=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2552/Paper12
|storemode=property
|title=Language Engineering Methods in Forensics: a Study of the Authorship of Texts Attributed to Lavrenty Beria
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2552/Paper12.pdf
|volume=Vol-2552
|authors= Mikhail Marusenko, Vadim Petrov, Xenia Piotrowska, Sergey Bogdanov
}}
==Language Engineering Methods in Forensics: a Study of the Authorship of Texts Attributed to Lavrenty Beria==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2552/Paper12.pdf
Language Engineering Methods in Forensics:
a Study of the Authorship of Texts Attributed
to Lavrenty Beria ∗
Mikhail Marusenko 1,2 Vadim Petrov1
mamikhail@yandex.ru vadim.petrov1953@mail.ru
Xenia Piotrowska 2 Sergey Bogdanov 2
krp62@mail.ru rector@herzen.spb.ru
1
Saint-Petersburg State University,
2
Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia,
St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
Abstract
Abstract: This paper discusses the need and possibility of applying quantitative lin-
guistics methods to forensic investigation. The results of the examination of the texts
appearing in the Beria case (“Beria’s letters from prison”, interrogation protocols, the last
words of the defendants) testify to the falsification of the trial and the entire process of
removing Beria from power.
Keywords: forensic science, quantitative linguistics, historical expert examination,
Beria case
1 Introduction
More than 66 years have passed since the day when Lavrenty Beria was removed from the
Soviet political Olympus. Yet, there is no unanimity among scholars even as to when Beria
was actually killed - immediately after the arrest, in early July 1953, or, according to the
official date of his execution, at the end of December of that year. From July 1953 until the
mid-1990s, the name of L. Beria was steadily associated with the words "spy", "vile killer",
"foreign intelligence agent", "sexual maniac", "rapist" and the like. Thanks to N. Khrushchev,
Beria became the main monster of the Stalin’s era. Only recently have historians begun to
re-evaluate their attitude to him [Chertinov, 2018a, 20].
∗
Copyright c 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attri-
bution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
1
Regarding the crimes attributed to Beria, A. Dugin and V. Shepelev note that in the
materials they studied, including the recently published draft indictment in the Beria case,
there was not a single serious crime, confirmed by factual evidence, that could be qualified as
treason or espionage in favor of foreign states, nor was there one in the minutes of the Plenum
of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which took place in July 1953 [Dugin, Shepelev, 2015].
Under N. Khrushchev, the name of L. Beria was not only hushed up, but was also removed
from books. After his death, Beria was not only deleted from Soviet history, but even his
name was removed from encyclopedias [Prudnikova, 2014].
In addition, Khrushchev and his associates completely ignored anything good Beria have
done for strengthen the power and defense capability of the Soviet Union. This created a
somewhat paradoxical situation, which many researchers do not notice or do not want to
notice, because only L. Beria remains convicted of crimes, many of which he haven’t done or
have done but not only himself [Kudriashov, 2017].
After the pre-war purges, after the difficult military and post-war years, the population
negatively perceived security services. Conspirators against Beria skillfully took advantage
of, among other circumstances, the internal political situation that had developed in the
USSR after the death of J. Stalin. All the conspirators had to do is to convince delegates
of the Plenum of the Party Central Committee and members of the Supreme Council of the
treachery and treason of L. Beria.
Only after 1991 did the ban on Lavrenty Beria start to be lifted, and “now there is no
longer an unambiguous assessment of the activities of Stalin’s associate. Nevertheless, an
official, objective assessment of this contradictory personality of the twentieth century has not
yet been given” [Kudriashov, 2017].
2 Forensic aspect of the Beria’s case
A number of scholars believe that the murder of Beria occurred in the afternoon of June 26,
1953 or shortly after this date. They point to General K. Moskalenko, as the direct executor
of the murder [Mukhin, 2002][Pereyaslavov, 2002].
V. Chertinov also mentions Beria’s death on June 26, 1953, but he point to a conspiracy
against Joseph Stalin as the motive for the murder. According to the official version, the
military, led by Marshal G. Zhukov, took Beria directly from the courtroom, and in December
after a closed trial he was shot. The non-official version is that Beria didn’t even reach the
meeting, but had been killed in the morning, his Moscow house was stormed [Chertinov,
2018b].
N. Kudryashov asking a number of completely logical questions consider that after Stalin’s
death, Lavrenty Beria was doomed [Kudriashov, 2017][Dugin, Shepelev, 2015, 48]. The infor-
mation provided by Kudryashov convincingly indicates that Khrushchev and Co. had very
serious motives in order to immediately kill Beria, not entrusting his interrogations to even
the most trusted people. At the July 1953 Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU,
N. Bulganin named Malenkov, Khrushchev and Molotov as the organizers of the conspiracy
against Beria. N. Khrushchev himself, in his brief reply, ranked Bulganin as one as well [Be-
ria, 1999, p. 258]. He marked, that Bulganin had committed a slip of the tongue that meant
that there was no conspiracy against Beria, since he had acted alone [Beria, 1999, 255]. But
Khrushchev himself had many reasons to eliminate Beria as soon as possible because of the
circumstances of Khrushchev’s previous work [Sever, 2018, 33]. Some of the speeches at this
2
Plenum transparently hint that Beria is already dead [Kudriashov, 2017, 201], but none of the
speakers at the July 1953 Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee could bring clear evidence
of the urgent need for the arrest of Beria [Tskvitariya, 2015, 350].
Other researchers, considering the presence of agences of foreign special services agents
among senior officials of the USSR, also drew attention to the possibility of Western intelligence
services participating in the deaths of both Stalin and Beria [Dugin, Shepelev, 2015] [Yerashov,
2010, 15-16]. For example, if Bulganin was an agent of the CIA, he could participate in the
conspiracy against Beria not only as an ally of Khrushchev, but also as an agent of the CIA
or British intelligence.
Another, rather implicit reason for the liquidation of Beria, could have been considerations
in the activities of Beria, the primacy of pragmatism over ideology [Tskvitariya, 2015, 351].
Based on all the facts cited above, it can be concluded that the circumstances of Beria’s
death is very contradictory. L. Beria was most likely killed by the conspirators either on June
26, 1953, or somewhat later, and did not live up to the officially announced date of his execution
on December 23 of the same year. Next, we can proceed to consider the linguistic aspect of
the “Beria’s case,” in particular, the level of Beria’s knowledge of the Russian language.
3 Linguistic analysis of authorship in the Beria’s case
For many years, Beria’s deputy and main assistant V. Merkulov served as his chief “speech-
writer” [Kudriashov, 2017, 211]. There are a lot of other evidences that indicates that Beria
was not sufficiently educated, did not speak Russian well [Politburo, 2012]. Now, it is already
certain that other people wrote for him a number of works whose authorship was officially
attributed to him. It seems that letters from prison should confirm the fact that Beria was
alive, if he had been able to write them. But even they are by no means evidence that Beria
was alive at any moment after the writing of the last of letters from prison.
Some researchers also pay attention to the semantic features of Beria’s letters. For exam-
ple, the initial phrase of the first letter, dated June 28, 1953: "I was sure that from that big
criticism at the Presidium I would draw all the conclusions I needed and would be useful in
the team..." poses a lot of questions because the meeting of the Presidium, at which serious
accusations of Beria’s anti-state and anti-party actions were first made, is known to have taken
place only on June 29, 1953 [Dugin, Shepelev, 2015, 47].
Z. Tskvitaria draws attention to some doubtful signs of the authenticity of "Beria’s letters
from prison": His opinion deserves the closest attention, because of strange accent of letter’s
postcriptum: "C-des, I apologize that I am not writing very coherently and poorly because
of my condition, but also due to weak lighting and the absence of pince-nez (glasses)" [Tskvi-
tariya, 2015, 330-331]. May be Beria needed to make excuses for his bad style, because of this
postscript was made only for the purpose that the letter itself would not cause unnecessary
questions if it were revealed that the writing style and calligraphy were different from those
of Beria? Despite this, no one has yet bothered to conduct a handwriting or any other ex-
amination ... it is especially interesting that in the documents published by the Democracy
Foundation these letters are listed as copies. If this foundation was not given the opportu-
nity to get acquainted with the original, I think the question of examination will remain an
unresolved problem.
In attempts to determine the authenticity of certain handwritten documents that are
considered to be written by L. Beria, researchers tend not to go beyond a handwriting exami-
3
nation. But even this method sometimes gives positive results. A logical step in the study was
an independent handwriting examination conducted by the expert E. Dolzhansky (certificate
No. CS7.001.001C). The expert found differences in particular features of the handwriting
and concluded that the differences in the general and particular features of the handwriting
are significant, stable and comprise two different individual sets of handwriting attributes,
which means that the author of the text of "Letter to the Presidium of the CPSU Central
Committee" is one person, and the author of the sample is another person [Dugin, Shepelev,
2015, 47].
Analysis of all the above information allows us to come to the following conclusion:
L. Beria could not be the author of "Beria’s letters from prison".
4 Materials and methods
To conduct a study of the authorship of “Beria’s letters from prison”, we have already applied
quantitative linguistic analysis methods using the Stylo package written in the programming
language R [Eder et al., 2016].
The intertextual measure Delta proposed by J. Burroughs in 2001 [Burrows 2002] was
tested by many researchers on large volumes of heterogeneous text data:
• English prose of 20th century [Hoover, 2004],
• modern English poetry [Hoover, 2005], as well as poetic works in Latin [Rybicki et
al., 2011],
• prose of big formes in English, French, Italian, German, Polish, Hungarian languages,
as well as in Latin and Arabic [Rybicki et al., 2011; Evert et al. 2015; Jannidis et al.,
2015],
• political texts in English [Savoy, 2015].
If we have a set of n words of interest for research, against which the Delta measure will
be calculated. We’ll call this set of words as wi , defining fi (D) as the frequency of the word
wi in the text D, and µi , - as the average frequency of the word in the sample, and σi - as
the standard deviation of this frequency. Then the standardized estimate, or z -estimation of
the frequency of use of the word wi in the text D is calculated by the formula
fi (D) − µi
z(fi (D)) = . (1)
σi
Thus, we have the following mathematical expression corresponding to the average of the
absolute values of the differences of standardized estimates of word frequencies from wi
between the texts D and D0 , called as Delta measure:
n
0 1X
∆(D, D ) = |z(fi (D)) − z(fi (D0 ))|. (2)
n i=1
This formula can be converted as follows:
n n
0 1X 0 1 X fi (D) − µi fi (D0 ) − µi
∆(D, D ) = |z(fi (D)) − z(fi (D ))| = − =
n i=1 n i=1 σi σi
4
n
1 X fi (D) − fi (D0 )
= . (3)
n i=1 σi
his transformation shows that the Delta is actually independent of the average frequencies of
the words µi in the sample, and it can be considered as a normalized measure of the difference
between the frequencies of each of the words in the texts D and D0 . Since taking the average
involves dividing the sum by a constant equal to the number of words n under consideration,
this action can be neglected when comparing the calculated results. Therefore, the formula
can be converted to the form:
n
0
X 1
∆(D, D ) = |fi (D) − fi (D0 )|, (4)
σ
i=1 i
those, the Delta measure with respect to the pair of texts (D, D0 ) equal to the sum over the
set of words wi of the absolute values of the word frequency differences between the texts D
and D0 divided by the standard deviation of σi .
Using Delta in the attribution problem, we try to compare authorship authors for the text
0
D by evaluating the multidimensional distance to the text D, and each dimension (frequency
of word usage) is scaled by the factor σ1i (i.e. , small deviations can affect the result if they
belong to a measurement with a small frequency spread) [Argamon, 2008].
To study texts in synthetic languages M. Eder suggested for increased weight of frequently
used words new modification of Delta, which was named as Eder’s Delta [Eder et al., 2016].
It was an and proposed by:
n
|fi (D) − fi (D0 )| n − i + 1
(n) 1 X
∆E (D, D0 ) = · . (5)
n i=1 σi n
Clustering algorithms are often used together with Delta to obtain the results in the form of
a dendrogramе. In this study, we used a clustering algorithm that forms clusters by Ward
method.
5 Results and Discussion
As a result, it was found that
• the intellectual authorship of the so-called “Beria’s letters from prison”, which date back
to the period between June 28 and July 2, 1953, most likely belongs not to one person,
but to a whole group of persons (speechwriters);
• these persons had previously taken part in the writing of speeches and articles for L. Be-
ria;
therefore, they were instructed to falsify these letters. These speechwriters included
V. Merkulov, who, until his arrest in September 1953, held the post of Minister of State
Control, and earlier was one of the persons closest to Beria. Merkulov most likely played a
leading role in the group of people who wrote these letters on behalf of Lavrenty Beria, because
Beria’s letters and his speech dated 03.04.1937, as well as Merkulov’s interrogation protocol
and his letters gradually form one cluster (Fig. 1) [Petrov et al., 2019, 601-602].
5
On the whole, the results of the authorship research confirm the hypothesis that the so-
called “Beria’s letters of from prison” and the protocols of his interrogations were written after
Beria’s death by V. Merkulov and an unknown third party or third parties. His “accomplices”
allegedly participated in the so-called “trial” of L. Beria as defendants:
• V. Merkulov, USSR Minister of State Control at that time;
• V. Dekanozov, Minister of the Interior of the Georgian SSR;
• B. Kobulov, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR;
• S. Goglidze, Head of Department 3 of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR;
• P. Meshik, Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR;
• L. Vlodzimirsky, Head of the Investigation Unit for Particularly Important Cases of the
USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs.
At the end of the judicial investigation, the defendants were given the last word [Sukhomlinov,
Murin, 2002]. However, there is not a single face-to-face or cross-examination protocol in the
case.
Yu. Mukhin summarizes the data that he cited in his book as follows: “All the facts
discussed above can be explained only in one way - there were no trials of Beria or of his
comrades-in-misfortune. And all the cited “protocols” of this court are fakes concocted under
the guidance of Rudenko" [Mukhin, 2002, 301].
Figure 1: Clustering results of “Beria’s letters from prison” and interrogations of Beria and
Merkulov
6
An additional argument confirming the death of L. Beria earlier on December 23, 1953 is
based on the results of our forensic analysis of the order given to Colonel-General P. Batitsky
to execute L. Beria [Sukhomlinov, 2003, 432] and its comparative analysis vs. other similar
regulations of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.
We examined these documents using the recommendations of E. Elagina: “From the point
of view of legal status, the following groups of documents can be distinguished: genuine and
false. An original document must satisfy the following criteria: there should be no doubt
about the source of the document; there should be no doubt about the authenticity of the
facts stated in the document; there should be no doubt about the method of manufacturing the
document and the absence of unacceptable changes made to the document after completion
of its production and execution" [Kriminalistika, 2019, 202]. For all three criteria listed by
E. Elagina, serious doubts arose as to the authenticity of the "Order to Batitsky."
An analysis of the forensically significant elements of the order addressed to Colonel-
General P. Batitsky, with similar elements of other investigated instructions for the execution,
showed significant differences between them. This circumstance allows us to come to the
conclusion about the falsity of the instruction addressed to Batitsky about Beria’s execution.
Figure 2: Clustering of the “Last words of the defendants”
7
Therefore, the second stage of the authorship research was to establish the authorship
of the texts of the last words of the defendants (Table 1). Considering that “Beria’s letters
from prison” were found to be false at the first stage, the hypothesis was put forward that the
whole trial was falsified after the death of the main defendant, and that the last words of the
defendants were also falsified.
The results of text processing using the Stylo package are shown in Fig. 2. It shows that
seven texts were divided into two clusters: one includes the last words of Merkulov, Dekanozov
and Kobulov, the second contains the last words of Meshik, Goglidze, Beria and Vlodzimersky.
It can be assumed that the authors of all the texts were two unknown persons who were
entrusted with creating the appearance of a real trial and falsifying necessary documents.
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