Beria's Mansion


    From a guidebook for Moscow:

    "…the Tunisian Embassy at no. 28 [Kachalova St.] was abashed to make news in 1993 when workmen found a dozen skeletons buried outside, reminding Muscovites that this was once Beria's mansion. The most odious and feared of Stalin's cohorts, Lavrenty Beria headed the secret police from 1938 onwards, and oversaw high-priority projects such as the construction of Moscow's skyscrapers and the development of the Soviet atomic bomb.

    "Beria's son recently alleged that the US scientist Oppenheimer revealed atomic secrets in this very house, in 1939, but recalls nothing of Beria's countless rapes in the same building. After Stalin's death, his Politburo colleagues feared for their lives and had Beria arrested at a meeting in the Kremlin. It's unclear whether he was shot at once, or first tried in camera as a "foreign agent", but the outcome was the same. Since then, he has remained one of the few disgraced persons whom nobody has cared to rehabilitate."


Source: Dan Richardson. Moscow: The Rough Guide. London: Rough Guides Ltd., 1995, p. 154.

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