Question by K2010: If Beria was important figure in Russian (USSR) life as much as Stalin, why wasn’t any city named after him?
There was Stalingrad, Kaliningrad, Kirov, Sverdlovsk,
Beria was so poweful (evil), how come there wasn’t any city named after him in the USSR?
Answers and Views:
Answer by Admiral Kolchak
Beria wasn’t an angel but he wasn’t that powerful and bloodthirsty as his predecessors (Yagoda and Yezhov) within the NKVD. We know those legends about his might from Nikita Khrushchev, who shot Beria during power struggle within post-Stalinist leadership. Khrushchev needed somebody to blame for repressions apart from Stalin and Beria turned out to be a very convenient figure for that. By the way, it was Beria who initiated large-scale GULAG amnesty when about 2 million prisoners were released in March 1953 (Stalin died on March 5th, 1953). It was Beria who released Jewish doctors right after Stalin’s death (Doctors’ plot) charged with poisoning Soviet leadership. It was Beria who started openly speaking about introduction of the market economy and unification of Western and Eastern Germany.
All Soviet leaders who had cities named after them were high-ranking Soviet functionaries from the time of the revolution of 1917 while Beria joined Stalin’s inner circle relatively late, in the end of the 1930s. Before that Beria served as a party and NKVD boss in provincial and God-forgotten Georgia, that is, thousands kilometres from Moscow, the real political power centre of the USSR.
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