The World of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria and Lev Davidovich Bronstein
Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (1993) Amy Knight Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky (2009) Bernard M. Patenaude Amy Knight's biography of Beria, who Stalin referred to as his Himmler, was written at a transitional point in the historiography of the Soviet imperium, between the Cold War history created out of guesswork and propaganda and the post-perestroika opening up of Russian archives. It is an excellent book in that context. Beria the man is not very interesting. He is the type of the intelligent corporate psychopath who helps keep complex and otherwise chaotic systems in place but Beria as part of the construction of a unique form of totalitarian governance is much more fascinating. The weakness of the book is that Knight still had to rely on a number of very unreliable 'testimonies' (whether Khrushchev's, Svetlana Alliluyeva's, Sergo Beria's and many others) for lack of data at key periods and that she still cann...