[Sharing Lights]

By 1980s, the sexual assault stories about Beria included rape of teenage girls. The author Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, who wrote a biography of Beria, said in an interview: "At night he would cruise the streets of Moscow seeking out teenage girls. When he saw one who took his fancy he would have his guards deliver her to his house. Sometimes he would have his henchmen bring five, six or seven girls to him. He would make them strip, except for their shoes, and then force them into a circle on their hands and knees with their heads together. He would walk around in his dressing gown inspecting them. Then he would pull one out by her leg and haul her off to rape her. He called it the flower game." [2]

Numerous stories have circulated over the years involving Beria personally beating, torturing and killing his victims. Since the 1970s, Muscovites have been retelling stories of bones found in either the back yard, cellars, or hidden inside the walls of Beria's former residence, currently the Tunisian Embassy. Such stories continue to re-appear in the news media. The London Daily Telegraph reported in December 2003: "The latest grisly find — a large thigh bone and some smaller leg bones — was only two years ago when a kitchen was re-tiled. In the basement, Anil, an Indian who has worked at the embassy for 17 years, showed a plastic bag of human bones he had found in the cellars."

Such reports are treated with scepticism by many commentators due to prevalent bias of their sources. It should be noted that despite partial opening of Soviet archives since 1991, most of the Beria-related material remains classified. Memoirs by the people close to Beria, such as his son Sergo Beria and a former Soviet foreign intelligence chief Pavel Sudoplatov deny these charges and draw a very different portrait of Beria.

See also
History of the Soviet Union
List of Georgians
Further reading
Antonov-Ovseenko, Anton, Beria, Moscow, 1999
Avtorkhanov, Abdurahman, The Mystery of Stalin's Death, Novyi Mir, #5, 1991, pp. 194-233 (in Russian)
Beria, Sergo, Beria: My Father, London, 2001
Knight, Amy, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant, Princeton University Press, 1993. ISBN 0691032572
Khruschev, Nikita, Khruschev Remembers: Last Testament, Random House, 1977, ISBN 0517175479
Rhodes, Richard, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Simon and Schuster, 1996 ISBN 0684824140
Stove, R. J., The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims, Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2003). ISBN 189355466X
Sudoplatov, Pavel, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster, Little Brown & Co, 1994, ISBN 0316773522
Yakovlev, A.N., Naumov, V., and Sigachev, Y. (eds), Lavrenty Beria, 1953. Stenographic Report of July's Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Other Documents, International Democracy Foundation, Moscow, 1999 (in Russian). ISBN 5895110061
External links
Interview with Sergo Beria
An outline of the Russian Supreme Court decision of 29 May 2000