Beria And The Beautiful Game

John O’Sullivan | Beyond The Last Man | 14th November 2019

When Stalin appointed the “toadish, bespectacled” Lavrenty Beria — a psychopath and a mass murderer — to run his secret police, the NKVD, in 1938, Beria inherited control of Dinamo Moscow, a top Soviet football club that belonged to the NKVD. This was terrifying news f…