From 1939, when Stalin's chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, was put in charge of the Gulag empire, the zeki were given adequate food and medical care when possible, not out of humanity, but because healthy workers were more productive than sick ones.

ECONOMIST: Soviet Russia

The peasants, who had a shrewder idea of how Mother Russia functioned, thought it more likely that this evidence of progress, if that was the correct name for it, was somehow related to the purchase, several months earlier, of the late and little lamented Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria's sprawling wooden dacha by a man identified only as the Oligarkh.

NPR: Excerpt: 'Legends'