The execution of Lavrentiy Beria appears in the book not through an account of its circumstances, but through the act of erasure that followed. In the narrator’s family anecdote, the Soviet encyclopedia was revised so that a condemned former official could disappear from its pages as if he had never existed. The episode makes historical memory itself part of the event’s aftermath: power acts not only on a person’s life, but on whether the past may continue to name him.

Disgrace and erasure

Beria, identified as the head of the NKVD under Joseph Stalin, was disgraced and executed. The account supplies no date or details of the execution; its focus is what happened to his public representation afterward. Subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were instructed to cut out the article praising him as an ardent friend of the proletariat and insert an article of equal length about the Bering Strait.

The substitution preserves the encyclopedia’s alphabetical order while removing Beria from its account of the world. As the narrator puts the paradox, “Beria, Bering: the alphabetical order was respected, but Beria no longer existed. He never had.” The neatness of the replacement sharpens the violence of the omission: the page remains complete in form, but its history has been made false.

A remembered example of revision

The narrator traces the story to an anecdote told by his mother. In 1986, before the changes associated with perestroika had begun and before he sensed what was coming, he published a short essay titled “The Bering Strait,” taking its title from that family memory. The essay’s timing makes the anecdote more than an illustration of a past purge: it records how an ordinary act of reading and editing could expose the fragility of official history.

The episode also sits beside another example of retrospective deletion. After Nikita Khrushchev fell, libraries needed to remove One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich from old copies of New World. The two cases differ in what was removed, but both show authorities attempting to revise the record by altering the material objects through which readers encounter it: encyclopedia entries and bound journal pages.

The event’s historical meaning

In the narrator’s account, the execution and its textual aftermath belong to a wider system that claimed the power to undo what had happened. The encyclopedia’s replacement does not merely revise Beria’s reputation; it models a politics in which the state can demand that a past fact cease to exist in public memory. The equal-length article and the preserved alphabet make this erasure appear orderly, even routine, while revealing the impossible claim beneath that order: that official power can change the past by changing what remains legible of it.