About the book: 2014 / "Forward, after Stalin, Beria leads us! We are confidently heading towards the dawn of the future!” - the Soviet security officers sang. Collective farms and mines, streets, partisan detachments and pioneer organizations were named after the “Lubyansky Marshal”, his portraits were worn at demonstrations by workers next to the face of Stalin, and in Georgia, where the cult of Beria’s personality was especially strong, the first toast used to be raised to Lavrentiy Pavlovich and only the second - for the “Leader of the Peoples”. This “cult” did not disappear even after the arrest and execution of Beria - only the sign changed, from plus to minus: he was declared not just an “executioner”, “conspirator” and “English spy”, but a fiend and a sexual maniac like Bluebeard. In recent years, the pendulum of history has again swung in the other direction - now Beria is increasingly called the “brilliant organizer”, “father of the Soviet atomic bomb” and even “the best manager of the 20th century”. Is it true that he began to rehabilitate those illegally repressed, advocated the abolition registration and against the Cold War? Should we believe the rumors that Beria was going to take away power from party officials and hand it over to the people? Isn't that why he was actually killed? Is there any reason to consider him “the forerunner of Gorbachev” and would not the “Beria Thaw” have ended in the same way as Gorbachev’s “perestroika” - with the collapse of the USSR? This book investigates the “Beria case” “without anger or partiality”, without hushing up either achievements or crimes, no losses, no victories.