Titans of History (66 page)

Stalin's local ally in the Caucasus was Abkhazian boss Nestor Lakoba, who had helped to promote Beria. But now Lakoba and Beria clashed, and in 1936 Stalin allowed Beria to destroy his old friend which he did by poisoning Lakoba after an evening at the opera in Tiflis. Then, in what was to become a typical pattern, Beria set about destroying the entire Lakoba family, killing his brothers, young children and friends. When the Great Terror really started, Beria killed and tortured his way through the Caucasus, murdering far more victims than his quota.

In late 1938 Stalin brought Beria to Moscow and promoted him to “assist Yezhov,” the head of the NKVD, the secret police. Beria had been friendly with Yezhov, but now his role was to destroy him. On November 25 he was made boss of the NKVD in Yezhov's place, and set about restoring order to the frenzied chaos of Yezhov's killing machine. The Terror was officially over—but it never ended, it simply became secret, as Beria set about purging more Soviet leaders and generals. He liked to torture them himself, and beat one victim so hard that he knocked out one of his eyes. Stalin and Beria enjoyed coming up with imaginatively lurid ways of destroying their enemies. When Beria found out that Lakoba's wife feared snakes above anything else, he drove her to insanity by placing snakes in her cell. He kidnapped and murdered his comrades' wives and killed other comrades in faked car crashes.

After Stalin signed the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, allowing him to annex eastern Poland, the Baltic States and Moldavia, Beria supervised the brutal killing and deportation of
hundreds of thousands of innocent people suspected of anti-Soviet tendencies. In 1940 Beria, on Stalin's orders, presided over the execution of 28,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. Following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Beria became ever more powerful. Promoted to commissar-general of security and made a marshal of the Soviet Union, he was one of the key administrators on the new state defense committee through which Stalin ran the war. Running the vast Gulag camp system as well as much of the country's industrial production, Beria continued to run the secret police and terrorize the generals on Stalin's behalf. In 1941 Beria proposed the deportation of the Volga Germans, and later, in 1944, the deportation of the Chechens, Karachai, Kalmyks, Balkars and Crimean Tartars. Hundreds of thousands were killed or perished en route. In 1945 Beria accompanied Stalin to Yalta, where President Roosevelt, spotting Beria at a dinner, asked his identity: “That's Beria,” replied Stalin. “My Himmler.”

Beria's wife Nina was pretty and elegant, and his son Sergo was his pride and joy. He loved his family, but spent nearly all his time in the office, day and night, and the rest of his energy was devoted to a priapic addiction to sex. He always had mistresses—his last one was a fourteen-year-old beauty—and he was also addicted to rape.

The stories of his degeneracy circulated by his enemies after his fall are true. He would send out his bodyguards to kidnap and deliver young girls whom he had spotted from his cruising limousine, invite them to dinner, propose a toast to Stalin, and slip sleeping pills into their wine. He would then force himself on them. Afterward, his chauffeur would take them home, and present them with a bouquet of flowers. Even during the Second World War, when he was virtually running the country, and afterward when he was in charge of the nuclear project, Beria still found time for these squalid escapades, and caught venereal diseases several times. When Berias's crimes were reported to Stalin, the dictator tolerated him—commenting
that Beria was a busy man under great stress.

During the Potsdam Conference, President Truman informed Stalin about America's new nuclear weapons. Stalin immediately placed Beria in charge of over 400,000 workers, including many brilliant scientists, tasked with developing a Soviet atom bomb. In 1946 Beria became a full member of the Politburo. But Stalin had started to distrust him, sensing his cynicism about Marxism itself and his increasing dislike of his master. Stalin removed him from the ministry of internal affairs in 1946, purged his protégés and promoted Abakumov, another ruthless thug, to be minister of state security, independent of Beria. Yet Beria still managed to wield considerable influence. In 1949, to Stalin's delight, Beria delivered the Soviet atom bomb. In the same year, Beria managed to turn Stalin against two of his chosen heirs, and both were shot in the Leningrad Case.

By the early 1950s Stalin was in decline, forgetful, more and more paranoid, and never more dangerous. He now loathed “Snake-eyes” Beria, who, in turn, hated Stalin and his system, even though he himself was one of its monsters. When Stalin died in March 1953, Beria emerged from the deathbed as the strongman of the new regime. Although his title was first deputy premier, he dominated the nominal premier, the weak Malenkov, and took charge of the ministry of internal affairs. He disdained the coarse, clumsy but shrewd Khrushchev, whom he fatally underestimated. Freed of the hated Stalin, Beria overconfidently proposed the freeing of millions of prisoners, liberalization of the economy and the loosening of Soviet hegemony over eastern Europe and the ethnic republics. Yet at the same time he was still arresting his personal enemies and intimidating his rivals. No one trusted him everyone feared him. Three months after Stalin's death, Khrushchev orchestrated a palace coup backed by Marshal Zhukov and the Soviet military. Beria was arrested, and secretly confined in a
military bunker. Here he begged for his life, writing pathetic letters to his ex-comrades, but to no avail: at his trial he was sentenced to death. On the day he was due to die, he cried and collapsed until his executioner, a Soviet general, stuffed a towel in his mouth and shot him through the forehead.

Short, squat, bald and increasingly fat, Beria had a flat face with large fleshy lips, greeny-gray skin, and, behind his glinting pince-nez, gray, colorless eyes. At the same time, he was energetic, witty, quick, curious and an avid reader of history. “He was enormously clever with inhuman energy,” said Stalin's deputy Molotov. “He could work for a week with one night's sleep.” According to one of his henchmen, “Beria would think nothing of killing his best friend.” Several of his colleagues observed that if he had been born in America, he would have been head of General Motors. Yet—with his love of intrigue, poison, torture and killing—he would also have flourished at the court of the Borgias.

1899–1961

Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated
.

The essence of man's—and Hemingway's—indomitable spirit captured in
The Old Man and the Sea
(1952)

Ernest Hemingway was arguably the most important American writer of the 20th century. His novels and short stories, rejecting the stuffy 19th-century values he saw in his own family and in
the world around him, introduced a new and powerful style of writing: sparse, economical, tough, masculine prose that captures the horrors of war and the trials of love, and advocates a strong moral code for conducting life in a complex world of pain and betrayal. Hemingway could be unpredictable, violent, bad-tempered, vainglorious, ridiculous and drunken, but these were all aspects of a troubled yet brilliant mind. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in recognition of his work and his distinctive and unique contribution to literature.

Hemingway grew up in a Chicago suburb. His father, physician Dr. Clarence Hemingway, urged him toward manly outdoor activities like hunting, shooting and fishing. His mother, Grace, instilled in him a familiarity with literature. He used to claim that the first words he said as a baby were “Afraid of nothing! Afraid of nothing!” probably untrue but typical of his famed machismo. As a young man Hemingway went to Italy to serve in the First World War. He was blown up by a mortar in 1918, but, despite being injured by shrapnel and coming under machine-gun fire, he managed to carry two comrades to safety.

Though he later embellished this experience, it was an outstanding act of bravery for which the Italian government awarded him the Silver Medal of Honor. While recuperating, Hemingway fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry him. He never forgot the experience.

When he returned to America, his mother reprimanded him for his “lazy loafing and pleasure seeking,” accusing him of “trading on his handsome face” and “neglecting his duties to God.” Hemingway had always despised his mother's written style, her sermonizing and her religion, which he saw as running counter to human happiness. Now he began to despise her wholesale. The breach with his family was never reconciled, and when in 1921 Hemingway took a job as foreign correspondent on the
Toronto
Star
, based in Paris, he cut himself free and became his own man.

In Paris Hemingway fell in with prominent literary figures such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of
The Great Gatsby
and the other American literary genius of the time. In 1924–5 Hemingway published his short-story cycle
In Our Time
, and in 1926 the successful novel
The Sun Also Rises
, which dealt with the lives of the aimless socialites of America's postwar “Lost Generation,” who decadently drifted around Europe without purpose.

Hemingway's first masterpiece was
A Farewell to Arms
, published in 1929. It was heavily autobiographical, telling a love story set in the First World War. A young ambulance man, Frederic Henry, falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse tending to his recuperation. After Henry deserts his post, the couple flee to Switzerland, but Catherine and her baby die in childbirth, leaving Henry desolate.

Spain played a dominant part in Hemingway's life and works. He wrote a sensitive study of bullfighting,
Death in the Afternoon
, in 1932, and when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he became deeply involved in the Republican cause, raising money to assist the struggle against General Franco's Nazi-backed Nationalists. His experience was the basis for his second masterpiece,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, published in 1940. Set during the Civil War, this tells the story of an American volunteer guerrilla, Robert Jordan, who is sent to blow up a railway line in support of a Republican attack. Jordan's love for a Spanish girl, Maria, develops in a narrative that skillfully explores the Spanish character and the brutality of war.

Hemingway covered the Second World War as a journalist, flying several missions with the Royal Air Force, seeing action on D-Day and taking part in the liberation of Paris. After the war he spent most of his time working at Finca Vigía, his home in Cuba. The jewel of this final period was
The Old Man and the
Sea
(1952), the tale of an elderly fisherman and his struggles to land an enormous marlin. This short book won Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize the following year.

Alcohol, age and various serious accidents, including two plane crashes, took their toll on Hemingway. During the 1950s he spiraled into depression, and the more unpleasant aspects of his nature—he could be sour, quarrelsome, prone to violence—all came to the fore. Forced from Cuba in 1960 by Fidel Castro's revolution, Hemingway settled in Ketchum, Idaho. Aware that his creative powers were in terminal decline, and realizing that the electric-shock therapy he was receiving for depression was useless, he killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. He was sixty-two years old.

Hemingway may have been a troubled and troublesome character, but he was also a figure of enormous energy and dynamism who left an indelible mark not just on modern literature but on language too.

1900–1945 & 1904–1942

I also want to mention a very difficult subject before you here, completely openly. It should be discussed amongst us, and yet, nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public. I am talking about the Jewish evacuation: the extermination of the Jewish people
.

Heinrich Himmler, October 4, 1943

Heinrich Himmler was the chief organizer of the greatest crime in human history—the industrialized murder of 6 million Jews
by execution squads and gas chambers, the dead consumed by crematoria. Under his master Adolf Hitler, Himmler was the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, amassing huge powers as Reichsführer-SS, police chief and interior minister, and masterminding not just the Holocaust but also the massacre of Gypsies and homosexuals and the brutal enslavement of Slavs and other
Untermenschen
—subhumans.

Reinhard Heydrich was Himmler's chief assistant in these diabolical projects and both men were the highly educated, upper-middle-class children of cultured intellectuals—the very opposite of the thuggish Nazi street fighters.

Himmler was born in Munich to Gebhard Himmler, a respectable headmaster and tutor of the Wittelsbach royal family of Bavaria, and his wife Anna Maria. Himmler's godfather was a Wittelsbach Bavarian prince, the king of Bavaria's uncle. Slightly built and preferring chess and stamp-collecting to the sports field, he was the antithesis of the Aryan ideal. He did eventually marry following a chance meeting with divorcée Margarete Siegroth in a hotel lobby. The couple had one daughter, Gudrun.

Himmler met future Nazis in the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps after the First World War. Supporting Hitler from the start and joining the Nazi Party in 1925, his unflinching loyalty, coupled with his administrative abilities and utter ruthlessness, led to his appointment in 1928 as Reichsführer-SS, head of the
Schutzstaffel
(SS). After Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Himmler created the nonuniformed intelligence service, the SD (
Sicherheitsdienst
), and the following year he organized the Night of the Long Knives in which Ernst Röhm and the leadership of the SA—
Sturmabteiling
(Stormtroops)—were murdered. By 1936, he controlled the plainclothes political police, the dreaded secret police, the Gestapo, and all uniformed police.