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"Mature Content Warning!" |
Lavrentiy Beria is the main antagonist in the 2017 film The Death of Stalin. He is the head of the NKVD, the secret police of the Soviet Union, who begins scheming to seize power for himself after Joseph Stalin's death.
He was played by Simon Russell Beale.
What Makes Him a Hate Sink?[]
- He's had countless people tortured and executed while serving Stalin, and personally writes the lists of who to kill and directs his men to kill some in specific ways.
- After a movie night with Stalin he affably says goodbye to his "good friend" Vyacheslav Molotov only to cheerfully reveal that he is on a list as soon as he's out of earshot.
- He's extremely sadistic, telling his men to shoot a man's wife in front of him before killing him, and boasts about how a woman pleaded for her husband to be spared, and indicates that she did "everything" (hinting that he raped her) and that he intends to have them both killed anyway.
- He uses his position to rape numerous young girls.
- He has no true loyalty to Stalin, mocking him while he's dying.
- He has Moscow sealed off and creates his own enemy list to replace Stalin's, having numerous people executed to secure his position.
- He has one of his own men arrested, tortured and presumably executed simply for stuttering.
- While he agrees to freeze arrests and release political prisoners, he only does it to make himself look good and to steal the credit from Khrushchev, who had proposed it first.
- He tries to undermine Nikita Khrushchev by forcing him to take charge of Stalin's funeral, then shuts down the trains so nobody can get there, while blackmailing Khrushchev by threatening to link him with Stalin's death.
- He shows no remorse when his men open fire and massacre 1500 civilians who came to mourn Stalin, blaming the crowd for being there against his orders.
- When the other committee members suggest that some of his lowly officers get scapegoated for the massacre, he refuses out of fear that that would come back at him and then responds to yell at them how he has incriminating documents on all of them while rattling of their past crimes.
- During his trial he refuses to take any responsibility for his numerous crimes and later begins to pathetically beg for the fair trial and mercy he had denied countless others, going out as a weeping mess of a person. While near the end when Khrushchev begins naming off his victims, he possibly shows remorse, he was more likely scared to die.
- While all members of Stalin's inner circle are shown to be a bunch of back-stabbing, power-hungry opportunists, Beria is easily the most rotten of all of them with his sexual deviance and pedophilia disgusting even the others.
Trivia[]
- The film's producers actually said they had to tone down some of Beria's real-life crimes to make him believable to the audience.
External Links[]
- Lavrentiy Beria on the Pure Evil Wiki