Lavrentiy Beria

Lavrentiy Beria is born in Merkheuli, Georgia.

First deputy to Yezhov since August 1938, Beria takes over the secret police and the Gulag on 25 November 1938; the bomb programme follows in December 1944.

The nuclear age begins. Beria has overseen the Soviet bomb programme since December 1944; a State Defence Committee decree of 20 August 1945 sets up the Special Committee that formalizes it. The project is staffed in part by imprisoned scientists in sharashkas.

Stalin's death loosens Lysenko's grip and dooms Beria, arrested in June and shot in December. The poison laboratory's patrons begin to fall.

The reputed overlord of the poison laboratory and the sharashka is arrested after Stalin's death and shot in December; the poison tests on condemned prisoners form a separate charge in his trial.

With Beria's fall, Sudoplatov is arrested on 21 August 1953. He is held five years before the Supreme Court's military collegium sentences him on 12 September 1958 to fifteen years; he is released on 21 August 1968.

Interrogated on 27 August 1953, Mairanovsky states that Beria approved his proposal and had him test poisons on condemned prisoners. A protocol of a Beria interrogation for 28 August 1953 could not be verified, and the accounts of what he said that day disagree. He is shot in December.