The Rise and Fall of Lavrenti Beria
NICOLAEVSKY, BORIS I.
Battle in the Kremlin—2 The Rise and Fall of Lavrenti Beria By Boris I. Nicolaevsky (Second of a series) Here Boris I. Nicolaevsky, veteran of Moscow's Marx-Engels Institute, continues his...
...There is no longer any doubt that Beria tried to effect radical changes in Soviet foreign policy...
...And so Malenkov at this plenum was forced to leave the Central Committee Secretariat...
...In the Secretariat of the Central Committee and the apparatus of the Moscow City Committee, Nikita Khrushchev was still boss together with his close aide, Averky Aristov, chief of the cadre section of the Central Committee...
...The struggle against the dominant role of the Party apparatus could previously be based only on the person of the supreme dictator, Stalin, who stood above both the Government and Party machines...
...Without his complicity, there could not have been the secret trial of Lozovsky, Bergelson and other Jewish Communists in August 1952, the drive against Beria's followers in Georgia and the Slanskv trial in Czechoslovakia later that year...
...At the very end of February 1953, he was elected to the Moscow City Soviet, but his name vanished from the press when Stalin died...
...Within his purview were the Soviet Supreme Court and Prosecutor's Office, the troop commander of the Moscow Military District, and the commandant of the Kremlin Guard...
...In order to save himself from the hatred which surrounded him within the Party, he was trying to find support outside the Party...
...Exactly when Poskrebyshev disappeared is unknown...
...The policy he was beginning to implement in East Germany was nothing less than preparation for withdrawal...
...The new Presidium was limited to eight members of the 1950 Politburo (Andreyev, whose removal Khrushchev had engineered while Stalin was still alive, was the only old member not restored) plus two new members, both leaders of the managerial group whose patron was Malenkov...
...Malenkov brought in his closest collaborator, N. N. Shatalin, who had long been his aide in the Central Committee's carde division and now returned to that post...
...Of course, these attempts were foredoomed...
...in the last weeks of Stalin's life, Georgi Malenkov...
...Last week, he described the rivalry between two major groups in Soviet society: the economic managers and technicians, some two million strong, championed by Georgi Malenkov...
...The summer of 1953 marked their palmy days...
...Hence, at the March 16 Central Committee plenum, major opposition to Malenkov's inclusion in the Secretariat appeared...
...It called for more consumers goods and concessions to the peasants...
...whose supporters among Soviet economic managers were being hounded...
...At Stalin's death, Beria realized that he had to break out of the vicious circle: His position was desperate because all strata of the regime without exception were against him...
...Beria, whose followers were being liquidated both in the Soviet Union (especially in Georgia) and in such satellites as Czechoslovakia and Rumania...
...Beria, who had a special detachment of devoted Georgian bodyguards, was in a position to answer blow with blow...
...Beria had achieved his position as the obedient executor of Stalin's will, for Stalin needed a police apparatus that was dependent on him personally to keep watch on the entire country, including the Party apparatus...
...In this situation, the remaining purgers could have attempted to continue the struggle, hut the result would have been strife...
...This "second Yezhovshchina" of 1952-3 was aimed at Beria and at the economic managers under Malenkov's wing...
...Anti-Georgian feeling, which did not exist in Tsarist Russia or in the first decades of Soviet rule, became widespread during the Beria period, particularly among Communist party members...
...There was panic at the time, not so much at the grassroots of Soviet society but among the top leaders of the regime and their immediate entourage...
...But these victories of the group opposed to the Party apparatus were counter-balanced by the broad decision which underlay the entire compromise: recognition of the Party's Central Committee Presidium as the highest organ of Soviet government...
...Continued next week...
...The apparatus Poskrebyshev had created to carry out the "second Yezhovshchina" still existed: The Ministry of State Security (MGB) was still headed by Semyon D. Ignatyev...
...its broader features included anti-Semitism and an aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East...
...The "second Yrzhoi'shchina," although it had barely started at Stalin's death, had already begun to strike at prominent Soviet leaders...
...Vyacheslav Molotov, whose wife had been arrested...
...Nor was all favorable in the Defense Ministn : Shtemenko...
...Its organizer was Khrushchev, but Khrushchev could not at that time conduct the struggle alone against Malenkov...
...In 195152, when the ""second Yezhovshchina" was first being prepared and there was as yet no question of purging the economic managers, Malenkov had supported Poskrebyshev and Khrushchev...
...The conference also ousted from the Central Committee Presidium nearly all of the new members who had been admitted at the 19th Party Congress (October 1952), for the most part supporters of the Poskrebyshev-Khrushchev bloc...
...At the same time, there is increasingly detailed information about attempts made by Beria's people to make direct contact with Western leaders with a view to direct negotiations on improving relations...
...Stalin's death brought the personal struggles to the forefront...
...The plan was adopted unanimously...
...It was a form of disguised protest against the police terror which Stalin, through Beria, imposed on all strata of the Soviet regime...
...had no intention of going to their doom without a struggle...
...Bulganin still ruled, working with Leonid Brezhnev, a member of the Centrol Committee Secretariat...
...But Stalin and Khrushchev were foiled by two factors: Malenkov, who had first gone along with them, balked at the purge of economic managers...
...He is not mentioned in any of the reports of Stalin's funeral or of the many meetings at the time...
...Until then, Khrushchev had retreated and kept silent, concentrating on maintaining his position in the Central Committee Secretariat...
...T,he destruction of Beria and his MVD empire radically altered the situation within the regime...
...Whereas the economic managers were the actual organizers and directors of the Soviet economy, Beria and his enormous machine were a parasitic growth on the state apparatus, completely dependent on Stalin's position as dictator...
...Such a counter-blow by Beria resulted in the disappearance of Alexander N. Poskrebyshev, who for three decades had headed Stalin's personal secretariat...
...The Minister himself, Ignatyev, was not tried, but he was removed as a secretary of the Central Committee...
...Its very composition — the two highest organs of the Government apparatus participating on an equal basis with the Party Central Committee — was a blow to the principle of partiinost ("party-ness...
...Superficially, this conference appeared a victory for the opponents of the Party machine...
...Seweryn Bialer, a well-informed Polish Communist who fled to the West early in 1956, informs us that Khrushchev, in a circular letter to Party organizations which Bialer read, told of a courier whom Beria had sent to Tito but who had been intercepted by the Khrushchev apparatus...
...He disappeared either just before Stalin's death (conceivably his destruction led to Stalin's demise) or immediately after it...
...In any event, if the blows against Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Beria and Malenkov were stages in a mounting "second Yezhovshchina," the destruction of Poskrebyshev marked a halt in the campaign...
...He became sole master of the whole vast police-industrial apparatus (which had previously been divided between the MGB and the MVD), the atomic industry, huge construction projects, nearly all gold-mining operations, etc...
...There also remained all the conflicts and contradictions which had been eroding the dictatorship from within—major socio-political antagonisms within Soviet society, as well as personal struggles among the hierarchs...
...Stalin's consent to the purge of Beria's followers which began in the spring of 1952 indicated that he was ready to sacrifice Beria in order to allay this discontent...
...True, this was restricted by a "gentlemen's agreement" which precluded any change in the composition of the Presidium (the agreement became known from the polemics attending Khrushchev's recent coup...
...They received the greatest share of the loot in the division of Beria's empire: industries, mines and construction sites long under MVD sway...
...Realizing that he was hated by all the other strata of the regime, especially by the Party functionaries, Beria was trying to launch a policy based, on the one hand, on achieving reconciliation with the West and, on the other, on real concessions to the population...
...With the aid of Alexander Poskrebyshev, Stalin's chef du cabinet, Defense Minister Nikolai Bulganin and Minister of State Security Semyon Ignatyev, Khrushchev began undermining the position of police chief Lavrenti Beria...
...Essentially, this meant concentrating in Malen-kov's hands all Stalin's formal rights...
...It was to Stalin that Malenkov looked in his attempt to secure a leading role for the economic managers...
...This was inevitable in a country of one-party dictatorship...
...Hence, he cast about in directions which seem utterly incredible for a man with his past...
...Key MVD officials refused to carry out Beria's orders to gather information on the internal activity of the Party apparatus...
...In March and April 1953, this Secretariat had been reorganized several times...
...This group also helped Stalin plan a great purge, comparable to that waged under Nikolai Yezhov in the 1930s...
...The interests of all required a compromise, and the compromise was made on March 6, 1953 at a conference of the Party Central Committee, the Council of Ministers and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet...
...On the other hand, as far as basic principle was concerned, recognizing the Presidium—an organ formally created by the Party and responsible only to it —as the highest organ of the regime had the ultimate effect of confirming the supremacy of the Party machine over the entire apparatus of the dictatorship...
...Malenkov's report to the Supreme Soviet on August 8, 1953 reflected the managers' thinking...
...and the Communist party functionaries, perhaps a million strong, led by Nikita Khrushchev...
...This statement was an appeal not to the Party elite but to the rank-and-file Soviet intelligentsia—the class to which the released doctors belonged...
...the Chief of Stall, had been knocked out of the saddle, and Marshal Konev was out of Moscow...
...Battle in the Kremlin—2 The Rise and Fall of Lavrenti Beria By Boris I. Nicolaevsky (Second of a series) Here Boris I. Nicolaevsky, veteran of Moscow's Marx-Engels Institute, continues his historical analysis of the Kremlin struggle...
...Nevertheless, Shatalin was not Malenkov, and Khrushchev's hands were freer...
...For the bitter fight among these leaders had brought the regime to the brink of bloody internecine warfare...
...Beria's past weighed on him like a heavy load...
...But with Poskrebyshev destroyed, all the materials gathered for the purge were in the hands of Beria...
...There was the mysterious urgency of Winston Churchill's call for a summit conference on May 11, 1953 — when Beria was at the height of his influence...
...It also appears that Beria helped persuade Communist China to conclude an armistice in Korea...
...Khrushchev was its chief organizer, disintegrating the MVD apparatus through its Party cells...
...Among those groups to which he was trying to appeal, his name had for decades been a synonym.for the most frightful terror...
...On the domestic front, it was Beria who made the first report in mid-March 1953, exposing the machinations against the Jewish doctors and the "second Yezhovshchina" in general...
...His name does not appear in the accounts of sessions of the Supreme Soviet, although he was chairman of its Commission on Legislative Proposals...
...Formally, his power was never as great as during the three-and-a-half months after the March 6 conference...
...It promised to secure for every Soviet citizen the legal rights established by the Soviet Constitution...
...The Party technocrats not only broadened their economic base, but were now free of police supervision...
...To the outside world, the victory in the Beria fight appeared to have gone to Malenkov and the economic managers...
...and Soviet Army professionals replaced u Bulganin protege as chief of staff with Marshal Georgi Zhukov's wartime aide, Marshal Vasili D. Sokolovsky...
...He was aided by the view of him which had taken root in Party circles: that he was a man of little independence in matters of major policy, capable of playing only a secondary role...
...Khrushchev was not yet its complete master...
...For that reason, the agreement of March 6 placed two Presidium members, Malenkov and Khrushchev, at the head of the Secretariat...
...These decisions seemed a great victory for Beria personally...
...Both they and their adversaries realized that a bloody split in the ruling apparatus would threaten the whole Soviet regime...
...The June uprising in Germany dealt Beria the final blow...
...Both men collaborated in the "Leningrad case" of 1949-50, in which followers of the late Andrei Zhdanov were purged, but Khrushchev then assumed much of Zhdanov's power and turned against his former protector Malenkov...
...Stalin, his purge forestalled, died...
...Exceeding the powers he had received from the Presidium (as reported after his arrest), Beria not only released the imprisoned doctors but published a statement which exposed "methods of investigation that are impermissible and strictly forbidden by Soviet law" and announced that the culprits, headed by Deputy Minister of State Security Ryumin, would be placed on trial...
...Beria was also the first to try to establish contact with Tito...
...In the Defense Ministry...
...These top leaders, especially Beria and Malenkov...
...In his funeral oration, Lavrenti Beria warned against panic — with good reason...
...Moreover, Beria, like Stalin, was a Georgian and had installed a great many Caucasians, especially Georgians, in the top posts of the terror machine...
...When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, the apparatus of his dictatorship survived, as did the group of his "close disciples and comrades-in-arms...
...Molotov stubbornly resisted Beria's new foreign policy...
...According to Khrushchev's secret report to the 20th Party Congress, as well as reliable information from other sources, those who felt threatened included Kliment Voroshilov, whom Stalin considered a British agent and barred from Presidium meetings...
...To experienced hands like Malenkov, Beria, Kaganovich and Mikoyan, thoroughly familiar with all the methods of utilizing the mighty Party machine, it was apparent what a terrible force this Secretariat could become in the hands of a skilful intriguer...
...He had to have powerful support, and there is reason to believe that this support was supplied by Beria, whose report on the activity of Poskrebyshev and Stalin's personal secretariat was a key feature at that plenum...
...In these conditions, Beria now regarded discord between Malenkov and Khrushchev as more favorable to him than concentration of all leading functions in Malenkov's hands...
...Lazar Kaganovich, suspect as a Jew under Stalin's general anti-Semitic policy...
...But this created an extraordinary position for Malenkov: Already Chairman of the Central Committee Presidium and head of the Government, he became chief of the Party apparatus as well...
...One of these was Strokach in the Ukraine, who during the war had been Khrushchev's closest aide in organizing partisan detachments behind German lines...
...This was even more true of Beria's struggle against the Party functionaries...
...At the same time, within the regime itself these attempts helped create a united front against him...
...Malenkov, who on many issues had supported Beria in an attempt to maintain a balance within the framework of the March compromise, abandoned him at the decisive moment and went over to the camp of Khrushchev and Molotov...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 31
