For What Did Beria Die?

...The statement of the U.S.S.R...

...Its main features can be determined from statements published by the Soviet authorities...

...While newspaper reports on factory meetings call Beria no less than a man who "sold himself to international imperialism," the official statements are extremely vague on this subject...

...A noted authority on Communism attempts to analyze the program for which Beria and his group were purged By Boris I. Nicolaevsky The Beria case has little in common, basically, with the show trials of the 1930s...

...internal cohesion in the Kremlin has proved much weaker than it had seemed to the outside observer...

...When these statements discuss Beria's "crimes" in the realm of foreign policy, they seem rather obscure...

...The Ukrainian Party Secretary, Melnikov, was accused of "filling leading Party and Soviet positions in the western provinces of the Ukraine primarily with workers from other provinces of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic," and also of "in effect changing instruction in Western Ukrainian universities to the Russian language" (Pravda, June 13...

...Needless to say, not everything in these statements is true...

...But these in no way affect the collective-farm system itself...

...The ultimate aim of the Kremlin is clear in Stalin's 1952 work, Economic Problems of Socialism, where he speaks of the contradiction between the state form of property, which dominates Soviet industry, and group property, which exists in the kolkhozes...

...Bagirov's and Arutyunov's attacks on "amalgamation" must have enjoyed at least the indirect support of Beria...

...But the situation was such that the Government had to give some information about the actual content of Beria's offense...

...Both of these men are now paying for those attacks...

...Stalin's death checked this trend...

...But Beria's leading role in this matter was clearly indicated by, among other things, the fact that the article in the June issue of the Communist propounding the new line was signed by his henchman P. N. Fedoseyev...

...Immediately after Beria's fall, Bagirov lost his post and Arutyunov is following him...

...The Communists systematically rehabilitated Tsarist nationalities policy, glossing over its evil aspects and glorifying its contributions to the building up of the "Russian state...

...What was Beria's program...

...2) they favored alleviating the persecution of minority nationalities, and (3) they favored moderating Soviet foreign aggression by weakening the dictatorship of the Communist parties in the occupied countries...

...Boris I. Nicolaevsky (cut at right) is one of the Western world's greatest authorities on Soviet affairs...

...This charge, constantly repeated in all documents and articles with minor variations, also has a basis in fact...

...This "coincidence" helps explain the charge which was leveled against Beria on July 10 but went un-mentioned on December 17—the charge that "Being obliged to carry out the direct orders of the Party and the Soviet Government on strengthening Soviet legality and liquidating . . . arbitrary behavior, Beria deliberately slowed the carrying out of these orders [or] attempted to distort them...

...In addition to the farm and nationalities problems, foreign affairs played a decisive role in Beria's fall...

...Both of these men were Beria prot?g?s—particularly Arutyunov, who first worked under Beria as Secretary of the Tiflis party and was promoted by Beria in 1937 to the party leadership in Armenia...

...The peasants resist and then adapt, and then the regime starts anew...

...2) the statement, "In the Prosecutor's Office of the U.S.S.R.," published in Soviet newspapers on December 17, and (3) the statement on the trial and conviction, published on December 23...

...The statement of the U.S.S.R...

...too many people knew about the struggle which preceded his destruction...

...Then the Government opens a new drive against the countryside...

...Prosecutor's Office, "Beria and his accomplices undertook criminal measures aimed at reviving the remnants of bourgeois-nationalist elements in the Union republics, at sowing enmity and dissension among the peoples of the U.S.S.R...

...Great though Beria's power was, he could only have initiated such a policy with the acquiescence of the Party Secretariat, headed by Khrushchev, and of Malenkov as head of the Government...

...A former leader of the Russian Social Democrats and official of the Moscow Archives of the Russian Revolution, he is the author of a biography of Azeff: The Spy, co-author of Forced Labor in Soviet Runtia and Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, and a featured writer for scholarly journals here and abroad...

...Beria's policies were undoubtedly of a more radical nature...

...To sum up, Beria's group was liquidated because (1) they favored relaxing the offensive against the countryside carried on under the slogan of "amalgamation of the kolkhozes...

...If Ryumin investigated the doctors case, then Vlodzimirsky undoubtedly investigated Ryumin's investigation...

...We are fairly well informed about the struggle which raged among the top German Communists...

...suppression of minorities by the Kremlin was drastic, and it was carried out in the guise of Great Russian chauvinism...

...Nikolai Bukharin at the Moscow Trial of March 1938 the collective-farm system and create food difficulties in the country," and "in every possible way sabotaged and interfered with the carrying out of vital Party and Government measures aimed at improving the kolkhozes and sovkhozes, at steadily increasing the well-being of the Soviet people...

...Consequently, the main body of these statementsd—especially where political charges were involved—is exceedingly informative...

...Thus, the liquidation of the "doctors plot" is held to be a "distortion" perpetrated by "Beria and his accomplices" in violation of "direct orders" of the Party and Government...

...The basic cause of the Soviet farm crisis is the failure of the collective-farm system as such to satisfy the interests and wishes of the peasants...

...The prisoners' dock was filled by the highest chiefs of the Soviet terror apparatus, men who actually did aspire to, and could, capture power—not merely for power's sake alone, but to carry out a definite program...

...Undoubtedly, he combined his plans for retreat on basic questions of domestic policy with an understanding of the need for corresponding changes in foreign policy as well...

...Prosecutor's Office confines itself to saying that Beria "based his criminal calculations on support for the conspiracy by reactionary imperialist forces abroad" and, for this purpose, "maintained and expanded his links with foreign intelligence...

...This same post had been occupied in the months before Stalin's death by Ryumin, the man who conducted the investigation in the "doctors case" and whose investigatory methods were so sharply condemned last spring when the doctors were released...

...The "amalgamation of the kolkhozes," as originally projected in 1950, was to be the decisive step...

...A second cause of dispute which led to Beria's fall was the nationalities question...

...The acuteness of the present Soviet farm crisis is caused precisely by this "amalgamation," and the struggle within the Kremlin has been raging on whether to continue or to alleviate this policy...

...with the great Russian people...

...For when yon ask yourself, If you must die, what are you dying for?, an absolute black vacuity rises before you with startling vividness...

...The West Germans called these plans "the German NEP," but they were even more than that...

...It must be assumed that Beria's plans included an agreement with, the West based on considerable concessions by the U.S.S.R., at least in regard to the Soviet zones of Germany and Austria...

...Thus, even in the last 11 months the number of kolkhozes had dropped another 3,000, which means that perhaps as many as 6,000 kolkhozes—comprising 5 per cent of the entire collective system—were subjected to the "amalgamation" operation...

...at last September's plenum of the Central Committee of the Party, Khrushchev gave a figure of 94,000...

...The statement of the Prosecutor's Office says that Beria set out to "undermine "In prison, I made a re-evaluation of my entire past...

...Wilhelm Zaisser, chief of the East German secret police, was Beria's man, and it was he who launched the so-called "new course," which included not only economic concessions but also an agreement with the church, major concessions to the bourgeois parties, and so on...

...Last spring, Ryumin was branded an "adventurist...

...The "crimes" of Beria constitute, in their essence, the very measures of relief and relaxation which Stalin's successors sought to introduce both before and after the death of the supreme dictator...

...Central to all the accusations against Beria is the charge of "wrecking" activities in agriculture...

...The "amalgamation" plan was not completely carried out: At the beginning of March 1951, Khrushchev, generally credited with being the initiator of the plan, suffered a severe defeat...

...Prosecutor's Office, published on December 17, tells us that Beria's "accomplice" Vlodzimirsky held the post of "chief of the special investigatory section of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the U.S.S.R...

...The official statements show that Beria did favor such changes...

...The Malenkov regime is unquestionably trying to shift responsibility for this crisis to Beria and his co-defendants...

...The regime's relations with the peasantry have, for two decades, been a strange game: Driven by force into the kolkhozes and unable to abolish them, the peasants try in one way or another to adapt to the collective forms as they exist at any given time...

...At the Nineteenth Party Congress, Malenkov reported that the number of kolkhozes had been reduced from 254,000 on January 1, 1950, to 97,-000 in October 1952...

...But the present acuteness of the crisis stems from a specific policy, which was begun by the Soviet Government in 1950 under the slogan "Amalgamation of the Kolkhozes" and which is still continuing...

...The last days of Stalin's life were marked by extreme narrowness on the nationalities question...

...the Beria case is fundamentally based on the truth...

...The aim of Soviet farm policy, he says, is to eliminate this contradiction—in other words, to transform the collective farmer into a hired worker for the state...

...Peasants were to be forcibly resettled from small villages and settlements to "agro-cities" in a fundamental upheaval of the entire Soviet countryside...

...One further fact should be noted...

...The great struggle in Moscow is by no means over...

...Similar developments took place in other Union republics...

...nor do they tell all the facts about the case...

...and, in particular, undermining the friendship of the peoples of the U.S.S.R...

...There have been three of these: (1) the articles published in Pravda and Izvestia on July 10, after Beria's arrest...

...How true is its charge...

...They find loopholes in the system which permit them to carry on...

...But the "amalgamation" policy was by no means finished...

...His article, "Russia Purges the Purgers," in last week's Nkw I.KUtKR, analyzed the position of Beria's co-defendants and the significance of their downfall...

...Their statements were published in the local press—in the Erivan Communist and the Baku Worker...

...the dictatorship gave up its plans for "agro-cities," and much less was heard about "amalgamation...

...According to the statement of the U.S.S.R...

...There is no precise information about the farm program of the Beria group, but it is safe to say from what we know that Beria did favor a relaxation of the offensive against the countryside...

...The importance of this identifying comment cannot be overestimated...

...The trials of the broken Old Bolsheviks were based on lies...

...But the present stage of the struggle, the downfall of the Beria group, must be set down as a victory for "Stalinist reaction...

...More informative than these statements are the Pravda and Izvestia articles of July 10, which claim that Beria was "an agent of international imperialism" and, on orders from the latter, had harbored plans "to replace the policy worked out by the Party over many years by a policy of capitulation which would have led ultimately to the restoration of capitalism...

...The charge sounds very grave in view of the acute farm crisis whose details were made public just after Beria's arrest...

...In this dispute, Beria advocated alleviating or abandoning the policy of "amalgamation of the kolkhozes...

...Many of the purges of 1948-52 were conducted under anti-nationalist slogans...

...But not one of these intelligence organizations is named...

...In the non-Russian republics, high officials who had vigorously espoused Stalin's policy were replaced...

...At a plenum of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist party, the policy was acknowledged to be unsatisfactory...

...These were the three main political charges leveled against "Beria and his accomplices" by the Government of Malenkov and his accomplices...

...It is true that Malenkov and Khrushchev have taken various measures to increase the peasant's stake in the productivity of the economy...

...This can be categorically confirmed from the following facts: In March and April 1951, Bagirov, then Secretary of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist party, and Arutyunov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Armenian Communist party, came out openly against Khrushchev's "excess" in the realm of "amalgamation...

...Now we learn that the investigator who exposed him has been liquidated...