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By the summer of 1953 most of Beria’s colleagues in the Presidium were united in their fear of another conspiracy—that he might be planning a coup d’état to step into Stalin’s shoes. While visiting a foreign capital in July, Mitrokhin received a top secret telegram with instructions to decipher it himself, and was astonished to discover that Beria had been charged with “criminal anti-Party and anti-state activities.” Only later did Mitrokhin learn that Beria had been arrested at a special meeting of the Presidium on June 26 after a plot organized by his chief rival, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. From his prison cell, Beria wrote begging letters to his former colleagues, pleading pathetically for them to spare his life and “find the smallest job for me”: You will see that in two or three years I’ll have straightened out fine and will still be useful to you... I ask the comrades to forgive me for writing somewhat disjointedly and badly because of my condition, and also because of the poor lighting and not having my pince-nez. No longer in awe of him, the comrades simply mocked his loss of nerve. On December 24 it was announced that Beria had been executed after trial by the Supreme Court. Since neither his responsibility for mass murder in the Stalin era nor his own record as a serial rapist of under-age girls could be publicly mentioned for fear of bringing the Communist regime into disrepute, he was declared guilty instead of a surreal plot “to revive capitalism and to restore the rule of the bourgeoisie” in association with British and other Western intelligence services. Beria thus became, following Yagoda and Yezhov in the 1930s, the third Soviet security chief to be shot for crimes which included serving as an (imaginary) British secret agent. In true Stalinist tradition, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were advised to use “a small knife or razor blade” to remove the entry on Beria, and then to insert a replacement article on the Bering Sea.4
The Sword and the Shield
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
Sell your by-products When you make something, you always make something else. You can’t make just one thing. Everything has a by-product. Observant and creative business minds spot these by-products and see opportunities. The lumber industry sells what used to be waste—sawdust, chips, and shredded wood—for a pretty profit. You’ll find these by-products in synthetic fireplace logs, concrete, ice strengtheners, mulch, particleboard, fuel, and more. But you’re probably not manufacturing anything. That can make it tough to spot your by-products. People at a lumber company see their waste. They can’t ignore sawdust. But you don’t see yours. Maybe you don’t even think you produce any by-products. But that’s myopic. Our last book, Getting Real, was a by-product. We wrote that book without even knowing it. The experience that came from building a company and building software was the waste from actually doing the work. We swept up that knowledge first into blog posts, then into a workshop series, then into a .pdf, and then into a paperback. That by-product has made 37signals more than $1 million directly and probably more than another $1 million indirectly. The book you’re reading right now is a by-product too.
Rework
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Once you’ve named your stressors, I’d like you to pick the one that causes you the most strife on a day-to-day basis. Don’t think too hard about it—the first thing that comes to your mind is usually the one creating the most stress in your body and mind and weighing most heavily on your heart.
Heart Breath Mind
Leah Lagos
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