmatist than the previous leader. They say that Beria released so many and so many, but look at the documents related to the mechanism of the Beria Thaw itself.
The “troikas” were cancelled, and the process of accepting complaints became possible because the appropriate decisions were made. When the “troikas” were cancelled, a lot of complaints poured in, prosecutors considered them, and they went to the courts. The courts released people; indeed, there was a month when the percentage of acquittals in the courts was high and cases fell apart. Did Beria release it or did the system release it? Of course, Beria took part in this, the security officers prepared documents, agreed on some things, disagreed on others. But in many cases they did not agree. The heads of departments already wrote certificates like Beria's: social origin is not the same, that is to be refused. A massive process of refusals began back in 1939, with a small percentage of satisfied complaints. The regime did everything to prevent the amnesty from being massive, in order to narrow it down and limit it as much as possible.
Then the process of winding down the Beria Thaw began, which you don’t talk about in the film, it needs to be said. On the initiative of Stalin in March 1940, one directive was that those who were acquitted should be returned back to places of imprisonment, because the NKVD should consider this, who should be released and who not, the majority were refused. April 1940, when a new directive, already signed by Prosecutor Pankratiev and the same Beria, when all previous decrees that allowed for the review of complaints were canceled. Prosecutors can appeal, but this will be considered by another body, not the courts - a Special Meeting under the NKVD. Biener and Junge write that this is how the insignificant Beria thaw ended.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, I also watched your film, where you are a screenwriter, you have released one very important topic. You say - violators of socialist legality. But Lavrentiy Beria himself was a violator of socialist legality. Extrajudicial contract killings, the use of poisons from Dr. Mairanovsky’s laboratory, lethal injections to “enemies of the people.” It’s not for me to tell you, give you all sorts of names. The murder of the USSR Plenipotentiary Representative in China Luganets and his wife, when he was killed with a hammer, his wife was strangled, then buried with honor. Or the kidnapping of Marshal Kulik’s wife and her execution by Beria’s officers. According to the testimony in the Beria case, everything is clear who did what, according to what instructions, and so on. Why are you missing these topics?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Firstly, I am amazed by the logic of Mr. Kurlyandsky. When he was called to Moscow, they were afraid of a coup. Leonid Naumov believes that there was a conspiracy.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Cheap conspiracy theory, where did it come from, what do you rely on?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Do you think Leonid Naumov is a cheap conspirator?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I think he just has fantasies. I read that he has some assumptions that he generalizes.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I want to note that Leonid Naumov is a completely person, liberal views, a like-minded person of Mr. Kurlyandsky. Of course, it’s interesting that they didn’t agree with each other here. About contract killings. We don’t know why these people were killed.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander Shumsky, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Was Beria involved in the murder of Shumsky?
Igor Kurlyandsky: Shumsky is no longer ready for the murder. All the same, this was carried out by Beria’s cadres, but the Beriaites remained.
Mikhail Sokolov: Was the laboratory created under Beria?
Alexander Kolpakidi: The laboratory was created, strictly speaking, under Yezhov.
Mikhail Sokolov: Beria did not close it.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Is there no such laboratory in America? We don't have such a laboratory now? Tell me a country where there is no such laboratory?
Mikhail Sokolov: Where are prisoners killed using poisons?
Alexander Kolpakidi: They killed German criminals sentenced to execution during the war, captured, and sentenced to death for their crimes. In America, people voluntarily give subscriptions. President Clinton apologized to the people of Guatemala for the fact that for four years the Americans conducted experiments on mentally ill Guatemalans to introduce syphilis and treat them. All people do these things.
Mikhail Sokolov: So you justify crimes?
Alexander Kolpakidi: I'm not making excuses. I want to say that we don’t know why they did this to Kulik’s wife and why they did this to the ambassador. We just know a fact.
Mikhail Sokolov: A fact of crime even from the point of view of Soviet legality.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Anyone present doubts that Beria received this order.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Execution of criminal orders is a crime, this was established by the Nuremberg trials.
Alexander Kolpakidi: We don't know why this order was given.
Mikhail Sokolov: If you knew the reason for the murder, would it be easier for you?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Of course, if I knew whether Tukhachevsky was a conspirator or not, it would be easier for me, but I doubt it. You all know this, but I doubt it, I question everything.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander follows his own line, the same as in the film, in one way or another trying to justify a person, I really like the title “The verdict is not subject to appeal,” a person whom the Russian court found unworthy of rehabilitation - Lavrentiy Beria.
Yuri Tsurganov: Beria was a major functionary of a criminal state. If we apply the Nuremberg Statutes to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, we will see many analogies. At the same time, we can, looking at the twentieth century, observe the following: the region with which Beria is connected by origin, by birth, in the same twentieth century produced a brilliant galaxy of worthy people who played a role in politics. This is Noah Jordania, for example, if we take the beginning of the twentieth century, this is Valery Chelidze, if we take practically our era, Semyon Gigilashvili, if we take approximately the middle part, a personal friend, ally.
Mikhail Sokolov: I would remember Irakli Tsereteli.
Yuri Tsurganov: Of course, the matter is not limited to the three names that I mentioned. I would like to say warm words about them. And try to rehabilitate people who hardly deserve it. It’s good that more and more films are being produced about this; of course, we need a discussion, different points of view. As I am not a Black Hundred, but someone who dares to call himself a person of rather a liberal persuasion, let that be, but let there be something else.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Interesting topic. Noah Jordania, the main one, of course, is Georgian and the greatest is Ilya Chavchavadze, of course. In 1937, Beria held a magnificent anniversary in honor of his memory.
Mikhail Sokolov: At the same time, Georgian poets, Tabidze, Yashvili were killed.
Alexander Kolpakidi: The same Noah Jordania who said that Western imperialism is better than Eastern barbarism. I just want to clarify that eastern barbarism is Mr. Kurlyandsky, Mr. Sokolov, these are Russians, this is Russia. Who did he mean by eastern barbarism? Who did the great cinematographer Otar Ioseliani mean when he said: we endured and despised for two hundred years? Did they tolerate and despise Stalin for two hundred years?
Mikhail Sokolov: Didn’t Georgia rebel against Stalin, against Bolshevism? In your film you have this plot of the most brutal suppression of an uprising.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Why are more lies being poured out on Beria and Stalin in Georgia now than in all three Baltic republics combined on some Kalnberzin or Snechkus? Because the goal is to tear Georgia away from our country and turn it into an enemy.
Mikhail Sokolov: Don’t forget that Georgia has long been an independent state.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Where American and foreign agents work, who receive grants, receive support from various American foundations, and so on.
Mikhail Sokolov: This is bad? This is an independent state.
Alexander Kolpakidi: This is wonderful, I'm happy for these people. When they tried to erect a monument to Stalin in Gori, not in the center, but near the museum, Western diplomats prohibited it.
Mikhail Sokolov: Lev Lurie was in Georgia not so long ago and, it seems, wants to continue.
Lev Lurie: I was struck by the strangeness of your conversation that you need to make a film about Jordania and Rustaveli, and not about Beria. Actually, what are we talking about? Beria, no matter how you look at him, is a major historical figure. We have not yet talked about what he did in 1953 - he killed Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, one Georgian to another. He outlined a reform plan political system, which failed to launch but was wildly progressive nonetheless. He was a man who proposed giving the union republics more independence. He was the man who proposed moving the center of control from the Central Committee to the government. Is this not enough? It is clear that they were all scoundrels in their own way, but we are still historians, we must engage in politics.
Igor Kurlyandsky: We should not engage in politics; if we are historians, we should restore the picture of events.
Mikhail Sokolov: We were talking about one period, Lev Lurie took us, quickly jumping over the war, jumping through the whole historical period, through the nuclear project, space and so on, which Alexander said a lot about in this film, jumping straight to 1953. I don’t have any particular objections, but the thesis “Beria killed Stalin,” frankly speaking, seems very controversial to me. Did Berin kill Stalin or not?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I think not. Eat historical research, sources, Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage, a stroke. It is known that he lay for a day without medical care; his comrades did not dare to call doctors.
Yuri Tsurganov: There is such a thing as failure to provide timely medical care. Probably the classic work on this topic belongs to Avtarkhanov, “The Mystery of Stalin’s Death,” “The Beria Conspiracy,” this book has this subtitle.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, are you also for killing Lavrenty Pavlovich Joseph Vissarionovich?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Unlike those present, I have no answer to many questions. I wanted to support Lev Yakovlevich in the sense that this is really what we are talking about. Man created a poor, starving Georgia, where citrus fruits did not grow as they do now, there were swamps there, people were starving, he created the most powerful one.
Mikhail Sokolov: The swamps began to be drained, contrary to your film, long before Lavrentiy Beria.
Alexander Kolpakidi: But they drained it in front of him. Many things began under the tsar, but for some reason they ended under Stalin. A man who played a colossal role during the war. In addition to the fact that he led the NKVD, intelligence, counterintelligence, internal troops, he became a marshal.
Mikhail Sokolov: He evicted peoples, he evicted 61 people.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Did he come up with this himself or was he assigned to do it?
Mikhail Sokolov: But we don’t know, I don’t have an answer. I came up with it and got approval. You speak approvingly about this in the film.
Alexander Kolpakidi: The person who oversaw the State Defense Committee, being the deputy chairman of the State Defense Committee, one of the five heads of the State Defense Committee, oversaw the production of aircraft, the Air Force, tanks, railway transport, who played a colossal role in the war, of course, incommensurable with the role of Stalin, who won the battle for the Caucasus.
Mikhail Sokolov: And in the camps, how many died at that time - about a million people.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Mortality in the camps during the war was lower than in the wild. There is such data - this has long been an established fact.
Igor Kurlyandsky: There are studies by the excellent Gulag historian Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, she has all these figures.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Are there figures that the death rate in the Gulag was higher than in the wild?
Mikhail Sokolov: What do you think, with or without the blockade of Leningrad?
Igor Kurlyandsky: If you look at the rear, then, of course, the mortality rate was higher in 1942-43. And if you look from the front...
Alexander Kolpakidi: It is written everywhere that the mortality rate in the camps under Beria was halved - this is a fact.
Mikhail Sokolov: This was before the war, and then it was wild. Another question raised by Lev Lurie is about the reformer Beria. Was Lavrentiy Beria a reformer who wanted to change Soviet Union in 1953?
Alexander Kolpakidi: This is the most difficult question because these reforms have just begun. The fact that reforms were necessary back in the late 1940s is clear to everyone. They were necessary because it was difficult to repeat the modernization of the 1930s a second time, resources were exhausted, and everyone understood that some kind of reforms had to be undertaken. Stalin had already stayed too long. Although I am considered a Stalinist, I am not a Stalinist, I understand that since the late 1940s it would have been better for Stalin to leave and make room. Unfortunately, he did not do this, his comrades did not do this. The same situation happened in Spain under Franco. He certainly carried out reforms, he started them. Undeservedly, all the laurels went to Mr. Khrushchev, a man who was different from him in everything - mediocre, inept, unable to do anything, but cunning and vile.
Mikhail Sokolov: And the 20th Congress was held and people were released from the camps.
Igor Kurlyandsky: What was Khrushchev’s meanness?
Alexander Kolpakidi: The fact that he danced Kamarinsky in front of Stalin before he had time to die...
Igor Kurlyandsky: Stalin's meanness was that he organized massive illegal repressions against the citizens of his country.
Mikhail Sokolov: The question was whether Beria was a reformer.
Alexander Kolpakidi: He was not allowed to carry out reforms.
Yuri Tsurganov: He was, of course, a cunning and extraordinary man. Exists modern concept- an image maker, he was one himself. You can contact classic work“Steep route” by Evgenia Ginzburg, how the camera rejoiced when they received the newspaper with Lavrenty Pavlovich’s portrait, these unfortunate women: look at what an intelligent face, he has glasses or pince-nez on his nose, relief will probably come. Although, according to some data from the historian Georgy Pavlovich Homizuri, Beria had excellent eyesight and did not need any glass. But this is an image of an intelligentsia or an intelligent one, depending on who will pronounce this word in which audience. This was, of course, further, and after the Second World War. Talks about the unification of Germany, for example, in this sense some reform initiatives are visible. But in the name of what? Creating your own reputation, which is beneficial. And in a hypothetical case, although a historian should not argue this way, of course, under Beria the Soviet Union would have remained a despotic power, I have no doubt about that.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Reformism, I agree, of course, he began to carry out reforms. Because he sought power, when a new leader comes to power, he seeks to put forward an alternative program and proposals. It went beyond the boundaries of Soviet discourse and marked the beginning of de-Stalinization. But this does not justify the crimes he committed. This is not a political issue; the issue of the historical accuracy of this film is very important here. I believe that from a specific historical perspective this film does not stand up to criticism. He is biased, he grossly distorts history. He adjusts historical reality to the actual task of creating good image Beria. The audience watches and thinks: yes, Beria is good. And the fact that he evicted peoples is that before the war, pre-war deportation, 86 thousand people from the Baltic states, mass arrests in the western territories annexed, 1939-41.
Of course, fewer arrests were made within the country, because the country was already tired of such powerful terror that had happened before. But to say that under Beria the system of early release from the camps was preserved, as in the film, when in June 1939 Stalin abolished the credits for working days, and Beria carried it out with his instructions, this is incorrect. To say that they paid wages, although symbolic wages began to be paid after Beria in 1946, is incorrect. To say that half of the political prisoners were released in 1939-40 during the Beria Thaw is incorrect; a very small percentage were released. If we talk about the official figure of those released, this is 7% of those arrested in 1937-38. One and a half million is Article 58, where all sorts of fictitious cases are in place. And among the criminals you kindly mentioned, in the continent of camps, there are a lot of those who went for all sorts of ears, also for far-fetched economic matters.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Beria did not let go of the ears of corn.
Mikhail Sokolov: Amnesty for up to 5 years, released in 1953.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Yes, indeed, a criminal amnesty.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Why criminal? Are pregnant women a crime?
Igor Kurlyandsky: This amnesty is a huge blessing, but it did not affect the counter-revolutionaries who survived in the camps, Khrushchev, whom you dislike, has already done this, he released them. There may be a lot of complaints against Khrushchev, but still he was not such a bloody executioner as Beria, because he was not at the head of the punitive machine.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Who closed the churches?
Igor Kurlyandsky: Khrushchev. Stalin also closed churches.
Lev Lurie: You know, you’re somehow arguing about the wrong things. According to my information and the information of Arseny Roginsky, one hundred thousand people were released - this is a lot in 1938, but they could have released more. What are we talking about, that Beria was an absolute good, that he was Jesus Christ? No. He, like all political figures, especially political figures of Stalin’s time, such as Khrushchev, Molotov, Shepilov who joined them, and so on, possessed a certain set of qualities that and only those that allowed him to be at the top of this regime. The fact that Beria killed Stalin is not only my opinion, not only Avtarkhanov’s, it is also shown in the wonderful book by Edward Radzinsky, which should not be underestimated. The fact that he released the surviving participants in the “Leningrad case”, closed the “doctors’ case”, began to rehabilitate the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, closed the senseless construction projects of communism, wanted to truly Finlandize Germany - there is simply no doubt about it. And there is not the slightest doubt that Khrushchev was just as bloody an executioner as Beria.
Mikhail Sokolov: Why do you think such a film is needed today?
Lev Lurie: This is a pretty pointless question. Why do you need " Captain's daughter"was in the 1820s? Why is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich needed? It is needed simply because people watch it, it was directed by Mr. Kolpakidi. The film, from my point of view, has nothing to do with Kolpakidi, it is creatively absolutely helpless. Beria looks like an absolutely scoundrel, Beria is the way Khrushchev described him. Why did Medinsky order this series of films? Probably because he wants to find some kind of continuity with the Soviet state. Do we not understand this? ?
Mikhail Sokolov: Another interesting thing I would note with this film is the way it is executed. This is a monologue, this is an announcer's text, this is a kind of indoctrination when people are instilled with thoughts, sometimes true, sometimes not so true, and they show newsreels and some dummy actors who portray Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria. This is a movie that, I would say, was made using the brainwashing method. I wanted to ask about one subject that cannot but excite the public - the image of Beria as a person. You, Alexander, as I suspect, judging by the film, are fighting for good name Lavrentiy Pavlovich, are you proving that he was not a villainous rapist who kidnapped women from the streets, do you think that all this was made up?
Alexander Kolpakidi: I mean, as Mark Twain said, “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” I personally had the opportunity to communicate with one of these women. There is such a book “I was the mistress of Lavrentiy Beria”, it was published in huge quantities already during perestroika. This is the lady I talked to. I can say one hundred percent - she was an absolute schizophrenic, crazy about sex, it was simply scary to talk to her. If the rest of the women are like that.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Indeed a fact. We are now getting into our personal lives. As Rina Zelenaya said: “Love is a butterfly and don’t touch it with your dirty hands, otherwise the butterfly will die.” I’ll just say, here’s Drozdova, there was a child. He had not lived with his wife for 7 years before, they had some problems. To the mansion, now on the Internet someone posted an excellent post about the mansion: I was in this mansion, there’s nowhere for an apple to fall. How could they drag some woman there and rape her?
Mikhail Sokolov: Do you think Beria didn’t have safe houses?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Still, they talk about the mansion. I think this is all the dirt that Khrushchev tried to pour on him. All this is sewn with white thread. They had to conduct a confrontation according to the law. They didn't. The same as with Rasputin. We now have Rasputin as a saint, there was nothing at all.
Mikhail Sokolov: Who said he was a saint?
Alexander Kolpakidi: You are behind the times. He had mistresses because he did not live with his wife, of course, but this is not a crime.
Mikhail Sokolov: 117?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Of course not. I think two or three. Exactly Drozdova.
Mikhail Sokolov: “The court established that Beria committed rape of women. So on May 7, having fraudulently lured 16-year-old schoolgirl Drozdova into his mansion, he raped her. Witness Kalashnikova testified...” and so on.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Beria denied this; according to the law, there should have been a confrontation.
Mikhail Sokolov: I agree that the investigation into the Beria case was conducted disgracefully. However, all these stories are about forced cohabitation, rape, and so on.
Alexander Kolpakidi: These are all stories. In 1988 there was an article about a pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union and his wife. No one reported then that the pilot was in a psychiatric hospital three times, where he died.
Mikhail Sokolov: This is Sergei Shchirov. By the way, he became an alcoholic after he was imprisoned for 25 years and then released.
Alexander Kolpakidi: They imprisoned him because he was going to cross the state border, and not because Beria seduced his wife. Did you seduce him? The wife denied this. It is known that he also did not live with her, went out, drank, had a bunch of mistresses. All these accusations against Beria are of this kind. The butterfly will die.
Mikhail Sokolov: Adjutant Sarkisov did not kidnap women or transport them?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Adjutant Sarkisov was just writing his affairs on the orders of his superiors when he was arrested, on Lavrenty Pavlovich. There is a report about this.
Mikhail Sokolov: I'm just wondering, there are facts, and there is their interpretation.
Alexander Kolpakidi: What are the facts? You say it yourself - an ugly investigation, there are no real stakes, no signatures, no photographs, no fingerprints.
Mikhail Sokolov: So you think that everything is falsified? Everything else - murders, torture, is everything falsified too?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Now, if only there was a similar volume nearby about how Beria was deputy chairman of the State Defense Committee during the war.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Do you think this will rehabilitate him? I'm not sure.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I have already said that he does not need government rehabilitation, the people have already rehabilitated him.
Mikhail Sokolov: As he was an executioner, he remained so.
Igor Kurlyandsky: The people are something very multifaceted and speaking for them as a whole, in my opinion, is frivolous and irresponsible.
Alexander Kolpakidi: For me, “monster oblo, mischievous and laya” are those who give Beria 52% approval before the film and 26% after the film.
Igor Kurlyandsky: For me, “the monster is oblo, mischievous and laya” - it’s you and the creators of this film or people like you.
Mikhail Sokolov: Have the people, as our guest claims, rehabilitated Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria?
Yuri Tsurganov: I don’t have data about 52%, but at the same time I can readily believe that 52% treat Beria well, I’ll even believe 72%. But it is very interesting to see the level of education, culture, profession of people who are for Beria and against, and we will see very interesting picture. Plus one more motivation, it’s called that in common parlance: to spite my mother, I’ll freeze my ears off. If Gaidar and Chubais are bad, then Beria is good - that’s how many people argue. Therefore, 52% may well be real, but what is behind this?
Igor Kurlyandsky: We don't know what's behind this percentage. We talk about pathology, about rape and so on. What was there, what wasn’t, it is necessary to open archives, interrogations, and so on. In my opinion, the pathology was still manifested in another, not at the everyday voluptuous level, namely that a person is not just a cog, a gear, but such a large mechanism, not the most important, of course, of this system, he grinds people, grinds destinies, life and so on. Here is one touch to the portrait of Beria, which I accidentally saw today in our institute kiosk. The volume “The Politburo and the Saboteurs” was published, where all sorts of sabotage processes were endlessly falsified from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, when they began to falsify less. There, Beria simply writes to Stalin: “These are such and such engineers, they have such and such projects with shortcomings. I propose to arrest them, I suspect sabotage there.” Stalin writes – “arrest”.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Even Academician Sakharov, your idol, wrote that Beria...
Igor Kurlyandsky: First of all, don’t come up with any nonsense, I have no idols and no idols.
Mikhail Sokolov: If Sakharov could praise Beria for the atomic project, what's wrong with that?
Igor Kurlyandsky: You sing the hymn to the sharashkas, do you understand that this is humiliating?
Alexander Kolpakidi: I’m not singing a hymn to the Sharashka, I’m saying that we are alive and in an independent country thanks to the nuclear weapons that Beria created. Molotov was entrusted with tanks during the war, he failed, Beria was entrusted with them, he did it. In 1949, the American monopoly collapsed, and you were probably unhappy about it. That's why you probably don't like Beria.
Mikhail Sokolov: I definitely don't like Beria.
Igor Kurlyandsky: I don't like it completely different.
Alexander Kolpakidi: You don’t like it because now we speak with the Americans as equals, and we are not their six, because we are not grant-suckers, and our people are not grant-suckers.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, by the way, I don’t like your position.
Igor Kurlyandsky: I understand your political pathos, but you are not standing on a factual source basis.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Beria did not create atomic bomb? All scientists recognized that without him nothing would have happened.
Mikhail Sokolov: Without the data stolen in the West, there would be no data.
Igor Kurlyandsky: He coordinated the project, of course.
Alexander Kolpakidi: In spite of Beria, would they have built an atomic bomb, in spite of Beria would they have won the war?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I have not done research on the atomic project; this requires special research. 135,696 people were arrested in these political cases in 1939-40, when the Beria Thaw was underway. 86 thousand are being expelled from the Baltic states, western Ukraine, western Belarus, Moldova, and so on.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Haven't you heard about the Forest Brothers?
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, you were silent in the film, for example, the Katyn case, where Lavrenty Pavlovich proposed to shoot 20 thousand people.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I don’t know who shot these people, there are different points of view.
Mikhail Sokolov: There are no different points From the point of view, there is a decision of the Politburo, there are documents.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I question everything.
Mikhail Sokolov: That's why you don't talk about it in the film. That's why the film is monologue, that's why there are no experts in the film, that's why there are no other opinions, there's only one opinion.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I can recruit a million experts. Lev Lurie had a film there huge amount experts said the same thing that was in this film.
Lev Lurie: You have a rather pointless argument, you just shout at each other, and don’t deal with Beria. One says that Beria is great, but no one knows who executed the shooting in Katyn, but Putin has already said who executed the shooting in Katyn. And others shout that nothing can be filmed about him. Beria, undoubtedly, was a very important independent political figure in Soviet times. He was not Molotov, not Bulganin, in this sense Khrushchev is similar to him. They had a certain common idea that concerned not only him personally, but concerned the fate of the country. I don’t think, here I agree with Mr. Kolpakidi, that Beria was an incredibly immoral type. We see how the Khrushchev investigation was unable to prove anything. Once again I want to say that it is pointless to educate people on the image of Beria, Beria is a bloody executioner, he is an insect. It is impossible to make him a person whom young people can imitate. But it is impossible not to study Beria, considering that Beria was a nonentity or that it amounted only to executioner.
Mikhail Sokolov: And you yourself called it an insect.
Lev Lurie: He is absolutely an insect, I don’t give up on that at all. This is a person devoid of whatever you have human qualities and feelings, for whom there were no friends, who first flattered his eyes, and then killed, and killed painfully. Natural sadist - it's all true. But he killed Stalin and did not help him quite deliberately. He was wildly glad when Stalin died. He told Molotov on the platform of the Mausoleum: “I saved you all from him.” These are Molotov's memoirs. This means we should be grateful to Lavrenty Pavlovich for saving us from Joseph Vissarionovich.
Mikhail Sokolov: He got rid of Joseph Vissarionovich, perhaps, but he created atomic weapons, which extended the life of the communist regime for decades. Torment Russian people Also, I suspect, this is precisely why it took so long to finally get out of the communist regime that Alexander Kolpakidi loves so much.
Yuri Tsurganov: I agree with you. My favorite literary hero Innokenty Volodin. Read at least the first chapter of Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle”, you will understand what I’m talking about now.
Mikhail Sokolov: The man who tried to prevent the creation nuclear weapons Soviet Union.
Yuri Tsurganov: I tried to warn the Americans to stop their citizen’s deal related to the nuclear project, his contact with a Soviet agent for the transfer of this data.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, why are you laughing?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Because you exposed yourself in front of the eyes of respected television viewers.
Igor Kurlyandsky: In the eyes of Alexander, Innokenty Volodin is a traitor to his homeland.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Of course, a traitor to the motherland. This is America, an empire of not only lies, but also evil. And the Soviet Union was the most best country in the history of civilization.
Mikhail Sokolov: This "best country" has killed millions of its citizens.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I didn't kill anyone, and neither did my parents. We went to pioneer camp, we were sent abroad.
Mikhail Sokolov: How many were shot in 1937-38? 700 thousand minimum.
Igor Kurlyandsky: And how many died during the years of collectivization.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Churchill organized a famine of three and a half million in West Bengal in 1943. None of you even heard this.
Mikhail Sokolov: Don’t you know about the Holodomor, organized by Stalin? We are talking about Beria and Stalin, and you are talking about Churchill.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Roosevelt put Japanese workers in the desert, 40 degrees, and zero at night.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Don't you see the difference between a hostile army and your own people?
Alexander Kolpakidi: The Soviet Union is an empire of development and goodness. Communism is the future of humanity.
Mikhail Sokolov: We will never agree with you. Including Lavrenty Beria.
Igor Kurlyandsky: The campaigns and realities that took place then, starting with Chekism, if we take the period of the Civil War, are not consistent with the measurement of goodness; it was not only a reaction to the whites - it was the repressive side of the utopia “let’s drive everyone by force, humanity into happiness.” Accordingly, therefore, dissidents were killed, all the years of the existence of Soviet power were destroyed in one stream or another, on one scale or another, in one way or another, by Abakumov, Yezhov, Beria, various leaders, starting from Lenin, Stalin and so on. Because there was no other way to drive us into communist happiness.
Mikhail Sokolov: Let's look at a short poll and try to understand whether the people who walk the streets in Moscow are on the side of Alexander Kolpakidi, or on the side of his opponents.
Survey on the streets of Moscow
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, are you satisfied? Are there any like-minded people there, loyal Beriaites?
Alexander Kolpakidi: What should I be pleased with, I know that the majority of people support this position even without this survey.
Lev Lurie: The problem is not whitewashing or not whitewashing, main lesson What we must learn from Beria's story is that any tyrant is killed by his minions. Beria organized the murder of the tyrant. Tyranny eventually comes to an end - this is what the life of Lavrenty Pavlovich tells us about. Those who kill a tyrant are killed by other tyrants. This is a wonderful story, such a parable.
Mikhail Sokolov: You are clearly looking at things with historical optimism.
Yuri Tsurganov: In principle, I have already said that the majority may not be right. There is a person, Vladimir Bukovsky, who remembers his childhood, he sits on the roof of a three-story building and sees crowds of people crying for Stalin, 1953, March. Vladimir Konstantinovich said: “It was then, at a young age, that I realized that the majority may not be right.”
Igor Kurlyandsky: I don’t understand at all why the majority is an indisputable argument. Why does the quantitative component become a criterion of truth? The criterion of truth can only be reliably established facts and, accordingly, their honest, deep, comprehensive understanding.
Mikhail Sokolov: Do you see this on television?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I absolutely don’t see this on television. I see false propaganda films, absolutely biased, distorting. I oppose this because I consider myself an honest historian.
How and why does Channel One, showing Star Media films made with money allocated by the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, glorify Stalin’s executioners as outstanding statesmen?
Discussed by a historian, researcher at the IRI RAS Igor Kurlyandsky, author of the script for the film about Lavrentiy Beria in the television series "Country of Soviets. Forgotten Leaders" Alexander Kolpakidi, historian, co-author of the book "Lavrentiy Beria. Bloody Pragmatist" Lev Lurie, historian, associate professor at Russian State University for the Humanities Yuri Tsurganov.
Conducts the program Mikhail Sokolov.
Mikhail Sokolov: The TV series “Country of Soviets. Forgotten Leaders” began airing on Channel One. This is a documentary historical series of seven films produced by order of the Russian Ministry of Culture by the Military Historical Society and the Star-Media studio. Both the Ministry of Culture and this society are headed by the same politician - Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky. The authors of this work are Alexander Kolpakidi, Vasily Shevtsov and director Pavel Sergatskov. The heroes of the series are Felix Dzerzhinsky, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Budyonny, Andrei Zhdanov, Viktor Abakumov. And Lavrentiy Beria is the first film. As Channel One reports, “these names are known throughout the country today, but few people remember how they went down in history and what they did for their state.” So we’ll try to figure out why government funds are now being spent on films about Stalin’s comrades. In our studio there are historians: senior researcher at the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences Igor Kurlyandsky, historian, associate professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities Yuri Tsurganov, co-author of the script for the television series “Forgotten Leaders” Alexander Kolpakidi. And Lev Lurie, a historian and co-author of the book “Lavrentiy Beria. The Bloody Pragmatist,” will be with us from St. Petersburg via Skype. What task did the customers set for you as a screenwriter or did they not set any task at all?
Alexander Kolpakidi: No task was set. Obviously, knowing my views on the Soviet era, that’s probably why they turned to me. I didn’t see the customer in person, I talked to them over the phone. I don’t know Medinsky, I haven’t seen the director. They called me and said: write a text. I wrote the text and sent it. As far as I understand, they shot it close to the text. The most interesting thing in this story is that it was a very long time ago - this is not a recent work, it was filmed at least two years ago. Therefore, I don’t think that we are talking about some kind of government order here.
Mikhail Sokolov: Is it government money?
Alexander Kolpakidi: I mean that this is not some kind of state action, similar, for example, to the restoration of the cross to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich.
Mikhail Sokolov: Isn’t it a task to carry out the rehabilitation process of one of the bloodiest leaders?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Certainly not a task. And then I personally don’t understand at all why any kind of rehabilitation of Beria is needed, what kind of rehabilitation is needed by the Decembrists, what kind of rehabilitation is needed by Radishchev, what kind of rehabilitation is needed by the Narodnaya Volya? Funny. History has already rehabilitated. The reaction to this film on the networks is one hundred percent positive. Everyone who writes, bloggers and others, they praise him, they say that they finally found out the truth, finally the story is shown not like the story about an elephant and the Hindus who pulled its tail and thought it was an elephant, but the whole thing is shown an elephant, with a trunk, with thick legs and a tail, naturally, and with long large ears, that is, the picture is given in its entirety.
Mikhail Sokolov: You believe that in its entirety. Igor Kurlyandsky, who wrote online about your script and film, tried to figure out where there is truth and where there is untruth. What are your first impressions?
Igor Kurlyandsky: My first impressions, to be honest, are negative, because I have been studying the history of the Soviet era for a long time, albeit in relation to the history of the confessional policy of the Stalinist state. For my last book, which is ready now, I also dealt with the problems of the so-called Beria Thaw. The data that was presented in this film did not satisfy me at all.
Mikhail Sokolov: The Beriev Thaw is, relatively speaking, the arrival of Beria to the People's Commissariat after Yezhov and the release of some people to freedom.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Here I just saw some details that surprised me.
Mikhail Sokolov: Do you think everything is wrong there?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I think it gives an incorrect picture of events. Firstly, the general message is given that Beria came, after Yezhov, he restored order, I quote the film, “he fired everyone who was connected with Yezhov’s crimes.” This is wrong. The filmmakers themselves cite data that is also in the KGB documents, 23% of those fired - this does not mean that they were all repressed, some of them were repressed, some later returned to service, some remained dismissed. If you look at the reference book that the historian Nikita Petrov published, led it, the NKVD, the MGB, the last large reference book, then you can also see that if you take the corps of perpetrators of the Great Terror, then the main part not only survived, it continued to make a career, became big bosses and so on.
Mikhail Sokolov: By the way, I would note that in the film there was such a phrase, as it were, positive about these people: “Those who ensured the security of the country during the Great Patriotic War came to the authorities.”
Igor Kurlyandsky: The second point: it is said that the education of personnel has increased, 10% had a higher education, it became 39%. You need to figure out what kind of education it was. People came there from different party groups, including under Beria. If you look at the same reference book by Nikita Petrov, then, firstly, there are many different higher party schools, institutes, communist universities or various branch institutes of communications, transport, national economy, and so on. That is, not directly related to the specifics of the special services. What kind of education was it, firstly. And the third very important objection is the size of the so-called Beria rehabilitation itself.
The film shows a table: 630 thousand people convicted of political charges during the Great Terror were released, only half in 1938. There are studies by Biener and Junge, studies on the Great Terror, there are studies by the same Nikita Petrov, that one and a half million were repressed, half were convicted, half were shot, about a hundred thousand were left without a sentence when the "troika" was abolished." The process of rehabilitation began, it was connected precisely with the abolition of the "troikas". When these cases went to the courts, they began to fall apart there. The main percentage of rehabilitation was not from those who were convicted, but from those who were not convicted in the "troikas". A small part was actually released. from prisons.
Mikhail Sokolov: So you have doubts about 600 thousand?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I have no doubt that this is not true. Nikita Petrov, Roginsky, Khotin write that 100 thousand were released during the Beria Thaw. I have doubts about this figure. This is under a counter-revolutionary article. It is very important here not to add into this figure those whose sentences have expired, those who served 5, 10 years, or were released in 1939-40, there is such a mistake. For example, I managed to find out that the famous church historian Shkarovsky incorrectly classifies Bishop Joasaph (Chernov) as one of those rehabilitated during the Beria Thaw. In 1940, he simply left because his term had run out.
Mikhail Sokolov: Yuri Tsurganov has just watched the film and can also speak out with fresh impressions. Maybe you can tell us about the ideological basis of this film, as you understand it?
Yuri Tsurganov: You predicted the angle, the direction of what I would like to say. Yes, of course, a very important task is to count, if possible, all those repressed, to compare the era of Beria with the previous one of Yezhov, with the subsequent leaders of the Soviet State Security. But what do we see at the conceptual level? On the one hand, the film is unexpected, on the other hand, it is generally natural. There is an aphorism, more than an aphorism, that if there is a God, then there must be a Devil. In Soviet propaganda, in Soviet historiography, the role of God was, of course, assigned to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin, and Beria was chosen as a counterbalance to the negative. I don’t think that Beria was very different from his colleagues in the 1930s-40s and, accordingly, in the early 1950s. He probably had more sins than Molotov and so on, although these are comparable.
Mikhail Sokolov: Although Molotov signed so many execution lists that there are more in number than Stalin’s.
Yuri Tsurganov: Maybe. In fact, these figures are comparable. A person who initially linked his fate with Bolshevism during the years of the revolution and civil war, he cannot help but be in the context of everything that happened afterwards. This film is aimed at preparing the moral rehabilitation of Beria, it leaves me with no doubts. He tries to be objective, but nevertheless, it is clear where the dominant is.
Mikhail Sokolov: A dominant is a major statesman. Let us ask Lev Lurie, especially since Lev is the author of the book about Lavrentiy Beria, a man who not only wrote based on some archival materials, but even specially traveled to Georgia for new material, which was also included in his book. What are your impressions? It would be very interesting to speak about the concept of the film?
Lev Lurie: I only watched the first episode, it seemed to me that we were seeing Beria in the style of the 20th Congress, such a scoundrel that the rest pale in front of him. It made an impression. Artistically, the film leaves much to be desired.
Mikhail Sokolov: I think Alexander listened and wants to speak out.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I'm very happy with what I heard. Mr. Kurlyandsky said that not all security officers were fired. Yes, those who committed crimes were fired. Many were reinstated, the so-called violators of socialist legality. The main group is the so-called “Evdokimov group”, North Caucasians and people who came with Yezhov from the Central Committee - Shapiro, Zhukovsky and so on. These groups were completely exterminated, except for Litvin, who shot himself in Leningrad. These are the people who carried out the Great Terror together with Yezhov. Lyushkov escaped, there is still a dispute, by the way, we don’t know what he told the Japanese, Uspensky escaped, he was caught and also shot. Some small security officers in the field who actually remained.
Mikhail Sokolov: The heads of departments remained.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Very little. It was precisely the check that was carried out; most of those involved were shot. Some of them redeemed themselves during the war, as they say, on the fronts, behind enemy lines. This has all been described more than once; we are talking about hundreds of security officers who died and became heroes. These are violators of social law, who were not shot immediately, but were convicted. By the way, there are many scouts among them. The second point is education. I don’t understand how Beria can be compromised by the fact that the security officers he brought in did not have a very good education.
Mikhail Sokolov: Not very accurate data can compromise your film, that's what I say. And Igor Kurlyandsky spoke about this.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Issued sizes. Even in the main measure of values in the modern world, in the most recent source of knowledge in the modern world in Wikipedia, it is written that the data is different about the number of issued.
Mikhail Sokolov: If you increase their number by 5 times, then you naturally give a plus to Lavrentiy Beria.
Alexander Kolpakidi: This is a controversial issue. The main thing is that people were released, and it was Beria who released them. Now, I don’t agree with what Mr. Tsurganov said, he was very different from, for example, Khrushchev, the beloved figure of our liberal intelligentsia. Because Beria was the leader of his republic, and Khrushchev led the Moscow party organization, and then the Ukrainian one. The percentage of those repressed where Khrushchev was is much higher than the percentage in Georgia. If you read the Jung you mentioned and so on, the percentage of those repressed in Georgia is very average. But everyone who more or less knows the history of our republics understands that in Georgia they should have shot the most people, because Georgia was filled with nationalists, former Mensheviks, the uprising of 1924, the struggle over the creation of the Soviet Union precisely because of Georgia .
Who did Ordzhonikidze hit in the face? To the Georgian member of the Central Committee Kabakhidze, who called him a Stalinist donkey. And he didn’t calm down, he continued, and all these people continued this squabble. The Georgian party organization was simply a thorn in Stalin's side. Of course, if Beria had not been different, he would have shot as many as Khrushchev. But he was precisely different - he was a moderate man, he understood that it was impossible otherwise. By the way, there is this Georgy Mamulia, a Georgian emigrant who lives in Paris and works there, he has an article, the only scientific article about repressions in Georgia, he writes there in black and white several times that Beria is not responsible, that Beria was forced to do this .
Mikhail Sokolov: And he is so poor, unhappy.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Now you can be ironic as much as you like, but then people had no time to laugh.
Mikhail Sokolov: Let's give Lev Lurie the floor.
Mikhail Sokolov: Yuri, what do you say? It turns out that Lavrentiy Beria is a moderate communist leader in the same Transcaucasia, do you agree with this?
Yuri Tsurganov: No, I don't agree. My interlocutors give different figures, but not only is everything measured by the number of corpses, there were more or less of them. In any case, this person bears responsibility for broken destinies, for interrupted lives. If he had been a truly decent person, he would not have associated himself with Bolshevism in principle. In the conditions of the civil war there were alternatives.
Mikhail Sokolov: He worked in the Musavatist counterintelligence, we still don’t know whether he was sent by the Bolsheviks or whether he joined this regime, for example, and then managed to reorient himself.
Yuri Tsurganov: One of the very memorable phrases of the film is “we will never know.” There are many things we will truly never know. He could have gone with the Mensheviks, he could have become a political emigrant in the early 1920s. There were many ways.
Alexander Kolpakidi: And he went with his people.
Mikhail Sokolov: In your film, the vocabulary is this: if the people rebelled against the terrorist Bolshevik regime, this is a rebellion. Everything that is presented against the Soviet regime is in negative terms.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Soviet power is people's power. Everyone who goes against Soviet power goes against their people.
Mikhail Sokolov: Where did you get the idea that it is popular?
Alexander Kolpakidi: The majority of the population thinks so. Last week, a survey of students and network users was conducted, and it turned out that 45% would vote for the Bolsheviks in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, twice as many as voted in 1917. These are students, the most fooled people in our country.
Mikhail Sokolov: Question about polls. We have a survey conducted by the Levada Center: in recent years, the number of people who approve of repressions and approve of Stalin’s activities has been growing, that this was inevitable. This ratio is changing. I think, Alexander, this is due to you and the films that are being made that 36% are ready to justify human sacrifices by the results achieved during the Stalin era, only 26% consider Stalin a state criminal. The number of Russians who consider Stalin's repressions a crime has decreased over five years from 51 to 39%. This is the result of such remarkable activities of Mr. Medinsky, the Military Historical Society, Channel One and screenwriter Kolpakidi.
Alexander Kolpakidi: We are on a liberal forum, who spoke strongly negatively about this film the day before? "Tsargrad". It turns out that we have only two population groups - the obscurantists-Black Hundreds, 10% of the population, and 10% of liberals. 80% against. At Tsargrad there was a rather funny discussion, they insisted that even if one person was shot innocently, Beria means he is an executioner, a tyrant and all that.
Mikhail Sokolov: He also raped women.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Lev Lurie will refute it, I’m sure. Yuri Zhukov says: “Tell me, name at least one innocent person.” The presenter says: “Here you go, I have friends - Hmayak Nazaretyan.” He is a major Bolshevik, at one time he headed Stalin's secretariat. I immediately went to Wikipedia: shot in Moscow, arrested in Moscow in 1937. What does Beria have to do with it?
Mikhail Sokolov: Who arrested and killed Meyerhold, who killed Babel? Dozens of such names.
Alexander Kolpakidi: We all know very well, let’s not lie, that the majority, peak, huge percentage of repressions are the work of Yezhov’s gang.
Igor Kurlyandsky: There was one Stalinist gang, but there were different performers - Yezhov’s, and others Beria’s. The Berievskys arrested and shot fewer people, because the political situation was already different, the Great Terror had passed, the mechanism of terror had slowed down, although it continued.
Lev Lurie: It seems to me that both sides are wrong. As for Alexander Kolpakidi, we must still remember that the investigation in the Georgian NKVD was harsher than in any other, where prisoners sentenced to death were beaten before death, where they invented a hot punishment cell, where people were boiled alive, where people were slaughtered in droves interrogations. You are talking about the Georgian Communist Party. Indeed, the percentage of people arrested in Georgia is somewhat lower compared to other places. If we take the percentage of arrested communists, it is simply colossal. Essentially all members of the Communist Party with experience up to approximately 1920-25, all former leaders of Beria were destroyed in one way or another. So to say that there is no blood on Beria is simply meaningless. He personally took part in the torture, he had blood on him like no one else, because he was a hard-working, responsible person.
On the other hand, it makes no sense to deny that there was a Beria Thaw. Beria really did produce, although they began to plant an order of magnitude less in 1939 compared to 1937-38. Therefore, the question here is this: it is possible and necessary to make films about Beria and Molotov - these are figures of Russian history. As for the objective view, it seems to me that we should not cry or laugh, but establish the truth, but instead we are engaged in clarifying some relationships, and not looking at the sources.
Mikhail Sokolov: What is important for you then in connection with this film, do you think that this is some kind of signal to society? There are poll results, society loves Stalin more and more.
Lev Lurie: How can you believe in the results of the surveys, the results of the surveys, we know how are done. And this is a completely strange idea that the majority of people are on the side of those who defended Soviet power and did not betray it. Has Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin betrayed Soviet power? Did Anatoly Sobchak betray the Soviet regime? Did Nikolai Ryzhkov betray Soviet power? Everyone betrayed Soviet power, except Comrade Zyuganov, and even then everything with him is very difficult. So what you say does not stand up to criticism at all. Under Soviet rule, they didn’t say anything about Beria, they didn’t talk about anyone else, they didn’t talk about Stalin.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Let's think like historians and politicize this story less. Actually, in the film it sounded like Beria came as a restorer of justice after the Yezhov gang and so on. But Beria did not have such an independent role as the head of the punitive authorities; he strictly subordinated to the political leadership of the Central Committee and Stalin. He, of course, was more of a pragmatist than the previous leader. They say that Beria released so many and so many, but look at the documents related to the mechanism of the Beria Thaw itself.
The “troikas” were cancelled, and the process of accepting complaints became possible because the appropriate decisions were made. When the “troikas” were cancelled, a lot of complaints poured in, prosecutors considered them, and they went to the courts. The courts released people; indeed, there was a month when the percentage of acquittals in the courts was high and cases fell apart. Did Beria release it or did the system release it? Of course, Beria took part in this, the security officers prepared documents, agreed on some things, disagreed on others. But in many cases they did not agree. The heads of departments already wrote certificates like Beria's: social origin is not the same, that is to be refused. A massive process of refusals began back in 1939, with a small percentage of satisfied complaints. The regime did everything to prevent the amnesty from being massive, in order to narrow it down and limit it as much as possible.
Then the process of winding down the Beria Thaw began, which you don’t talk about in the film, it needs to be said. On the initiative of Stalin in March 1940, one directive was that those who were acquitted should be returned back to places of imprisonment, because the NKVD should consider this, who should be released and who not, the majority were refused. April 1940, when a new directive, already signed by Prosecutor Pankratiev and the same Beria, when all previous decrees that allowed for the review of complaints were canceled. Prosecutors can appeal, but this will be considered by another body, not the courts - a Special Meeting under the NKVD. Biener and Junge write that this is how the insignificant Beria thaw ended.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, I also watched your film, where you are a screenwriter, you have released one very important topic. You say - violators of socialist legality. But Lavrentiy Beria himself was a violator of socialist legality. Extrajudicial contract killings, the use of poisons from Dr. Mairanovsky’s laboratory, lethal injections to “enemies of the people.” It’s not for me to tell you, give you all sorts of names. The murder of the USSR Plenipotentiary Representative in China Luganets and his wife, when he was killed with a hammer, his wife was strangled, then buried with honor. Or the kidnapping of Marshal Kulik’s wife and her execution by Beria’s officers. According to the testimony in the Beria case, everything is clear who did what, according to what instructions, and so on. Why are you missing these topics?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Firstly, I am amazed by the logic of Mr. Kurlyandsky. When he was called to Moscow, they were afraid of a coup. Leonid Naumov believes that there was a conspiracy.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Cheap conspiracy theory, where did it come from, what do you rely on?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Do you think Leonid Naumov is a cheap conspirator?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I think he just has fantasies. I read that he has some assumptions that he generalizes.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I want to note that Leonid Naumov is a person of completely liberal views, a like-minded person of Mr. Kurlyandsky. Of course, it’s interesting that they didn’t agree with each other here. About contract killings. We don’t know why these people were killed.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander Shumsky, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Was Beria involved in the murder of Shumsky?
Igor Kurlyandsky: Shumsky is no longer ready for the murder. All the same, this was carried out by Beria’s cadres, but the Beriaites remained.
Mikhail Sokolov: Was the laboratory created under Beria?
Alexander Kolpakidi: The laboratory was created, strictly speaking, under Yezhov.
Mikhail Sokolov: Beria did not close it.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Is there no such laboratory in America? We don't have such a laboratory now? Tell me a country where there is no such laboratory?
Mikhail Sokolov: Where are prisoners killed using poisons?
Alexander Kolpakidi: They killed German criminals sentenced to execution during the war, captured, and sentenced to death for their crimes. In America, people voluntarily give subscriptions. President Clinton apologized to the people of Guatemala for the fact that for four years the Americans conducted experiments on mentally ill Guatemalans to introduce syphilis and treat them. All people do these things.
Mikhail Sokolov: So you justify crimes?
Alexander Kolpakidi: I'm not making excuses. I want to say that we don’t know why they did this to Kulik’s wife and why they did this to the ambassador. We just know a fact.
Mikhail Sokolov: A fact of crime even from the point of view of Soviet legality.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Anyone present doubts that Beria received this order.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Execution of criminal orders is a crime, this was established by the Nuremberg trials.
Alexander Kolpakidi: We don't know why this order was given.
Mikhail Sokolov: If you knew the reason for the murder, would it be easier for you?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Of course, if I knew whether Tukhachevsky was a conspirator or not, it would be easier for me, but I doubt it. You all know this, but I doubt it, I question everything.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander follows his own line, the same as in the film, in one way or another trying to justify a person, I really like the title “The verdict is not subject to appeal,” a person whom the Russian court found unworthy of rehabilitation - Lavrentiy Beria.
Yuri Tsurganov: Beria was a major functionary of a criminal state. If we apply the Nuremberg Statutes to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, we will see many analogies. At the same time, we can, looking at the twentieth century, observe the following: the region with which Beria is connected by origin, by birth, in the same twentieth century produced a brilliant galaxy of worthy people who played a role in politics. This is Noah Jordania, for example, if we take the beginning of the twentieth century, this is Valery Chelidze, if we take practically our era, Semyon Gigilashvili, if we take approximately the middle part, a personal friend, ally.
Mikhail Sokolov: I would remember Irakli Tsereteli.
Yuri Tsurganov: Of course, the matter is not limited to the three names that I mentioned. I would like to say warm words about them. And try to rehabilitate people who hardly deserve it. It’s good that more and more films are being produced about this; of course, we need a discussion, different points of view. As I am not a Black Hundred, but someone who dares to call himself a person of rather a liberal persuasion, let that be, but let there be something else.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Interesting topic. Noah Jordania, the main one, of course, is Georgian and the greatest is Ilya Chavchavadze, of course. In 1937, Beria held a magnificent anniversary in honor of his memory.
Mikhail Sokolov: At the same time, Georgian poets, Tabidze, Yashvili were killed.
Alexander Kolpakidi: The same Noah Jordania who said that Western imperialism is better than Eastern barbarism. I just want to clarify that eastern barbarism is Mr. Kurlyandsky, Mr. Sokolov, these are Russians, this is Russia. Who did he mean by eastern barbarism? Who did the great cinematographer Otar Ioseliani mean when he said: we endured and despised for two hundred years? Did they tolerate and despise Stalin for two hundred years?
Mikhail Sokolov: Didn’t Georgia rebel against Stalin, against Bolshevism? In your film you have this plot of the most brutal suppression of an uprising.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Why are more lies being poured out on Beria and Stalin in Georgia now than in all three Baltic republics combined on some Kalnberzin or Snechkus? Because the goal is to tear Georgia away from our country and turn it into an enemy.
Mikhail Sokolov: Don’t forget that Georgia has long been an independent state.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Where American and foreign agents work, who receive grants, receive support from various American foundations, and so on.
Mikhail Sokolov: This is bad? This is an independent state.
Alexander Kolpakidi: This is wonderful, I'm happy for these people. When they tried to erect a monument to Stalin in Gori, not in the center, but near the museum, Western diplomats prohibited it.
Mikhail Sokolov: Lev Lurie was in Georgia not so long ago and, it seems, wants to continue.
Lev Lurie: I was struck by the strangeness of your conversation that you need to make a film about Jordania and Rustaveli, and not about Beria. Actually, what are we talking about? Beria, no matter how you look at him, is a major historical figure. We have not yet talked about what he did in 1953 - he killed Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, one Georgian to another. He outlined a plan for political reform that never took off but was nonetheless wildly progressive. He was a man who proposed giving the union republics more independence. He was the man who proposed moving the center of control from the Central Committee to the government. Is this not enough? It is clear that they were all scoundrels in their own way, but we are still historians, we must engage in politics.
Igor Kurlyandsky: We should not engage in politics; if we are historians, we should restore the picture of events.
Mikhail Sokolov: We were talking about one period, Lev Lurie took us, quickly jumping over the war, jumping through the whole historical period, through the nuclear project, space and so on, which Alexander said a lot about in this film, jumping straight to 1953. I don’t have any particular objections, but the thesis “Beria killed Stalin,” frankly speaking, seems very controversial to me. Did Berin kill Stalin or not?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I think not. There are historical studies, sources, Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage, a stroke. It is known that he lay for a day without medical care; his comrades did not dare to call doctors.
Yuri Tsurganov: There is such a thing as failure to provide timely medical care. Probably the classic work on this topic belongs to Avtarkhanov, “The Mystery of Stalin’s Death,” “The Beria Conspiracy,” this book has this subtitle.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, are you also for killing Lavrenty Pavlovich Joseph Vissarionovich?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Unlike those present, I have no answer to many questions. I wanted to support Lev Yakovlevich in the sense that this is really what we are talking about. Man created a poor, starving Georgia, where citrus fruits did not grow as they do now, there were swamps there, people were starving, he created the most powerful one.
Mikhail Sokolov: The swamps began to be drained, contrary to your film, long before Lavrentiy Beria.
Alexander Kolpakidi: But they drained it in front of him. Many things began under the tsar, but for some reason they ended under Stalin. A man who played a colossal role during the war. In addition to the fact that he led the NKVD, intelligence, counterintelligence, internal troops, he became a marshal.
Mikhail Sokolov: He evicted peoples, he evicted 61 people.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Did he come up with this himself or was he assigned to do it?
Mikhail Sokolov: But we don’t know, I don’t have an answer. I came up with it and got approval. You speak approvingly about this in the film.
Alexander Kolpakidi: The man who oversaw the State Defense Committee, being the deputy chairman of the State Defense Committee, one of the five heads of the State Defense Committee, oversaw the production of aircraft, the Air Force, tanks, and railway transport, who played a colossal role in the war, of course, incommensurate with the role of Stalin, who won the battle for the Caucasus.
Mikhail Sokolov: And in the camps, how many died at that time - about a million people.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Mortality in the camps during the war was lower than in the wild. There is such data - this has long been an established fact.
Igor Kurlyandsky: There are studies by the excellent Gulag historian Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, she has all these figures.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Are there figures that the death rate in the Gulag was higher than in the wild?
Mikhail Sokolov: What do you think, with or without the blockade of Leningrad?
Igor Kurlyandsky: If you look at the rear, then, of course, the mortality rate was higher in 1942-43. And if you look from the front...
Alexander Kolpakidi: It is written everywhere that the mortality rate in the camps under Beria was halved - this is a fact.
Mikhail Sokolov: This was before the war, and then it was wild. Another question raised by Lev Lurie is about the reformer Beria. Was Lavrentiy Beria a reformer who wanted to change the Soviet Union in 1953?
Alexander Kolpakidi: This is the most difficult question because these reforms have just begun. The fact that reforms were necessary back in the late 1940s is clear to everyone. They were necessary because it was difficult to repeat the modernization of the 1930s a second time, resources were exhausted, and everyone understood that some kind of reforms had to be undertaken. Stalin had already stayed too long. Although I am considered a Stalinist, I am not a Stalinist, I understand that since the late 1940s it would have been better for Stalin to leave and make room. Unfortunately, he did not do this, his comrades did not do this. The same situation happened in Spain under Franco. He certainly carried out reforms, he started them. Undeservedly, all the laurels went to Mr. Khrushchev, a man who was different from him in everything - mediocre, inept, unable to do anything, but cunning and vile.
Mikhail Sokolov: And the 20th Congress was held and people were released from the camps.
Igor Kurlyandsky: What was Khrushchev’s meanness?
Alexander Kolpakidi: The fact that he danced Kamarinsky in front of Stalin before he had time to die...
Igor Kurlyandsky: Stalin's meanness was that he organized massive illegal repressions against the citizens of his country.
Mikhail Sokolov: The question was whether Beria was a reformer.
Alexander Kolpakidi: He was not allowed to carry out reforms.
Yuri Tsurganov: He was, of course, a cunning and extraordinary man. There is a modern concept - an image maker, and he was one himself. You can turn to the classic work “Steep Route” by Evgenia Ginzburg, how the camera rejoiced when these unfortunate women received a newspaper with a portrait of Lavrenty Pavlovich: look at what an intelligent face, he has glasses or pince-nez on his nose, relief will probably come. Although, according to some data from the historian Georgy Pavlovich Homizuri, Beria had excellent eyesight and did not need any glass. But this is an image of an intelligentsia or an intelligent one, depending on who will pronounce this word in which audience. This was, of course, further, and after the Second World War. Talks about the unification of Germany, for example, in this sense some reform initiatives are visible. But in the name of what? Creating your own reputation, which is beneficial. And in a hypothetical case, although a historian should not argue this way, of course, under Beria the Soviet Union would have remained a despotic power, I have no doubt about that.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Reformism, I agree, of course, he began to carry out reforms. Because he sought power, when a new leader comes to power, he seeks to put forward an alternative program and proposals. It went beyond the boundaries of Soviet discourse and marked the beginning of de-Stalinization. But this does not justify the crimes he committed. This is not a political issue; the issue of the historical accuracy of this film is very important here. I believe that from a specific historical perspective this film does not stand up to criticism. He is biased, he grossly distorts history. He adjusts historical reality to the actual task of creating a good image of Beria. The audience watches and thinks: yes, Beria is good. And the fact that he evicted peoples is that before the war, pre-war deportation, 86 thousand people from the Baltic states, mass arrests in the western territories annexed, 1939-41.
Of course, fewer arrests were made within the country, because the country was already tired of such powerful terror that had happened before. But to say that under Beria the system of early release from the camps was preserved, as in the film, when in June 1939 Stalin abolished the credits for working days, and Beria carried it out with his instructions, this is incorrect. To say that they paid wages, although symbolic wages began to be paid after Beria in 1946, is incorrect. To say that half of the political prisoners were released in 1939-40 during the Beria Thaw is incorrect; a very small percentage were released. If we talk about the official figure of those released, this is 7% of those arrested in 1937-38. One and a half million is Article 58, where all sorts of fictitious cases are in place. And among the criminals you kindly mentioned, in the continent of camps, there are a lot of those who went for all sorts of ears, also for far-fetched economic matters.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Beria did not let go of the ears of corn.
Mikhail Sokolov: Amnesty for up to 5 years, released in 1953.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Yes, indeed, a criminal amnesty.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Why criminal? Are pregnant women a crime?
Igor Kurlyandsky: This amnesty is a huge blessing, but it did not affect the counter-revolutionaries who survived in the camps, Khrushchev, whom you dislike, has already done this, he released them. There may be a lot of complaints against Khrushchev, but still he was not such a bloody executioner as Beria, because he was not at the head of the punitive machine.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Who closed the churches?
Igor Kurlyandsky: Khrushchev. Stalin also closed churches.
Lev Lurie: You know, you’re somehow arguing about the wrong things. According to my information and the information of Arseny Roginsky, one hundred thousand people were released - this is a lot in 1938, but they could have released more. What are we talking about, that Beria was an absolute good, that he was Jesus Christ? No. He, like all political figures, especially political figures of Stalin’s time, such as Khrushchev, Molotov, Shepilov who joined them, and so on, possessed a certain set of qualities that and only those that allowed him to be at the top of this regime. The fact that Beria killed Stalin is not only my opinion, not only Avtarkhanov’s, it is also shown in the wonderful book by Edward Radzinsky, which should not be underestimated. The fact that he released the surviving participants in the “Leningrad case”, closed the “doctors’ case”, began to rehabilitate the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, closed the senseless construction projects of communism, wanted to truly Finlandize Germany - there is simply no doubt about it. And there is not the slightest doubt that Khrushchev was just as bloody an executioner as Beria.
Mikhail Sokolov: Why do you think such a film is needed today?
Lev Lurie: This is a pretty pointless question. Why was "The Captain's Daughter" needed in the 1820s? Why is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich needed? It is needed simply because people watch it, it was filmed by Mr. Kolpakidi. The film, from my point of view, has nothing to do with Kolpakidi, it is creatively absolutely helpless. Beria looks like an absolutely scoundrel, Beria is the way Khrushchev described him. Why did Medinsky order this series of films? Probably because he wants to find some kind of continuity with the Soviet state. That we are banging on an open door, don’t we understand this or what?
Mikhail Sokolov: Another interesting thing I would note with this film is the way it is executed. This is a monologue, this is an announcer's text, this is a kind of indoctrination when people are instilled with thoughts, sometimes true, sometimes not so true, and they show newsreels and some dummy actors who portray Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria. This is a movie that, I would say, was made using the brainwashing method. I wanted to ask about one subject that cannot but excite the public - the image of Beria as a person. You, Alexander, as I suspect, judging by the film, are fighting for the good name of Lavrenty Pavlovich, proving that he was not a villainous rapist who kidnapped women from the streets, do you think all this was made up?
Alexander Kolpakidi: I mean, as Mark Twain said, “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” I personally had the opportunity to communicate with one of these women. There is such a book “I was the mistress of Lavrentiy Beria”, it was published in huge quantities already during perestroika. This is the lady I talked to. I can say one hundred percent - she was an absolute schizophrenic, crazy about sex, it was simply scary to talk to her. If the rest of the women are like that.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Indeed a fact. We are now getting into our personal lives. As Rina Zelenaya said: “Love is a butterfly and don’t touch it with your dirty hands, otherwise the butterfly will die.” I’ll just say, here’s Drozdova, there was a child. He had not lived with his wife for 7 years before, they had some problems. To the mansion, now on the Internet someone posted an excellent post about the mansion: I was in this mansion, there’s nowhere for an apple to fall. How could they drag some woman there and rape her?
Mikhail Sokolov: Do you think Beria didn’t have safe houses?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Still, they talk about the mansion. I think this is all the dirt that Khrushchev tried to pour on him. All this is sewn with white thread. They had to conduct a confrontation according to the law. They didn't. The same as with Rasputin. We now have Rasputin as a saint, there was nothing at all.
Mikhail Sokolov: Who said he was a saint?
Alexander Kolpakidi: You are behind the times. He had mistresses because he did not live with his wife, of course, but this is not a crime.
Mikhail Sokolov: 117?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Of course not. I think two or three. Exactly Drozdova.
Mikhail Sokolov: “The court established that Beria committed rape of women. So on May 7, having fraudulently lured 16-year-old schoolgirl Drozdova into his mansion, he raped her. Witness Kalashnikova testified...” and so on.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Beria denied this; according to the law, there should have been a confrontation.
Mikhail Sokolov: I agree that the investigation into the Beria case was conducted disgracefully. However, all these stories are about forced cohabitation, rape, and so on.
Alexander Kolpakidi: These are all stories. In 1988 there was an article about a pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union and his wife. No one reported then that the pilot was in a psychiatric hospital three times, where he died.
Mikhail Sokolov: This is Sergei Shchirov. By the way, he became an alcoholic after he was imprisoned for 25 years and then released.
Alexander Kolpakidi: They imprisoned him because he was going to cross the state border, and not because Beria seduced his wife. Did you seduce him? The wife denied this. It is known that he also did not live with her, went out, drank, had a bunch of mistresses. All these accusations against Beria are of this kind. The butterfly will die.
Mikhail Sokolov: Adjutant Sarkisov did not kidnap women or transport them?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Adjutant Sarkisov was just writing his affairs on the orders of his superiors when he was arrested, on Lavrenty Pavlovich. There is a report about this.
Mikhail Sokolov: I'm just wondering, there are facts, and there is their interpretation.
Alexander Kolpakidi: What are the facts? You say it yourself - an ugly investigation, there are no real stakes, no signatures, no photographs, no fingerprints.
Mikhail Sokolov: So you think that everything is falsified? Everything else - murders, torture, is everything falsified too?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Now, if only there was a similar volume nearby about how Beria was deputy chairman of the State Defense Committee during the war.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Do you think this will rehabilitate him? I'm not sure.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I have already said that he does not need government rehabilitation, the people have already rehabilitated him.
Mikhail Sokolov: As he was an executioner, he remained so.
Igor Kurlyandsky: The people are something very multifaceted and speaking for them as a whole, in my opinion, is frivolous and irresponsible.
Alexander Kolpakidi: For me, “monster oblo, mischievous and laya” are those who give Beria 52% approval before the film and 26% after the film.
Igor Kurlyandsky: For me, “the monster is oblo, mischievous and laya” - it’s you and the creators of this film or people like you.
Mikhail Sokolov: Have the people, as our guest claims, rehabilitated Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria?
Yuri Tsurganov: I don’t have data about 52%, but at the same time I can readily believe that 52% treat Beria well, I’ll even believe 72%. But it is very interesting to look at the level of education, culture, profession of people who are for and against Beria, and we will see a very interesting picture. Plus one more motivation, it’s called that in common parlance: to spite my mother, I’ll freeze my ears off. If Gaidar and Chubais are bad, then Beria is good - that’s how many people argue. Therefore, 52% may well be real, but what is behind this?
Igor Kurlyandsky: We don't know what's behind this percentage. We talk about pathology, about rape and so on. What was there, what wasn’t, it is necessary to open archives, interrogations, and so on. In my opinion, the pathology was still manifested in another, not at the everyday voluptuous level, namely that a person is not just a cog, a gear, but such a large mechanism, not the most important, of course, of this system, he grinds people, grinds destinies, life and so on. Here is one touch to the portrait of Beria, which I accidentally saw today in our institute kiosk. The volume “The Politburo and the Saboteurs” was published, where all sorts of sabotage processes were endlessly falsified from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, when they began to falsify less. There, Beria simply writes to Stalin: “These are such and such engineers, they have such and such projects with shortcomings. I propose to arrest them, I suspect sabotage there.” Stalin writes – “arrest”.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Even Academician Sakharov, your idol, wrote that Beria...
Igor Kurlyandsky: First of all, don’t come up with any nonsense, I have no idols and no idols.
Mikhail Sokolov: If Sakharov could praise Beria for the atomic project, what's wrong with that?
Igor Kurlyandsky: You sing the hymn to the sharashkas, do you understand that this is humiliating?
Alexander Kolpakidi: I’m not singing a hymn to the Sharashka, I’m saying that we are alive and in an independent country thanks to the nuclear weapons that Beria created. Molotov was entrusted with tanks during the war, he failed, Beria was entrusted with them, he did it. In 1949, the American monopoly collapsed, and you were probably unhappy about it. That's why you probably don't like Beria.
Mikhail Sokolov: I definitely don't like Beria.
Igor Kurlyandsky: I don't like it completely different.
Alexander Kolpakidi: You don’t like it because now we speak with the Americans as equals, and we are not their six, because we are not grant-suckers, and our people are not grant-suckers.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, by the way, I don’t like your position.
Igor Kurlyandsky: I understand your political pathos, but you are not standing on a factual source basis.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Didn't Beria create the atomic bomb? All scientists recognized that without him nothing would have happened.
Mikhail Sokolov: Without the data stolen in the West, there would be no data.
Igor Kurlyandsky: He coordinated the project, of course.
Alexander Kolpakidi: In spite of Beria, would they have built an atomic bomb, in spite of Beria would they have won the war?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I have not done research on the atomic project; this requires special research. 135,696 people were arrested in these political cases in 1939-40, when the Beria Thaw was underway. 86 thousand are being expelled from the Baltic states, western Ukraine, western Belarus, Moldova, and so on.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Haven't you heard about the Forest Brothers?
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, you were silent in the film, for example, the Katyn case, where Lavrenty Pavlovich proposed to shoot 20 thousand people.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I don’t know who shot these people, there are different points of view.
Mikhail Sokolov: There are no different points of view, there is a decision of the Politburo, there are documents.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I question everything.
Mikhail Sokolov: That's why you don't talk about it in the film. That's why the film is monologue, that's why there are no experts in the film, that's why there are no other opinions, there's only one opinion.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I can recruit a million experts. Lev Lurie had a film, where a huge number of experts said the same thing that was in this film.
Lev Lurie: You have a rather pointless argument, you just shout at each other, and don’t deal with Beria. One says that Beria is great, but no one knows who executed the shooting in Katyn, but Putin has already said who executed the shooting in Katyn. And others shout that nothing can be filmed about him. Beria, undoubtedly, was a very important independent political figure in Soviet times. He was not Molotov, not Bulganin, in this sense Khrushchev is similar to him. They had a certain common idea that concerned not only him personally, but concerned the fate of the country. I don’t think, here I agree with Mr. Kolpakidi, that Beria was an incredibly immoral type. We see how the Khrushchev investigation was unable to prove anything. Once again I want to say that it is pointless to educate people on the image of Beria, Beria is a bloody executioner, he is an insect. It is impossible to make him a person whom young people can imitate. But it is impossible not to study Beria, considering that Beria was a nonentity or that it amounted only to executioner.
Mikhail Sokolov: And you yourself called it an insect.
Lev Lurie: He is absolutely an insect, I don’t give up on that at all. This is a person devoid of any human qualities and feelings, for whom there were no friends, who first flattered your eyes, and then killed, and killed painfully. Natural sadist - it's all true. But he killed Stalin and did not help him quite deliberately. He was wildly glad when Stalin died. He told Molotov on the platform of the Mausoleum: “I saved you all from him.” These are Molotov's memoirs. This means we should be grateful to Lavrenty Pavlovich for saving us from Joseph Vissarionovich.
Mikhail Sokolov: He got rid of Joseph Vissarionovich, perhaps, but he created atomic weapons, which extended the life of the communist regime for decades. The torment of the Russian people, too, I suspect, is precisely why it took so long to finally get out of the communist regime that Alexander Kolpakidi loves so much.
Yuri Tsurganov: I agree with you. My favorite literary hero is Innokenty Volodin. Read at least the first chapter of Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle”, you will understand what I’m talking about now.
Mikhail Sokolov: The man who tried to prevent the Soviet Union from creating nuclear weapons.
Yuri Tsurganov: I tried to warn the Americans to stop their citizen’s deal related to the nuclear project, his contact with a Soviet agent for the transfer of this data.
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, why are you laughing?
Alexander Kolpakidi: Because you exposed yourself in front of the eyes of respected television viewers.
Igor Kurlyandsky: In the eyes of Alexander, Innokenty Volodin is a traitor to his homeland.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Of course, a traitor to the motherland. This is America, an empire of not only lies, but also evil. And the Soviet Union was the best country in the history of civilization.
Mikhail Sokolov: This "best country" has killed millions of its citizens.
Alexander Kolpakidi: I didn't kill anyone, and neither did my parents. We went to a pioneer camp and were sent abroad.
Mikhail Sokolov: How many were shot in 1937-38? 700 thousand minimum.
Igor Kurlyandsky: And how many died during the years of collectivization.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Churchill organized a famine of three and a half million in West Bengal in 1943. None of you even heard this.
Mikhail Sokolov: Don’t you know about the Holodomor, organized by Stalin? We are talking about Beria and Stalin, and you are talking about Churchill.
Alexander Kolpakidi: Roosevelt put Japanese workers in the desert, 40 degrees, and zero at night.
Igor Kurlyandsky: Don't you see the difference between a hostile army and your own people?
Alexander Kolpakidi: The Soviet Union is an empire of development and goodness. Communism is the future of humanity.
Mikhail Sokolov: We will never agree with you. Including Lavrenty Beria.
Igor Kurlyandsky: The campaigns and realities that took place then, starting with Chekism, if we take the period of the Civil War, are not consistent with the measurement of goodness; it was not only a reaction to the whites - it was the repressive side of the utopia “let’s drive everyone by force, humanity into happiness.” Accordingly, therefore, dissidents were killed, all the years of the existence of Soviet power were destroyed in one stream or another, on one scale or another, in one way or another, by Abakumov, Yezhov, Beria, various leaders, starting from Lenin, Stalin and so on. Because there was no other way to drive us into communist happiness.
Mikhail Sokolov: Let's look at a short poll and try to understand whether the people who walk the streets in Moscow are on the side of Alexander Kolpakidi, or on the side of his opponents.
Survey on the streets of Moscow
Mikhail Sokolov: Alexander, are you satisfied? Are there any like-minded people there, loyal Beriaites?
Alexander Kolpakidi: What should I be pleased with, I know that the majority of people support this position even without this survey.
Lev Lurie: The problem is not one of whitewashing or not whitewashing, the main lesson we should learn from the story of Beria is that any tyrant is killed by his minions. Beria organized the murder of the tyrant. Tyranny eventually comes to an end - this is what the life of Lavrenty Pavlovich tells us about. Those who kill a tyrant are killed by other tyrants. This is a wonderful story, such a parable.
Mikhail Sokolov: You are clearly looking at things with historical optimism.
Yuri Tsurganov: In principle, I have already said that the majority may not be right. There is a person, Vladimir Bukovsky, who remembers his childhood, he sits on the roof of a three-story building and sees crowds of people crying for Stalin, 1953, March. Vladimir Konstantinovich said: “It was then, at a young age, that I realized that the majority may not be right.”
Igor Kurlyandsky: I don’t understand at all why the majority is an indisputable argument. Why does the quantitative component become a criterion of truth? The criterion of truth can only be reliably established facts and, accordingly, their honest, deep, comprehensive understanding.
Mikhail Sokolov: Do you see this on television?
Igor Kurlyandsky: I absolutely don’t see this on television. I see false propaganda films, absolutely biased, distorting. I oppose this because I consider myself an honest historian.