Window on Eurasia

Where Beria Still Walks the Halls in Moscow…

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 24, 2006 – Every city has its legends and traditions, often believed in by one or another group in the population regardless of their plausibility or even possibility. And thus it should be no surprise that the city of Moscow, given its complicated history, has more than its share of such beliefs.

On Friday, Khaysam Baderkhan, a Moscow political scientist, published
an article in “Moskovskaya pravda” describing some of the legends that
continue to circulate in the Russian capital, which as he notes, are
not all “historically confirmed but [which] it would be stupid to
ignore.”

Some of the Moscow stories resemble those typical of many older
European cities. In one neighborhood of the Russian capital, there is an old elm
tree known to local residents as “the tree of death.” According to
them, the tree was the home of a witch who failed to win the heart of a
human and then began killing things that landed on the tree.

Elsewhere in the Russian capital, people believe that water-filled
ravines carry with them evil spirits certain to have a negative impact
on anyone who passes near them. And in still other locations,
Muscovites tell about the appearance of apparitions of one kind or another.

But two of the legends Baderkhan describes are unique to Moscow: one
concerns the rise and fall of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and
the other involved the continuing appearance of the shade of Lavrentiy
Pavlovich Beria, Stalin’s last and perhaps most disreputable secret
police chiefs.

When the tsarist authorities first planned to build the Cathedral of
Christ the Saviour in the early part of the 19th century, they hoped to
place it in the Sparrow Hills neighborhood. But that turned out to be
impossible because the ground water there was so close to the surface.

Consequently, they decided to erect the church on the site of the
Alekseyev female monastery on the banks of the Moscow River. The nuns
did not want to give up their home, and as their leader was being
evicted, she shouted that “Nothing will stand here.”

The Church was built, but then it was blown up by the Bolsheviks,
something many Muscovites associated with the curse the leader of the
monastery has issued. Now, the post-Soviet Russian government has build
the Church again, but apparently, some residents of the Russian capital
still remember the curse and wonder about the future.

But an even more interesting legend concerns the shade of Lavrentiy
Beria. Baderkhan reproduces the following comment by Maksim Shvedov, a
young collector of Moscow legends.

According to Shvedov, “Take for example the house at Vspol’niy
pereulok, no. 28. Now the Embassy of Tunisia is located there. In this
unique house, they live and work! In the 17th and 18th centuries, this
was a place of public executions for ordinary murderers and thieves.’

Moveover, Shvedov reports, in the foundation of this building are the
tombstones of a tsarist era cemetery that was subsequently destroyed by
the Bolsheviks. “More than one employee of the embassy has seen there
the shade of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beriya, who was declared ‘an enemy
of the people’ and executed [in 1953].

Tunisian diplomats say that in the corridors it is possible to hear the
sound of his steps and to see his dim silhouette. And from time to
time, it is even possible ‘to see’ the silhouette of [Beriya’s]
limousine near the entrance,” the car he used to kidnap and abuse
young women during the years of his almost unrestricted power under
Stalin.

The number of such stories in the Russian capital can be multiplied at
will, Baderkhan suggests in conclusion. All one needs to do is to ask
an elderly Muscovite about a particular place and he is almost certain to
answer: “I myself haven’t seen this, but they say…”

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