Stalin Aide Killed Prisoners ‘With His Own Hands,’ Soviet Paper Says

MOSCOW —  Lavrenti P. Beria, the notorious chief of Josef Stalin’s secret police, killed prisoners “with his own hands” in a Georgian torture chamber, an official newspaper said Saturday in a horrifying account of Beria’s trial.

Beria and several aides were sentenced to death in December, 1953, nine months after Stalin’s death, but details of his closed trial were not released until Trud, the official newspaper of the state-run trade unions, ran excerpts from the trial transcripts in Saturday’s editions.

In six days of testimony beginning Dec. 18, 1953, Beria’s former underlings described his cruelties in carrying out brutal purges in his native Georgian republic in 1937 and 1938.

“The investigation confirmed that Beria, with his own hands, killed prisoners,” Trud said. “For this purpose various instruments of torture were stored in his waiting room.”

Beria gained Stalin’s confidence in the 1920s and 1930s, providing security for him during the dictator’s frequent trips to Georgia, which also was Stalin’s homeland. Stalin rewarded Beria’s loyalty in 1931 by naming him Communist Party chief of the entire Transcaucasus region.

Beria killed thousands of “enemies of the state” in the region under orders from Moscow before Stalin brought him to the capital in 1938 to head the vast network of secret police Stalin had built over a decade.

It was long believed that Beria was executed by firing squad in December, 1953, after his trial. But some historians recently have said he died in mysterious circumstances in July, 1953, while imprisoned, and that his testimony at the trial was fabricated.