The stories about Laventy Beria are notorious. He is portrayed as a sexual fiend who desired women and young girls with insatiable appetite. Yet this portrayal has mostly been repeated after the show trial and following the fall of the Soviet Union where a lot more was explored about the inner workings of the Stalin government. The issue remains that the scholarship around the subject is looking at a powerful man who had immeasurably control over a vast government organization. The governmental organization, the NKVD, was in charge of the Great Purge and led to the deaths of thousands and within those halls was Beria. The result is that the scholarship around Beria has in the past been spotty. The older sources often stated that they had “heard” that Beria was a sexual deviant or that he raped women. Joseph Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva described Beria as the darkest of men in most of her correspondence after her father’s death in 1953. She relayed that her mother had kept Beria out of the family apartment because her mother hated Beria. Svetlana Alliluyeva never accused Beria of being a sexual predator and instead focused on the effect Beria had on her father.

This has changed in more recent years as more archives had been opened and more scholarship has been done looking into the deeper depths of the Stalin government. While the most noteworthy example was the discussion of Beria surrounding his trial after the death of Stalin. There has also been scholarship done looking into the accusations, Simon Sebag Montifiore looked into the former Soviet archives and found testimony by Beria’s bodyguards including an alleged list of victims that Beria had the bodyguard keep. The list of victims is scheduled to be released to the public in 2028 by the Russian Federation.

The issue remains that a lot of the accusations do come from one historian currently in the west regarding Beria and his crimes. Simon Sebag Montifiore is not an unbiased source as the title of the book, In the Court of the Red Tsar, clearly states his goals with his book. He did not write it in an attempt to give a clear look at Stalin’s government from an unbiased view. Understanding that bias does not invalidate his scholarship on the material or what he discovered but it makes it far more difficult to state that it is a closed case. With more scholarship and with the release of the list of victims will give a more clear look into that chapter of Soviet history.