Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was certainly one of the most vicious and mysterious figures of Stalin's era. He was born on March 29 (March 17 according to the Julian calendar), 1899, to a poor Megrel (an ethnic group of Georgians) family in the village of Merkheuli, Abkhazia. Drafted into the Russian Imperial Army, he briefly saw action during
Death sentence Józef Stalin personally decided to murder Polish prisoners of war, at the request of the Peopleās Commissioner of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, Lavrentiy Beria. In an extensive note of 5 March 1940, the head of the NKVD called for the case to be considered āin a special procedure and giving them the maximum penalty