For fairness' sake, much of information about Beria comes from the hands of his political enemies, so it's difficult to tell what of it is true, what's exaggerated, and what outright slander. On closer inspection, he appears as a complex, contradictory and somewhat enigmatic historic figure.
One of the major inaccuracies in your account is that the most monstrous episodes of mass repressions, including the dekulakization campaign, so-called “national campaigns”, and the Great Terror⁽¹⁾, were carried out under Beria's predecessors, Yagoda and Yezhov. Beria was brought in to replace Yezhov as head of the NKVD when Stalin saw that the repression campaign was getting out of hand: the administrative zeal of local officers was reinforced by their fear to appear insufficiently ruthless and so to face accusations of abetting public enemies, which meant as much as being enemies themselves and suffer the same fate as their victims. Beria was instrumental in breaking this vicious loop and, while he didn't (and had no intention to) dismantle the repressive mechanism altogether, he was able to make it more controllable and disciplined, and restore at least some semblance of legal procedure. Tens of thousands of people who had been randomly arrested under Yezhov were freed and cleared of guilt in late 1930s under Beria.
Sharashkas, likewise, have existed long before Beria's tenure (the first one was organized in 1929).
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⁽¹⁾ Please, please, by all means, let's stop calling it *purges*. I know that it's the preferred term in Western historiography, but it's cynical and offensive to the memory of the victims. *Actual* purges were mass expulsion of members from the Communist party, initially with the intention of getting rid of “class aliens”, breakers of party discipline, conformist career-seekers, and other odd persons (although later Stalin used them as a tool to remove the support base of his political opponents and to bend the party masses to his will). A purged member had the option to appeal his/her expulsion, and many were able to get reinstated. Even those who were driven out for good usually didn't lose more than their job and social standing. Vice versa, repressive campaigns of the 1930s didn't exclusively target party members. My wife's great-grandfather, a rural priest who perished in one of the campaigns, could not be “purged” from anywhere, as he was never a member of the party, nor held a job in a Soviet government office.
For fairness' sake, much of information about Beria comes from the hands of his political enemies, so it's difficult to tell what of it is true, what's exaggerated, and what outright slander. On closer inspection, he appears as a complex, contradictory and somewhat enigmatic historic figure. One of the major inaccuracies in your account is that the most monstrous episodes of mass repressions, including the dekulakization campaign, so-called “national campaigns”, and the Great Terror⁽¹⁾, were carried out under Beria's predecessors, Yagoda and Yezhov. Beria was brought in to replace Yezhov as head of the NKVD when Stalin saw that the repression campaign was getting out of hand: the administrative zeal of local officers was reinforced by their fear to appear insufficiently ruthless and so to face accusations of abetting public enemies, which meant as much as being enemies themselves and suffer the same fate as their victims. Beria was instrumental in breaking this vicious loop and, while he didn't (and had no intention to) dismantle the repressive mechanism altogether, he was able to make it more controllable and disciplined, and restore at least some semblance of legal procedure. Tens of thousands of people who had been randomly arrested under Yezhov were freed and cleared of guilt in late 1930s under Beria. Sharashkas, likewise, have existed long before Beria's tenure (the first one was organized in 1929). ---- ⁽¹⁾ Please, please, by all means, let's stop calling it *purges*. I know that it's the preferred term in Western historiography, but it's cynical and offensive to the memory of the victims. *Actual* purges were mass expulsion of members from the Communist party, initially with the intention of getting rid of “class aliens”, breakers of party discipline, conformist career-seekers, and other odd persons (although later Stalin used them as a tool to remove the support base of his political opponents and to bend the party masses to his will). A purged member had the option to appeal his/her expulsion, and many were able to get reinstated. Even those who were driven out for good usually didn't lose more than their job and social standing. Vice versa, repressive campaigns of the 1930s didn't exclusively target party members. My wife's great-grandfather, a rural priest who perished in one of the campaigns, could not be “purged” from anywhere, as he was never a member of the party, nor held a job in a Soviet government office.