Sharashka
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In the Soviet Union, a sharashka was a type of secret research and development laboratory operating from the 1920s to the 1950s within the Gulag labor camp system, as well as in other facilities under
Tupolev's sharashka TsKB-29 of NKVD in Omsk (1943)
Lavrentiy Beria
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Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph Stalin's secret police chiefs, serving as head of the NKVD from 1938 to 1945 during the
Sharashka
…was in operation until 1936, when the scientists were transferred to a Red Army microbiology facility on Gorodomlya Island on Lake Seliger. In 1938, Lavrenty Beria, a senior NKVD official, created the Department of Special Design Bureaus at the NKVD USSR (Отдел особых конструкторских бюро НКВД СССР). In 1939, the…
Official portrait, c. 1938–1940
Young Svetlana Stalina sitting on Beria's lap, with Stalin (in the background) and Nestor Lakoba in 1931.
Beria in 1934
Nestor Lakoba, Nikita Khrushchev, Beria and Aghasi Khanjian during the opening of the Moscow Metro in 1936, the same year that Lakoba and Khanjian were killed by Beria.