March 29, 1899 - Lavrentiy Beria

As head of the NKVD during some of the Soviet Union's most violent years, he commanded the machinery of state terror with unusual administrative competence — organizing mass executions, deportations, and purges on a scale that shaped the fate of millions across Eastern Europe and the Soviet interior. His longevity at the apex of the security apparatus, outlasting rivals who were themselves consumed by the system, speaks to a particular talent for navigating — and perpetuating — structures of extreme institutional violence. The Katyn massacre alone, which he personally ordered, became one of the defining atrocities of the Second World War era.

From Wikipedia

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (29 March [O.S. 17 March] 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet criminal 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 country's involvement in the Second World War.

An ethnic Georgian, Beria enlisted in the Cheka in 1920, and quickly rose through its ranks. He transferred to Communist Party work in the Caucasus in the 1930s, and in 1938 was appointed head of the NKVD by Stalin. His ascent marked the end of Stalin's Great Purge carried out by Nikolai Yezhov, whom Beria purged. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Beria organized the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia, and after the occupation of the Baltic states and parts of Romania in 1940, he oversaw the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians to remote areas or Gulag camps. In 1940, Beria began a new purge of the Red Army. After Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was appointed to the State Defense Committee, overseeing security.

Beria expanded the system of forced labour, mobilizing millions of Gulag prisoners into wartime production.

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