Next day, Beria went back to Tbilisi.
As a fellow Georgian, Beria was one of the few people Stalin could trust, so his rise through the ranks of the Communist Party was effortless. In 1938, he moved to Moscow to head the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs — the NKVD — and ran the huge chain of labour camps that spread across the Soviet Union.
As deputy premier in charge of both internal security and war production, it is hard to work out when Beria could have had time for all his womanizing. Nevertheless, Moscow was abuzz with rumours of him seducing-or raping-young girls, but the truth was not widely known until after Stalin’s death in 1953, when Beria lost out in a power-struggle to Nikita Khrushchev.
When Beria was finally arrested during the struggle for power, one of his bodyguards produced a list of thirty-nine women with whom Beria had had sexual relations. He also claimed, rightly, that Beria had contracted syphilis in 1943. At Beria’s trial another bodyguard said that he had been employed to pick up women in the street and transport them to Beria’s home, where Beria raped them. U.S. embassy staff corroborated this. Their residence was in the same street as Beria’s home and they saw girls brought there late at night in a limousine.
Beria did not confine his activities to his office. At night, he would often risk taking girls back to his villa, despite the presence of his wife. To keep them quiet, his victims would be plied with wine until they fell asleep. Then Beria would rape them.
Outside Moscow, he was no better. The Minister of Culture for Georgia told of going for a ride in Beria’s cherished speedboat. Out in the lake, they came across a young woman swimmer, a member of a local sports club. Beria stopped the boat and insisted that she climb aboard. Then he began making lewd remarks and indicated his desire to seduce her, though she was plainly terrified of him. He turned to the Minister and told him to jump overboard and swim to the shore. When the poor man said he could not swim, Beria pushed him overboard. He would have drowned if he had not been spotted by one of Beria’s bodyguards who was watching from the shore and sent out a boat to rescue him.
Beria had a proclivity for sportswomen. He insisted on having the pick of the female athletes who travelled from Georgia to Moscow for the annual Day of Physical Culture.
The NKVD kept a special watch on the intelligentsia, while Beria himself kept a close eye on young actresses. He had an affair with Nina Alekseeka, a member of the Ensemble of Song and Dance that was sent to Finland in 1940 to entertain the troops.
After Beria’s arrest, his office was searched. Love letters and items of women’s clothing were found. Beria’s son, Sergo, leapt to his father’s defence, but even he was forced to admit that Beria had a secret love child.
Stalin, of course, knew all along what Beria was getting up to. The Soviet historian Dimitri Volkogonov said: “Even though he professed to value asceticism and puritanism, the General Secretary must have known that Beria was a notorious profligate.”
It is said that Stalin laughed when he heard of some of Beria’s escapades. Beria even tried it on with a close friend of Stalin’s, Eugenia Aleksandrovna, in front of Uncle Joe himself. One evening, at dinner, he put his hand on her knee under the table.
Joseph, he’s trying to squeeze my knee!” she said loudly. The whole table looked at Beria. That didn’t mean he didn’t try again.
Nadya, Stalin’s wife, hated Beria and warned her husband against him, but he took no notice. There is even a picture of Beria with Svetlana sitting on his lap. He has his arms around her and she is looking very uncomfortable.
During his trial Beria was accused of being an “imperialist agent” and conducting “anti-party and anti-state activities”, along with four counts of rape. The indictment cited orgies with teenaged girls incarcerated in his villa in Georgia as well as the girls he abducted and raped in Moscow. He was found guilty of all charges in December 1953 and immediately executed.
4. HANGING OUT WITH MUSSOLINI
There was nothing furtive about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s sex life. In fact, he could have been a Democrat. He had all the wham, bam thank you ma’am of a JFK or a Lyndon Johnson.
During his teens, he admitted to undressing every girl with his eyes. Even before he was eighteen, when he was at school in Forlimpopoli, he would visit the local brothel. In an early fragment of an autobiography written during one of his frequent periods of imprisonment, he described having sex with a whore whose “flaccid body exuded sweat from every pore”.
It also told how he seduced his cousin and a number of her friends, but these encounters were usually quick and unpleasant. He described his first brutal sexual encounter with a country girl named Virginia. She was “poor… but she had a nice complexion” and “was reasonably good-looking”.
“One day I took her upstairs, threw her onto the floor behind the door, and made her mine. She got up, crying and insulting me between her sobs. She said that I had violated her honour. I probably had. But what sort of honour can she have meant?”
These passages are, of course, omitted from his official autobiography published in 1939.
His first steady sexual partner was the Russian socialist agitator Angelica Balabanoff. She was fourteen years his senior and soon got tired of the violent, egotistical youth.
When he was nineteen, Mussolini spent four months working as a schoolteacher in Gualtieri. There he met a woman named Luiga. She was the wife of a soldier, a beautiful girl of twenty and he treated her ruthlessly.
“I accustomed her to my exclusive and tyrannical love,” he said. “She obeyed me blindly, and I did what I liked with her.”
He bullied and abused her, and once stabbed her in the thigh. He always made love to her savagely and selfishly in a way that characterized all his affairs.
Mussolini saw himself primarily as a man of action. He could not hang around in a small Italian town, teaching a class of forty children. He had to get out and make his mark on the world. In June 1902, he travelled to Switzerland without a penny. He slept under bridges, in public lavatories and, occasionally, with a medical student, a Polish refugee whose lovemaking he said was “unforgettable”. Around this time he contracted venereal disease from a married woman who was “fortunately older and less strong than I was” and who, as always, “loved me madly”.
He returned to Italy to become a journalist and political agitator, getting himself arrested regularly. During a brief period of freedom in 1909, he was living at his father’s house when he fell in love with Augusta Guidi, the older of the two daughters of his father’s sullen mistress, Anna. He decided that he would marry her, but she thought he was much too unstable. She married a man with regular work as a gravedigger instead. So Mussolini turned his attention to Augusta’s younger sister, Rachele, who gossips referred to as his half-sister.
Mussolini had just finished his one and only published novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress, which was serialized in Il Popolo d’Italia. It was not well received, but Rachele liked it. One of the most sympathetic characters, the maid who gives her life to save her mistress, was called Rachele.