Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (March 17 (29), 1899 - December 23, 1953) - Soviet politician of Georgian nationality, Marshal Soviet Union, head of organs state security during the years of World War II.
Beria was the most influential of the heads of the secret police Stalin and led it for the longest time. He also controlled many other areas of the life of the Soviet state, was the de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union, standing at the head of the NKVD detachments that were created for the partisan operations of the Great Patriotic War and as "detachments" against thousands of "defectors, deserters, cowards and malingerers". Beria carried out a huge expansion of the Gulag camp system and was the main person responsible for the secret defense institutions - "sharashki", which played the largest military role. He created an effective reconnaissance and sabotage network. Together with Stalin, Beria took part in Yalta Conference. Stalin introduced him to the President Roosevelt as "our Himmler". After the war, Beria organized the seizure by the communists of the state institutions of the Central and of Eastern Europe and successfully completed the project of creating Soviet atomic bomb to which Stalin gave absolute priority. This creation was completed in five years thanks to Soviet espionage in the West, carried out by Beria's NKVD.
After Stalin's death in March 1953, Beria became deputy head of government (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR) and prepared a liberalization campaign. For a short time, together with Malenkov and Molotov, he became one of the members of the ruling "troika". Beria's self-confidence led him to underestimate the other members of the Politburo. During the coup d'etat, which was led by N. Khrushchev, who had the assistance of Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Beria was arrested on charges of treason during a meeting of the Politburo. The neutralization of the NKVD was provided by Zhukov's troops. After interrogation, Beria was taken to the cellars of the Lubyanka and shot by General Batitsky.
Beria's youth and his rise to power
Beria was born in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, Kutaisi province (now in Georgia). He belonged to the Mingrelian people and grew up in a Georgian Orthodox family. Beria's mother, Marta Jakeli (1868-1955), distantly related to the Megrelian princely family of Dadiani, was a deeply religious woman. She spent a lot of time in the church and died in one of the temples. Martha managed to become a widow once before she married Father Lavrenty, Pavel Khukhaevich Beria (1872-1922), a landowner from Abkhazia. Lavrenty had a brother (name unknown) and sister Anna, who was born deaf and mute. In his autobiography, Beria only mentions his sister and niece. His brother, apparently, was either dead or did not maintain relations with Beria after he left Merkheuli.
Beria graduated from the Sukhumi Higher Primary School. TO Bolsheviks he joined in March 1917 as a student at the Baku Secondary Mechanical and Technical Construction School (later the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy), whose program was related to the oil industries.
In 1919, 20-year-old Beria began his career in the state security agencies, but not the Bolsheviks, but in counterintelligence hostile to the Soviet Republic Baku Musavatists. Later he himself claimed that he played the role of a communist agent in the Musavat camp, but this version of his own cannot be considered proven. After the capture of the city by the Red Army (April 28, 1920), Beria, according to some reports, escaped execution only by chance. Once in prison for a while, he struck up a relationship there with Nina Gegechkori, the niece of his cellmate. They managed to escape by train. 17-year-old Nina was an educated girl from an aristocratic family. One of her uncles was a minister in Menshevik government of Georgia, the other - a minister of the Bolsheviks. Subsequently, she became the wife of Beria.
In 1920 or 1921 Beria joined Cheka- Bolshevik secret police. In August 1920, he became the manager of the affairs of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Azerbaijan, and in October of the same year, he became the executive secretary of the Extraordinary Commission for the Expropriation of the Bourgeoisie and the Improvement of the Life of Workers. However, he only worked in this position for about six months. In 1921, Beria was accused of abuse of power and falsification of criminal cases, but thanks to the intercession Anastas Mikoyan escaped serious punishment.
The Bolsheviks raised an uprising in what was then under the rule of the Mensheviks. Democratic Republic of Georgia. Following this, the Red Army invaded there. The Cheka actively participated in this conflict, which ended in the defeat of the Mensheviks and the creation of the Georgian SSR. Beria also participated in the preparation of the uprising against the Mensheviks. In November 1922, he was transferred from Azerbaijan to Tiflis and soon became the head of the secret operational unit of the Georgian branch there. GPU(successor of the Cheka) and its deputy head.
In 1924, Beria played a prominent role in the suppression Georgian national uprising ending in the execution of 10,000 people.
Beria in his youth. Photo from the 1920s
In December 1926, Beria became the chairman of the GPU of Georgia, and in April 1927, the Georgian People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the head of the Bolsheviks of Transcaucasia, introduced him to an influential Georgian countryman - Stalin. Lavrenty Pavlovich, to the best of his ability, contributed to Stalin's ascent to power. During the years of leadership of the Georgian GPU, Beria actually destroyed the intelligence networks of Turkey and Iran in the Soviet Transcaucasia and he himself successfully recruited agents in the governments of these countries. During Stalin's vacations in the south, he was also responsible for security.
The chairman of the GPU of all Transcaucasia was then a prominent Chekist Stanislav Redens, husband Anna Alliluyeva, sisters of Stalin's wife, hopes. Beria and Redens did not get along with each other. Redens and the Georgian leadership tried to get rid of the careerist Beria and transfer him to the Lower Volga. However, Beria, in his intrigues against them, acted more deftly and ingeniously. Once Lavrenty Pavlovich got Redens drunk, undressed and sent home completely naked. In the spring of 1931, Redens was transferred from Transcaucasia to Belarus. This facilitated the further career of Beria.
In November 1931, Beria was appointed head of the Communist Party of Georgia, and in October 1932 - of the entire Transcaucasus. In February 1934, on XVII Party Congress, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b).
Beria and Stalin's Great Terror
As you know, in 1934 the old party guard made attempts to remove Stalin. When members of the Central Committee were elected at the 17th Party Congress, the head of the Leningrad Communists Sergei Kirov collected more votes than Stalin, and this fact was hidden only by the efforts of the commission for counting ballots, headed by Lazar Kaganovich. Influential communists offered Kirov to head the party instead of Stalin. Meetings about this were held at the apartment of Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Until the very end of 1934, both Stalin and the opposition to him were stubborn undercover intrigues. Stalin proposed recalling Kirov from Leningrad and appointing him one of the four secretaries of the Central Committee. Kirov refused to move to Moscow. Stalin insisted, but was forced to back down when the request to leave Kirov in Leningrad for another two years was supported Kuibyshev and Ordzhonikidze. Relations between Kirov and Stalin worsened. Counting on the support of Ordzhonikidze, Kirov hoped to consult with him in Moscow at the November plenum of the Central Committee. But Ordzhonikidze was not in Moscow. In early November, he and Beria were in Baku, where he suddenly became ill after dinner. Beria took the sick Sergo by train to Tbilisi. After the November 7 parade, Ordzhonikidze became ill again. He started bleeding internally, then had a massive heart attack. The Politburo sent three doctors to Tiflis, but they did not establish the cause of Ordzhonikidze's mysterious illness. Despite feeling unwell, Sergo wanted to return to Moscow to participate in the work of the plenum, but Stalin firmly ordered him to follow the instructions of the doctors and not come to the capital until November 26. It is more than likely that the mysterious illness of Ordzhonikidze, which kept him away from communication with Kirov, was caused by the intrigues of Beria, led by Stalin.
By 1935, Beria had become one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates. He strengthened his position in the Stalinist environment by publishing (1935) the book “On the Question of the History of Bolshevik Organizations in Transcaucasia” (apparently, its real authors were M. Toroshelidze and E. Bedia). It inflated Stalin's role in the revolutionary movement in every possible way. "To my dear and beloved Master, the great Stalin!" - Beria signed a gift copy.
After murder of Kirov(December 1, 1934) Stalin began his Great Purge, the main goal of which was the highest party guard. Beria opened the same purge in Transcaucasia, using it as an opportunity to settle many personal scores. Committed suicide or was killed (they say even personally by Beria) Aghasi Khanjyan, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia. In December 1936, after dinner at Lavrenty Pavlovich's, he died suddenly. Nestor Lakoba, the head of Soviet Abkhazia, who shortly before greatly contributed to the rise of Beria, and now, dying, called him his killer. Before the burial of Nestor, Lavrenty Pavlovich ordered to remove all the internal organs from the corpse, and later dug out the body of Lakoba and destroyed it. Nestor's widow was thrown into prison. By order of Beria, a snake was thrown into her cell, which made her go crazy. Another prominent victim of Lavrenty Pavlovich was Gaioz Devdariani, People's Commissar for Education of the Georgian SSR. Beria ordered the execution of the Devdariani brothers - Georgy and Shalva, who held high positions in the NKVD and the Communist Party. Beria also arrested Sergo Ordzhonikidze's brother, Papulia, and then dismissed another of his brothers, Valiko, from the Tiflis Council.
In June 1937, Beria said in a speech: "Let the enemies know that anyone who tries to raise his hand against the will of our people, against the will of the Lenin-Stalin party, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed."
Beria with Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva on her knees. In the background - Stalin
Beria at the head of the NKVD
In August 1938, Stalin transferred Beria to Moscow to the post of first deputy head of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs ( NKVD), in which the state security agencies and police forces were combined. The then head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, whom Beria affectionately called "dear Hedgehog", ruthlessly carried out the Stalinist Great Terror. Millions of people across the USSR were imprisoned or executed as "enemies of the people". By 1938, the suppression had assumed proportions that already threatened the collapse of the economy and the army. This forced Stalin to weaken the "purge". He decided to remove Yezhov and at first thought to make his " faithful dog Lazar Kaganovich, but in the end he chose Beria, apparently because he had extensive experience in punitive bodies. In September 1938, Beria was appointed head of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD, and in November he replaced Yezhov as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. Yezhov, who was no longer needed by Stalin and knew too much, was shot in 1940. The NKVD underwent another purge, during which half of the leading personnel were replaced by Beria's henchmen, many of whom were natives of the Caucasus.
Although the name of Beria as the head of the NKVD is strongly associated with repression and terror, his entry into the leadership of the people's commissariat at first was marked by a weakening of the repressions of the Yezhov era. More than 100 thousand people were released from the camps. The authorities officially acknowledged that there were some "injustices" and "excesses" during the purges, placing all the blame for them solely on Yezhov. However, liberalization was only relative: arrests and executions continued into 1940, and as the war approached, the pace of the purge accelerated again. During this period, Beria led the deportations of "politically unreliable" people from the Baltic and Polish regions recently annexed to the USSR. He orchestrated the murder. Leon Trotsky in Mexico.
In March 1939, Beria became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. He did not receive full membership in the Politburo until 1946, but already in the pre-war era he was one of the top leaders of the Soviet state. In 1941, Beria became the general commissar of state security. This highest quasi-military rank was equated with the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union.
On March 5, 1940, after the Third Conference of the Gestapo-NKVD was held in Zakopane, Beria sent a note to Stalin (No. 794 / B), where he claimed that the Polish prisoners of war held in camps and prisons in Western Belarus and Ukraine were enemies of the Soviet Union. Beria recommended that they be destroyed. Most of these captives were soldiers, but among them were many intellectuals, doctors, priests. Their total number exceeded 22 thousand. With Stalin's approval, Beria's NKVD executed Polish prisoners, arranging " Katyn massacre».
From October 1940 to February 1942, Beria and the NKVD conducted a new purge of the Red Army and related institutions. In February 1941, Beria became deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and in June, after Nazi German invasion of the USSR- member of the State Defense Committee ( GKO). During Great Patriotic War he transferred millions of camp prisoners Gulag in the army and in military production. Beria took control of arms production, and (together with Malenkov) - aircraft and aircraft engines. This was the beginning of an alliance between Beria and Malenkov, which later gained great importance.
Lavrenty Beria with family
In 1944, when the Germans were expelled from Soviet territory, Beria was instructed to punish a number of ethnic minorities who had cooperated with the invaders during the war years (Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Pontic Greeks and Volga Germans). All these nations were deported from their native places to Central Asia.
In December 1944, Beria's NKVD was assigned to supervise the creation of the Soviet atomic bomb ("Task No. 1"). The bomb was created and tested on August 29, 1949. Beria directed the successful Soviet intelligence campaign against the United States Atomic Weapons Program. In the course of it, it was possible to obtain most of the necessary technologies. Beria provided the necessary labor force for this extremely time-consuming project. He attracted at least 330 thousand people, including 10 thousand technicians. Tens of thousands of Gulag prisoners were sent to work in uranium mines, to build and operate uranium production plants. They also built nuclear test sites in Semipalatinsk and on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. The NKVD ensured the necessary secrecy of the project. True, the physicist Pyotr Kapitsa refused to work with Beria, even after he tried to "bribe" him with a gift of a hunting rifle. Stalin supported Kapitsa in this quarrel.
In July 1945, when the Soviet police system was finally reorganized along military lines, Beria officially received the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union. He never commanded a single real army unit, but made a significant contribution to the victory over Germany through the work of organizing military production, the actions of partisans and saboteurs. However, Stalin never publicly noted the size of this contribution. Unlike most other Soviet marshals, Beria did not receive the Order of Victory.
Beria in the post-war years
As Stalin approached his 70th birthday after the war, covert struggles intensified among his inner circle. At the end of the war, the most likely successor to the Leader seemed Andrey Zhdanov, who during the war years was the head of the Leningrad party organization, and in 1946 was appointed to control ideology and culture. After 1946, Beria sealed his alliance with Malenkov to counter Zhdanov's rise.
December 30, 1945 Beria resigned as head of the NKVD, while maintaining overall control over national security issues. However, the new People's Commissar (from March 1946 - Minister) of the Interior, Sergey Kruglov, was not Beria's man. In addition, by the summer of 1946, Beria's protege Vsevolod Merkulov was replaced as head of the Ministry of State Security (MGB) Viktor Abakumov. Abakumov from 1943 to 1946 was the head of SMERSH. His relationship with Beria was marked by both close collaboration (Abakumov rose to prominence thanks to Beria's support) and rivalry. With the encouragement of Stalin, who was beginning to fear Lavrenty Pavlovich, Abakumov began to create a circle of his own supporters within the MGB in order to resist Beria's dominance over the power ministries. Kruglov and Abakumov quickly replaced Beria's people in the leadership of the state security apparatus with their own proteges. Very soon the Deputy Minister of the Interior Stepan Mamulov remained the only ally of Beria outside the foreign intelligence system, which Lavrenty Pavlovich continued to control. Abakumov began to conduct important operations without consulting Beria, often working in tandem with Zhdanov, and sometimes on direct orders from Stalin. Some historians believe that these operations - at first indirectly, but over time more and more directly - were directed against Beria.
One of the first steps was Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which was launched in October 1946 and eventually led to the murder Solomon Mikhoels and the arrest of many other members of the JAC, which revived the old Bolshevik idea of handing over Crimea to the Jews as an "autonomous republic". This case caused severe damage to the influence of Beria. He actively helped the creation of the JAC in 1942, his entourage included many Jews.
After the sudden and rather strange death of Zhdanov in August 1948, Beria and Malenkov strengthened their positions with a powerful blow to the supporters of the deceased - “ the Leningrad case". Among those executed were Zhdanov's deputy Alexey Kuznetsov, prominent economist Nikolai Voznesensky, head of the Leningrad party organization Petr Popkov and head of the government of the RSFSR Mikhail Rodionov. Only after this Nikita Khrushchev began to be seen as a possible alternative to the tandem of Malenkov and Beria.
IN post-war years Beria led the creation of communist regimes in the countries of Eastern Europe, which, as a rule, took place through coups d'état. He personally selected new Eastern European leaders dependent on the USSR. But since 1948, Abakumov initiated a number of cases against these leaders. Their culmination was the arrest in November 1951 of Rudolf Slansky, Bedrich Geminder and other leaders of Czechoslovakia. Defendants were usually charged with Zionism, cosmopolitanism and the supply of arms in Israel. Beria was quite alarmed by these allegations, since a large number of weapons from the Czech Republic were sold to Israel on his direct orders. Beria sought an alliance with Israel to advance Soviet influence in the Middle East, but other Kremlin leaders decided instead to forge a lasting alliance with the Arab countries. 14 prominent figures of communist Czechoslovakia, of whom 11 were Jews, were found guilty in court and executed. Similar trials took place then in Poland and other vassal countries of the USSR.
Abakumov was soon replaced Semyon Ignatiev which further intensified the anti-Semitic campaign. On January 13, 1953, the largest anti-Jewish case in the Soviet Union began with an article in Pravda - “ doctors case". Several prominent Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning the higher Soviet leaders and arrested. At the same time, an anti-Semitic campaign was launched in the Soviet press, called the struggle against "rootless cosmopolitanism." Initially, 37 people were arrested, but the number quickly rose to several hundred. Dozens of Soviet Jews were dismissed from prominent posts, arrested, sent to the Gulag or executed. Some historians say that the MGB, on the orders of Stalin, was preparing the deportation of all Soviet Jews to Far East, but such a hypothesis is almost certainly based on exaggeration; it is most often put forward by Jewish authors. Many researchers insist that the eviction of the Jews was not planned, and the persecution of them was not severe. A few days after Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, Beria released all those arrested in this case, declared it fabricated and arrested MGB functionaries who were directly involved in it.
As for other international problems, Beria (together with Mikoyan) correctly predicted victory Mao Zedong V Chinese civil war and helped her a lot. He allowed the Communist Party of China to use Manchuria, occupied by Soviet troops, as a springboard and organized the widest supply of weapons to the People's liberation army” - mainly from the captured arsenals of the Japanese Kwantung Army.
Beria and the version about the murder of Stalin
Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that immediately after Stalin's stroke, Beria "spewed hatred" against the Leader and mocked him. When suddenly it seemed that consciousness was returning to Stalin, Beria fell to his knees and kissed the Master's hand. But he soon fainted again. Then Beria immediately got up and spat.
Stalin's assistant Vasily Lozgachev, who found the Leader lying after the blow, said that Beria and Malenkov were the first members of the Politburo to come to the patient. They arrived at Kuntsevskaya dacha at 3 am on March 2, 1953, after telephone calls from Khrushchev and Bulganin, who themselves did not want to go to the scene, fearing that they would somehow incur the wrath of Stalin. Lozgachev convinced Beria that Stalin, who was unconscious and in soiled clothes, was ill and needed medical care. But Beria angrily scolded him for "alarming" and quickly left, ordering "not to disturb us, not to fan the panic and not to disturb Comrade Stalin." The call for doctors was delayed for 12 hours, although the paralyzed Stalin could neither speak nor hold urine. Historian S. Sebag-Montefiore calls this behavior "extraordinary", but notes that it was consistent with the standard Stalinist (and generally communist) practice of postponing even absolutely necessary decisions without the official sanction of a higher authority. Beria's order to postpone the immediate call of doctors was tacitly supported by the rest of the Politburo. The situation was aggravated by the fact that then, in the midst of the “doctors' case”, all doctors were under suspicion. Stalin's personal doctor has already been tortured in the cellars of the Lubyanka, for suggesting that the Leader lie in bed more.
The death of the Master prevented a new, final reprisal against the last old Bolsheviks, Mikoyan and Molotov, for which Stalin began to prepare a year before. Shortly after Stalin's death, Beria, according to Molotov's memoirs, triumphantly announced to the Politburo that he "removed [Stalin]" and "saved you all." Beria has never explicitly stated whether he engineered Stalin's stroke or simply left him to die without medical attention. Additional arguments in favor of the version that Beria poisoned Stalin with warfarin are provided by a recent article by Miguel A. Faria in the journal Surgical Neurology International. The anticoagulant (blood clotting agent) warfarin could well have caused the symptoms that accompanied Stalin's stroke. It was not difficult for Beria to add this remedy to the food or drink of Joseph Vissarionovich. Historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore emphasizes that Beria during this period had every reason to be afraid of Stalin, he could well have used warfarin against him, but notes that he never admitted to poisoning and never remained alone with Stalin during the days of his illness. He came to the Boss, who had been struck by a blow, together with Malenkov - apparently in order to specifically remove suspicions.
After Stalin's death from pulmonary edema caused by a stroke, Beria showed the broadest claims. In the painful silence that reigned after Stalin's agony, Beria was the first to come up to kiss his lifeless body (a step that Sebag-Montefiore likens to "removing the ring from the finger of the deceased king"). While other associates of Stalin (even Molotov, now saved from almost inevitable death) wept bitterly over the body of the deceased, Beria looked radiant, animated and did not hide his joy well. Leaving the room, Beria broke the mournful atmosphere by loudly calling his driver. His voice, according to the memoirs of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva echoed with undisguised triumph. Alliluyeva noticed that the rest of the Politburo was clearly afraid of Beria and was preoccupied with such a daring display of ambition. “He went to take power,” Mikoyan muttered quietly to Khrushchev. Members of the Politburo immediately rushed to their limousines so as not to be late for Beria to the Kremlin.
Lavrenty Beria in last years life
Fall of Beria
After Stalin's death, Beria was appointed first deputy head of government and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which he immediately merged with the MGB. His close ally Malenkov became the head of government and, at first, the most powerful man in the USSR. Beria was second in power, but with the weakness of Malenkov, he could well soon subordinate him to his influence. Khrushchev led the party Voroshilov became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council (i.e., head of state).
Given Beria's reputation, it is not at all surprising that other party leaders viewed him with extreme suspicion. Khrushchev was opposed to the alliance between Beria and Malenkov, but at first he did not have the strength to challenge him. However, he took advantage of the chance that appeared in June 1953 with the onset of a natural disaster. uprisings against communist domination in Berlin and East Germany.
Based on Beria's own words, other leaders suspected that he might use this uprising to agree to German reunification and end the Cold War in exchange for extensive assistance from the United States, similar to that received by the USSR during World War II. . The high cost of the war still weighed heavily on the Soviet economy. Beria coveted the enormous financial resources and other benefits that could be secured through concessions to the United States and the West. It was rumored that Beria secretly promised Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania serious prospects for national autonomy, similar to the one that the Eastern European satellites of the USSR had.
The uprising in East Germany convinced the Kremlin leaders that Beria's policies could dangerously destabilize the Soviet state. A few days after the events in Germany, Khrushchev persuaded other leaders to depose Beria. Lavrenty Pavlovich left his main ally, Malenkov, as well as Molotov, who initially leaned on his side. As they say, only Voroshilov hesitated to speak out against Beria.
Arrest, trial and execution of Beria
On June 26, 1953, Beria was arrested and taken to an unidentified location near Moscow. Information about how this happened is very different. According to the most likely stories, Khrushchev convened the Presidium of the Central Committee on June 26 and there suddenly launched a fierce attack on Beria, accusing him of betrayal and paid espionage for British intelligence. Beria was taken by surprise. He asked: “What is going on, Nikita? Why are you digging through my underwear?" Molotov and others also quickly moved against Beria, demanding his immediate resignation. When Beria finally realized what was happening and began plaintively asking for support from Malenkov, this old and close friend of his silently lowered his head, looked away, and then pressed the button on his desk. This was the agreed signal to the marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in the next room (it is said that one of them was Leonid Brezhnev). They immediately ran into the meeting and arrested Beria.
Beria was first placed in a guardhouse in Moscow, and then transferred to the bunker of the headquarters of the Moscow Military District. Minister of Defense Nikolai Bulganin ordered the Kantemirovskaya tank division and the Tamanskaya motorized rifle division to arrive in Moscow in order to prevent the state security forces loyal to Beria from releasing their boss. Many of Beria's subordinates, proteges and supporters were also arrested - including Vsevolod Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov, Sergey Goglidze, Vladimir Dekanozov, Pavel Meshik And Lev Vlodzimirsky. The Pravda newspaper was silent for a long time about the arrests and only on July 10 informed Soviet citizens about Beria's "criminal activities against the party and the state."
Beria and his supporters were convicted by the Special Judicial Presence of the Supreme Court of the USSR on December 23, 1953 without the presence of a lawyer and without the right to appeal. Marshal presided over Ivan Konev.
Beria was found guilty:
1. In treason. It was alleged (without evidence) that “until the moment of his arrest, Beria maintained and developed his secret connections with foreign intelligence services.” In particular, attempts to start peace negotiations with Hitler in 1941 through the Bulgarian ambassador were classified as high treason. At the same time, no one mentioned that Beria acted on the orders of Stalin and Molotov. It was also alleged that Beria, who in 1942 helped organize the defense North Caucasus, tried to give it into the hands of the Germans. It was emphasized that "planning to seize power, Beria tried to get the support of the imperialist states at the cost of violating the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and transferring part of the territory of the USSR to the capitalist states." These statements were based on what Beria told his assistants: in order to improve international relations it would be reasonable to transfer the Kaliningrad region to Germany, part of Karelia to Finland, the Moldavian USSR to Romania, and the Kuril Islands to Japan.
2. In terrorism. Beria's participation in the purge of the Red Army in 1941 was classified as an act of terrorism.
3. In counter-revolutionary activities during the Civil War. In 1919, Beria worked in the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Beria claimed that he was appointed to this job by the Gummet party, which subsequently merged with the Adalat, Ahrar and Baku Bolshevik parties, thus forming the Communist Party of Azerbaijan.
On the same day, December 23, 1953, Beria and the rest of the defendants were sentenced to death. When the death sentence was read, Lavrenty Pavlovich begged for mercy on his knees, and then fell to the floor and sobbed desperately. Six other defendants were shot on the day the trial ended. Beria was executed separately. As S. Sebag-Montefiore writes:
... Lavrentiy Beria was stripped down to his underwear. He was handcuffed and tied to a hook in the wall. He begged for his life and screamed so hard that a towel had to be stuffed into his mouth. His face was covered with a bandage, leaving only eyes wide with horror. General Batitsky became his executioner. For this execution, he was promoted to marshal. Batitsky fired a bullet into Beria's forehead...
Beria's behavior at trial and during execution strongly resembles how his predecessor in the NKVD, Yezhov, behaved in 1940, who also begged for his life. Beria's body was cremated, and his remains were buried in a forest near Moscow.
Beria had many awards, among which were five Orders of Lenin, three Orders of the Red Banner, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor (awarded in 1943). He was twice awarded the Stalin Prize (1949 and 1951).
About the sexual exploits of Lavrenty Pavlovich - see the article
The name and personality of Lavrenty Beria are firmly connected with the blackest pages of our history. Ever since he was declared an “enemy of the people” in 1953 and executed without leaving a trace, Soviet party leaders and chroniclers have represented him as a bloody tyrant, a conspirator, and even a perverted sex maniac.
For decades, in Russia and abroad, such a demonic image of Beria has developed that the public refuses to believe the facts if they look less odious. Anews decided to deal with some of the popular judgments about him: which are true and which are erroneous or unproven.
1. Beria was the main executioner of the Stalinist regime
When Beria is accused of organizing the Great Terror of 1937-38, this is either a delusion or a lie. Until 1936, Genrikh Yagoda and his successor Nikolai Yezhov were responsible for the preparation and conduct of the most massive repressions. Beria was at that time at party work in Transcaucasia, he did not hold any positions in the NKVD system. The only thing he could do at that time was to authorize arrests by order of the punitive department.
Lavrenty Beria in Georgia, 1930. RIA Novosti Archive
Beria's wife Nina Gegechkori in a 1990 interview: “We arrived in Moscow at the end of 1938. By that time, the repressions of the 37th had already ended. When they write about my husband, for some reason they forget about it. It's easier this way: there is a person who can be blamed for all the crimes that have taken place in the country. You know, it was a car, and no one could stop or change its movements. And Lavrenty couldn’t either.”.
Nina Gegechkori
Stop something, of course, did not stop, but began to correct "Yezhov's excesses", heading the NKVD in November 1938. Repressions have been drastically reduced. Few people know that in 1939 the first Beria amnesty took place, according to which from 270 to 330 thousand people were released from prisons, camps and pre-trial detention centers. Hundreds of thousands more had their sentences reduced.
Finally, such a nuance: only in 1946, Beria was accepted as a member of the Politburo with the right to vote and thus formally entered the narrow circle of Stalin's associates, in whose hands were all the levers of governing the country. Accordingly, before that he could not make the most important state decisions, including the decision on a large-scale "purge".
2. Beria rotted in the camps many great talents and scientists
As a minister of Stalin and a reliable executor of his will, Beria continued arrests, executions, and landings after the 38th. Already with him, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the writer Isaac Babel, and the publicist Mikhail Koltsov were shot. Geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was brought to exhaustion in prison and died there as a result of serious illnesses. Poet and writer Daniil Kharms died of starvation in a prison psychiatric hospital during the siege of Leningrad. Hundreds more scientists and cultural figures became victims of repression when Beria ruled the Lubyanka.
Beria and Stalin
On the other hand, many outstanding scientists and designers, previously accused of "wrecking" and "counter-revolution" (Tupolev, Korolev, microbiologist Zilber and others), got the opportunity to work again under Beria. Mostly in "sharags" - research institutes and a prison-type bureau subordinate to the NKVD. It was there that many new weapons and military equipment were created.
It is clear that such "favors" were determined not by kindness of soul, but by exceptional benefits for the state. So, on the eve and at the beginning of the war, about 12,000 officers were returned from prisons and camps to the army, whom Beria's predecessors did not have time to shoot. The future marshals Rokossovsky, Meretskov, General Gorbatov received freedom.
Moreover, to some especially valuable minds, almost any antics were forgiven. If many convicts were victims of monstrous slander, then the physicists Pyotr Kapitsa and Lev Landau, who worked in the atomic project, by and large, remained untouchable, although they did not hide their “anti-Soviet” attitude and allowed themselves unheard of things.
Landau, who called the USSR a “fascist state”, members of the government “vile executioners”, and Soviet scientists “pathetic lackeys”, came under pressure in 1938 for developing a leaflet where Stalin was equated in the harshest terms with Hitler and Mussolini. But a year later, Beria released him from prison under the guarantee of Kapitsa.
Lev Landau
And in 1945, Kapitsa himself complained to Stalin about Beria, who headed the atomic project: “Comrade Beria behaves like a superman. The conductor must not only wave his baton, but also understand the score. With this, Comrade Beria is weak.<…>Nothing works out for me with Beria. His relationship with scientists<…>I don't like it at all". But even here, instead of severe punishment, there is “house arrest” at the state dacha with the opportunity to continue scientific activities.
Pyotr Kapitsa
3. Beria initiated the famous "doctors' case"
Quite the contrary, Beria insisted on stopping the "case of doctors" and their complete rehabilitation. The criminal case against prominent Soviet doctors accused of conspiracy and murder of a number of Kremlin leaders received publicity shortly before Stalin's death, in January 1953. And already in April, a week after the leader died, all those arrested were released and reinstated at work.
Beria (first from right) and other party and government leaders carry the coffin with Stalin's body.
There is an opinion that Beria himself could become a victim of the “case of doctors”. According to some historians, Stalin personally directed the investigation and prepared a public political trial in an attempt to remove especially zealous and ambitious politicians from his entourage. No wonder Beria immediately after his death arrested Colonel Mikhail Ryumin, who was developing the case. Although he did not have time to “liquidate” him, as he was going to, Ryumin was shot in 1954, already under Khrushchev.
4. Beria raped and killed women and girls
One of the most popular and enduring rumors about Beria has no reliable evidence. Yes, among the charges on which he was convicted and shot in the 53rd, “moral decay” appears, and there is a declassified interrogation protocol where Beria admits to numerous relationships with women. But the fact is that no one saw the original of his case, and copies could easily be falsified. Moreover, it was beneficial for Khrushchev and his team to denigrate their most dangerous rival in power as much as possible.
Quote from the protocol, allegedly the words of Beria: “I easily converged with women, had numerous connections, short-lived. These women were brought to my house, I never visited them. They delivered them to me at the house of the Sarkis and Nadarai(heads of personal protection. - Note Anews) , especially Sarkisov. There were such cases when, having noticed this or that woman who I liked from the car, I sent Sarkisov or Nadarai to trace and establish her address, get to know her and, if desired, deliver her to my house. There have been many such cases.".
Sardion Nadaraya (left) and Rafael Sarkisov
In court documents, which, again, are only available in copies, it is generally stated that Beria "committed rape of women." But at the same time, only one “victim” is mentioned - 16-year-old schoolgirl Valentina Drozdova, whom Beria deceived into his mansion.
This same Lyalya Drozdova since 1949 was actually the second wife of Beria and gave birth to a daughter from him. Four years later, she wrote a statement about the rape as soon as she learned about his arrest. Subsequently, she cohabited with the well-known currency speculator Yan Rokotov and was the wife of a shady businessman Ilya Galperin. Both were shot in the 60s.
This is probably a photo of Lyalya Drozdova
In the case of Beria, there is allegedly a gigantic list of his mistresses. When his wife was in prison, the warden told her that there were 760 names on the list.
Nina Gegechkori: “An amazing thing: Lavrenty was busy working day and night when he had to make love with a legion of these women ?! In fact, everything was different. During the war and later, he headed intelligence and counterintelligence. These women were his collaborators, informants, and only had direct contact with him. And then, when they were asked about their relationship with the boss, of course, everyone said that they were his mistresses! And what were they to do? Recognize the charge of undercover and subversive work?!”
Beria and his wife on vacation
Beria with his wife Nina (left), son Sergo and daughter-in-law Marfa (right)
Finally, the most incredible horror stories about the "rapist-Beria" are taken from very dubious sources. At the same time, they are supported and distributed not only by the yellow media, but also by some “serious” authors, who are somehow embarrassed not to believe.
For example, the late Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, a former camp prisoner, founder of the Gulag History Museum and an ardent anti-Stalinist, calmly told the Top Secret program that the bodies of those killed in Beria’s mansion on Malaya Nikitskaya (where the Tunisian embassy is now) were crushed with a stone crusher in the basement and lowered down the drain or dissolved in a bath of sulfuric acid. Where does this information come from? About the basement - from some plumbers who were repairing the building, about the bath - from an unnamed retired security guard.
Beria's former mansion in Moscow
Another writer-historian, former KGB officer Arsen Martirosyan reproached the "myth-creators": “At least once they would have bothered to ask what a stone crusher of the early 50s was ... They were huge machines that consumed a huge amount of energy and produced an incredible roar. They are still like this.”.
5. Beria behaved like a coward during the execution
In fact, the death of Beria remains the only mystery that has not been solved to this day. As already mentioned, the original materials of the investigation are not available, many documents have not been declassified, and in the retellings of people involved in his deposition or referring to other people's evidence, historians find a lot of oddities, inconsistencies and contradictions.
Beria and Malenkov (foreground)
Hence - a different presentation of events in different sources. Some write that Beria was arrested at his own dacha, others - in his Moscow mansion, others - at the Presidium of the Central Committee. For some it was in June 1953, for others it was in July.
According to the official version, he was shot by a court verdict in December, but Sergo's son, as well as a number of researchers, believe that he was dealt with immediately, without trial or investigation, and the subsequent "case" was completely staged and presented in the form of copies. Nobody could check.
The same Antonov-Ovseenko described in his article about Beria "a reliable picture of the execution" on the basis of "truthful testimonies of the military", with whom, according to him, he talked many times. The scene is reproduced in detail and even with replicas - who said what; according to it, it turns out that Beria was tied with ropes to a hook in the bunker of the headquarters of the Moscow military district and the verdict was read out, after which the future marshal Batitsky killed him with one accurate shot in the middle of the forehead. The body, according to the author, was burned on the same day in the crematorium.
The former building of the headquarters of the Moscow Military District (with a green roof) on Balchug Island. The underground bunker is located in the courtyard
Wikimapia
Presumably one of the corridors of the bunker
Another publicist writer Stanislav Gribanov directly quotes Batitsky himself, and here is a different version: “We took Beria up the stairs to the dungeon. He pissed himself off. stink. Then I shot him like a dog.”.
Pavel Batitsky
Another “witness to the execution”, an unnamed former commander of one of the missile bases near Moscow, was tracked down in 2000 by the Vlast magazine. Here are his words: “The guys hated Beria so much that they couldn’t bring it to the board, they started shooting right on the stairs. But they did not dare to send him with such a bunch of holes to the crematorium. I was later told that someone suggested dissolving the corpse in alkali. A suitable bath was in the same place, in the shelter. Alkali was brought. That's how the corpse of Beria did not become ".
Finally, Marshal Zhukov, who arrested Beria, wrote in his memoirs about his future fate from hearsay, because he himself did not take part either in the protection, or in the investigation, or in litigation: “After the trial, Beria was shot by those who guarded him. During the execution, Beria behaved very badly, like the very last coward, wept hysterically, knelt down, and, finally, got all dirty. In a word, he lived ugly and died even more ugly..
As you can see, it is impossible to get a real picture of what happened to Beria in 1953.
Anti-Stalinist attack of Lavrenty Beria Stalinists without Stalin
After Stalin's death, his "heirs" found themselves in a difficult position. The life of the majority of the people was still very difficult, but people believed that under the leadership of the great Stalin it would improve. Stalin had the charisma of the Savior of the country from enslavement by Nazi Germany. He still remained an indisputable authority, although the failures of the first years of the war and the innumerable victims incurred as a result of this had already given rise to doubts in the infallibility of the leader.
A small digression in support of what has just been said. I knew one scientist who before the war was a staunch supporter of Stalin, but one day he became an ardent anti-Stalinist. He had a chance to serve in the Baltic Fleet, and in the first weeks of the war he experienced the full horror of the campaign, when Soviet ships left Tallinn for Kronstadt under continuous bombing by German aircraft, without any air protection from our side. Before his eyes, our ships went under water, thousands of sailors drowned. And he himself was drowning, was already unconscious, but by a lucky chance he was taken aboard by a passing ship. And subsequently, nothing could convince him of the wisdom of the Soviet leadership, and he already experienced a pathological hatred for Stalin.
The portfolios in the government and in the leadership of the party were quickly divided by the "heirs", even during the life of the hopelessly ill leader, and immediately after his death they formalized their conspiracy by the relevant decisions of the Plenum of the Central Committee. However, it was necessary that the new government be recognized by the "lower classes", and on this score it could have doubts. Indeed, immediately after the death of Stalin, rumors began to circulate among the people that he was “helped” to die, especially since the very recent “case of killer doctors” remained in memory, and it had not yet been closed. It was necessary to urgently offer the people some plans showing a bright future, and these people had long served only as executors of the leader’s plans and had lost their initiative and the ability to think independently (if they had it at all before).
A favorable impression on the public was made by the decree on reducing the tax on the peasants, signed by Malenkov, and the old women are still living their lives, who, then still young women, almost prayed to Malenkov for this unexpected gift. The bureaucracy was pleased with the streamlining of the working day of civil servants, who under Stalin, in accordance with the regime of the leader's day, were forced to be on duty in their places until late at night. But large-scale transformations were required in the life of the country, and the new leaders did not have a clear idea about them.
Friendship "who - whom"
I looked at a lot of different sources that describe the course of the struggle for power in the USSR after the death of Stalin. Usually it is drawn in this way: Beria wanted to become the first person in the state, but Khrushchev, having enlisted the support of the most influential members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, outplayed him. As a result, Beria was arrested, put on trial and shot by a court verdict. In reality, the picture was much more complex and confusing. To understand it, we must return to the alignment of forces in the leadership of the party and the country in the last years of Stalin's life and immediately after his death.
The cohesion and monolithic unity of the leadership of the party and the state, demonstrated during the life of Stalin, was a myth. In fact, the leader's comrades-in-arms, trying to show their zeal, did not shy away from intrigues, mutual intrigue and even denunciations against each other. It is no coincidence that, having opened the safe with documents that stood in Stalin's office, they decided to set them on fire without reading them, because otherwise they would have found themselves in the position of the heroes of Gogol's "Inspector General", who listened to the reading of Khlestakov's letter to Tryapichkin. Probably, Beria had reason when he called the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU "a snake's nest." But this did not prevent the top leaders of the party and the state from being on friendly terms and forming temporary alliances, although Stalin tried not to allow any personal, extra-official relations between the people of his inner circle.
These alliances were precisely temporary, one ally, after achieving his goals, could betray the others, but this should neither surprise nor upset us: people, in everyday life, maybe very good, in politics are guided only by interests. Of course, there are different interests. But even the most highly moral politician, if his goal is to serve the state, cannot be guided in his activities by anything other than the interests of the state, which, as a rule, for him are also connected with personal interests and are not always in harmony with the usual norms of morality.
A long-standing friendship connected Malenkov and Beria. In particular, there is a suspicion that it was they who contributed to the death of Zhdanov, whom they hated (especially Malenkov). And then together they promoted the “Leningrad affair”, which led to the death of not only Voznesensky and Kuznetsov (whom Stalin supposedly intended to be his successors - the first to the post of chairman of the Council of Ministers, the second to the position Secretary General Central Committee of the CPSU), but also thousands of other party and Soviet workers in Leningrad and the region.
But Malenkov was also on friendly terms with Khrushchev. Khrushchev also sought to establish relations with Beria. But Khrushchev had a particularly close relationship with Bulganin - from the time when Khrushchev headed the metropolitan party organization, and Bulganin was the chairman of the Moscow City Council. Add to this the virtuoso behavior of Mikoyan, who lived "from Ilyich (Lenin) to Ilyich (Brezhnev) without a heart attack and paralysis", the sympathies and antipathies of other members of the Presidium of the Central Committee, deputy chairmen of the Council of Ministers and heads of leading ministries and departments, and the picture of life "at the top ” will not be easy at all.
When Stalin had a stroke, two couples were on duty at his bedside: Khrushchev with Bulganin and Beria with Malenkov. Later they were joined by Molotov, Mikoyan, Voroshilov and others.
Even in the last hours of Stalin's life, Khrushchev expressed to Bulganin his view on the current situation and found complete understanding from his interlocutor. When Stalin died, Beria spoke his famous phrase"Khrustalev, the car!" and was the first to leave the dacha of the late leader. Mikoyan immediately commented on this step, referring to Khrushchev: "Beria went to Moscow to take power." Khrushchev replied: "While this bastard is sitting, none of us can feel calm." So, it was necessary to remove Beria.
Khrushchev knew what was the main point of the reform plan developed by Beria. The center of power must move from the Presidium of the Central Committee to the Council of Ministers. So, Khrushchev was assigned a secondary role. Khrushchev could not reconcile himself to such a prospect, both for reasons of his personal career and because of his understanding of the role of the party. And most importantly, it was not for this that he disguised himself for decades, endured humiliation and ridicule from the leader, and now the light dawned before him, the prospect of becoming the first person in the state loomed in order to carry out his plans for the destruction of the system created by Stalin. Khrushchev could not miss such a chance and was ready to risk even his life in order to achieve this cherished goal.
In order to prevent Beria from carrying out his plan, it was necessary to prevent him from taking control of the state security organs again.
Khrushchev spoke about this with Malenkov. But Malenkov had already agreed with Beria on the division of the main posts, and therefore answered Khrushchev: "Let's get together, then we'll talk."
Everyone gathered together soon. Beria suggested that Malenkov be appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. The offer was accepted.
Malenkov, in turn, made a proposal to appoint Beria the first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Minister of the Interior, and to include the state security agencies in this ministry again. Khrushchev thought it best not to object to this appointment. Bulganin was appointed Minister of Defense, and so that his incompetence in military matters would not damage the cause, Marshal Zhukov (who is said to have hated Beria) was appointed his first deputy.
Molotov (at the same time he was the Minister of Foreign Affairs), Kaganovich and Bulganin also became the first deputies of the chairman of the Council of Ministers. Mikoyan joined the new, smaller Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Voroshilov was appointed chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and Shvernik, who previously held this post, was moved to the post of chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. About Khrushchev, it was said rather vaguely: he needed to focus on work in the Central Committee of the CPSU, in connection with which he was released from leadership of the capital's party organization. But it was clear that it was he who would head the central apparatus of the party, he himself expressed such a wish.
How successful were these appointments, based on the interests of the country and the solution of the new tasks that confronted it? Malenkov will be discussed below, but I will focus on the appointment of Kaganovich, who was instructed to oversee transport.
I am a railroad engineer by training, and this issue is well known to me. During the war, Kaganovich was not at the height of the situation, and he was twice removed from the post of People's Commissar of Railways. I remember how in 1954 he came to the Institute of Complex Transport Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where I worked then. In his speech, Kaganovich said that the new types of traction - electric and diesel - are good, but expensive. That is why the good old steam locomotive will serve us for more than a dozen years. It is clear that with such a view of the prospects, it was not necessary to expect rapid scientific and technological progress on the railways. Fortunately, his leadership of transport did not last long - until the June (1957) Plenum of the Central Committee.
The old members of the Politburo generally lived by the ideas of the past era, and during Stalin's lifetime they influenced his decisions in a not the best way.
Molotov, as Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, received reports from Soviet ambassadors abroad about Germany's preparations for an attack on the USSR, but reacted to them like this: “Here, they started to scare us with Germany. Where is she before us - with bare hands. Powder is not enough. And he wants to conquer the whole world. What about conquering?"
In the previous chapter, I wrote about the fatal mistake of Stalin, who rejected Hitler's proposal to divide the world. Of course, it was impossible to really participate in this conspiracy, but if we wanted to delay the war, then it was unreasonable to reject the proposal by putting forward counter demands (for example, to transfer the Bosporus and Dardanelles to us). I will add to this that Stalin, too, considered Molotov's move a mistake and reproached his deputy for his lack of flexibility. In his opinion, it was necessary to leave the door open at the end of the round of negotiations.
Beria maintained smooth business relations with Molotov, but considered him a dangerous person, a soulless executor of Stalin's will, an automaton who was ready to shoot without reasoning anyone who seemed suspicious from the point of view of Marxist ideology. He even conveyed to the German ambassador in Moscow, Schulenburg, that “under certain conditions” the Soviet Union was ready to join the tripartite pact, but it was too late, Hitler realized that this was just a game on our part.
The following episode testifies to the level of understanding of the real situation by two other close associates of Stalin. On the very first day of the war, Malenkov and Voroshilov (who had been People's Commissar of Defense for many years and was removed from this post only after the Finnish war, which was unsuccessful for us), said that the German attack was a short-term adventure that would last several days and end with the complete failure of the aggressor. In principle, they turned out to be right, the aggressor was eventually defeated, but this short period lasted almost four years and cost us tens of millions. human lives apart from the enormous material damage.
Is it any wonder that, given the dominance of such views in his inner circle, Stalin deep down remained convinced that the war with the Germans in 1941 could be avoided?
And why did these people so underestimate the power of Germany and overestimate our ability to give the enemy a crushing rebuff?
Because they had no real idea about the war and operated with numbers - the number of divisions, tanks, aircraft, etc., not realizing that the age of quality had already begun. In terms of numbers, of course, we could be calm: we had several times more tanks than the Germans. And the fact that our army has no experience of war, that only a few can use this technique, it never occurred to them. In addition, practically none of them had any experience of real work "from the bottom" (except for the activities of the underground), did not manage at least an enterprise. Their whole life flowed in the leading offices, and the life of the country was comprehended through papers passing through the office.
Anecdotes were told about Bulganin's incompetence, they recalled that his career in the Moscow City Council began with the position of responsible for the sewerage system. Stalin appointed him responsible for the creation of rockets, but he failed this business. When he was later appointed Minister of Defense, he could not even understand the operational situation presented on the maps. And although they say that he was a great intriguer, his ambitions were still not too great, and Stalin, leaving after the war on vacation, left Bulganin in his place.
Approximately the same little corresponded to the tasks of the country's development and other appointees. Stalin, of course, was two heads taller than any figure from his inner circle. They say that he often scolded his associates, sometimes even turning to insults. He scolded Mikoyan for stupid thoughts, called Voroshilov a blockhead ... He was even annoyed appearance comrades-in-arms - the excessive fullness and "womanly appearance" of Malenkov (whom colleagues called in conversations among themselves Malanya) or the "square" physiognomy of Khrushchev. Stalin wanted to see in the old members of the Politburo the ideal executors of his instructions, but they coped with this task poorly, because they did not study, for which he scolded them. Stalin also found fault with Beria, who wore a "Menshevik" pince-nez.
The foregoing, of course, does not mean that our leaders were some kind of exception against the world's prosperous background. The 20th century was generally extremely stingy with outstanding personalities in the ruling elites. And Churchill, for example, having personally met Molotov, highly appreciated his business and human qualities. But Stalin's associates dealt with Stalin, not with Churchill.
In fact, it is unjustified to demand that the leading elite consist of the most intelligent, loyal, noble figures, as the best representatives of mankind have dreamed of from time immemorial. In fact, as a rule, the ruling elite consists of the same average people, like you and me, reader. Only they appear before us in the brilliance of uniforms embroidered with gold, golden shoulder straps with large stars, hung with aiguillettes and orders, and therefore they are perceived in the “lower classes” as some kind of celestials. Even a person who is really gifted in some field of activity, in everything else can be (and most often happens to be) an ordinary layman.
When I think about it, I am reminded of Chekhov's story "Men". Anton Pavlovich, describing the almost bestial life of the peasants in the village in which the action of the story takes place, notes that they are still people, but they are thrown "on top" to the mercy of fate, and adds:
“Those who are richer and stronger than them cannot help, because they themselves are rude, not honest, not sober, and they themselves scold just as disgustingly ... And can there be any help or a good example from people who are greedy, greedy, depraved, lazy people who come to the village only to insult, rob, scare?
Extend this judgment to a level above the village, and you will feel how vain are the hopes of the "bottom" on the intelligence and nobility of the "top". Members of the Politburo, of course, felt that something was wrong in the country, real life did not correspond to the picture drawn in the reports, but what should be done to improve real life, did not know.
It is not surprising that the "heirs", left without a "father of their own", for quite a long time were in a state of some confusion, feeling the need for some radical changes, but not knowing what they should be. The only one who did not succumb to this mood, but, on the contrary, was downright gushing with initiatives, bombarding the Presidium of the Central Committee with his notes, was Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and head of the internal affairs and state security agencies, who concurrently oversaw the military-industrial country complex.
After the first distribution of portfolios, not one of the leading figures of the USSR had full power, which was unusual for our country. The leading figures themselves felt this, and the most energetic of them immediately began to take measures to strengthen their positions in power.
Two views on Lavrenty Beria
The first attack on Stalin's legacy was made by Beria, who was already mentally trying on Monomakh's hat on his head.
Now there are two extreme points of view on the meaning of these initiatives of Beria.
Some, for example, Yu.I. Mukhin, believe that Beria was a devoted communist, a faithful ally and successor to Stalin's work, which the late leader had just begun, but did not have time to complete. This was to curtail the role of the party, which should remain only ideological and educational functions, and to increase the responsibility of the government for the development of the economy. At the same time, the image of Beria is drawn as noble knight revolution, a devoted fighter for communist ideals, a creator by nature, an intelligent, far-sighted politician, a simple and accessible person, and most importantly, an outstanding organizer, whose name is inextricably linked with all the major achievements of the USSR from the late 30s until his untimely death .
Others (and most of them) consider Beria the most ardent opponent of Stalin and the enemy of the Soviet system, an insidious intriguer, a sadist, an executioner and, in general, a scoundrel. Some of them do not even rule out that Beria hastened the death of Stalin. So, the already mentioned S. Semanov in his book about Stalin writes:
“In Stalin there was (meaning the last years of his life. - M.A.) a clear separation from the knowledge and understanding of people's life, which always distinguished him, especially from his rivals, completely fanatics of various kinds of speculative and utopian ideas. Summed up and health. The sharp mind has always dulled. Suspicion intensified, turning into suspiciousness.
The treacherous Beria skillfully used the current situation. Hating everything Russian, he slipped fake “materials” about Zhdanov and his supporters to Stalin (which eventually led to the emergence of the bloody “Leningrad case.” - M.A.). It was Beria who felt a certain jealousy of Stalin for the famous marshals Zhukov and Rokossovsky, and soon after the Victory he planted unclean "compromising evidence" against them. (I wonder if the extensive list of expensive watches, cuts of fabrics and other “trophies” taken out by Zhukov from Germany and found by security officers at his house during an unofficial search is considered compromising evidence? - M.A.) ...
There is no doubt that Stalin was preparing a replacement for the former party and state leadership, although it remained unknown how he was going to do this and what persons were meant during those reshuffles ...
On January 13, a report appeared in Pravda in which the MGB announced that they had uncovered a conspiracy of doctors, and cited the names of the doctors involved in the conspiracy. Most of these surnames are Jewish, and it could not be otherwise, since in the "Kremlin" representatives of this ethnic group constituted the vast majority, occupied the highest posts. Now Stalin had reasons (fair or not - it doesn't matter for this plot) to be dissatisfied with the work of the MGB, because it overlooked the conspiracy. And who is the main specialist in the USSR on state security affairs? Beria. And Stalin began to suspect Beria!
There is evidence that Stalin requested materials about Beria, his personal file: and in this case (this has now been documented) there are very dubious places, and besides, Beria is a Jew ...
Beria was aware of Stalin's dangerous moods for him. But it is not in the rules of Beria to know and delay. He starts to act.
Vlasik (Stalin's head of security. - M.A.), on whom Stalin could rely entirely, suddenly falls under arrest, all to the same Beria. Then follows the arrest of A.N. Poskrebyshev, Stalin's secretary, whom Stalin also completely trusted. Now that the people closest and most loyal to Stalin have been removed from him, Beria can deliver a preemptive strike. And on the night of March 2, 1953, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin had a stroke. Damage to the right side of the brain, no speech ...
Exactly what happened, we will obviously never know. There are a lot of versions. But the fact that the experienced hand of Beria was involved here is very likely. Beria again becomes the head of the MGB. (Semanov S.N. Stalin: lessons of life and activity. M. 2002. S. 515, 539–540).
The son of Lavrenty Beria, Sergo Beria, wrote a book about his father, whom he loved very much and, naturally, could not slander him. He claims that in the last years of Stalin's life, his father had a very bad relationship with the leader. Beria considered both Stalin's foreign and domestic policies deeply flawed and predicted that Stalin would lead the country to disaster or drag it into a devastating and losing war. He scolded Stalin at home, knowing that all conversations there were tapped and recorded and that his words would be immediately reported to Stalin.
Sergo also testifies that his mother was Georgian nationalist and hated everything Russian.
Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev, in his book The Birth of a Superpower, tells how on June 26, 1953, his father convinced Mikoyan in a private conversation in the morning of the need to arrest Beria. But Mikoyan did not give consent to this. Although this threatened the failure of the conspiracy, it was already too late for Khrushchev to retreat. In the evening, returning home, he stunned his family with the news: “Beria was arrested today. He turned out to be an enemy of the people and a foreign spy."
So, Beria had just been arrested, the message about this appeared only on July 10, there was no investigation or trial yet, and Khrushchev had already learned that Beria was an enemy of the people and a foreign spy. (As you know, the version is widespread that Beria was not arrested, but immediately killed.)
So which of these two points of view is correct?
So who is he, Beria?
To answer this question, it is necessary to recall the main points of Beria's biography (of course, I do not have the opportunity to describe it in detail here, but in recent years about this character national history several books have been written - in a variety of interpretations).
A native of a peasant Mengrelian family, Beria with young years did not want to put up with the fate of an ordinary unknown person, he was always distinguished by the desire to be at least a little higher than others. Cheerful, cheerful, witty, physically strong, Beria knew how to establish the necessary connections. His dream was to become an architect or civil engineer, but for this he had to study in Moscow or Petrograd. Beria graduated with honors from the Baku Mechanical and Construction Technical School, but at that revolutionary time it was possible to make a real career only by participating in the political struggle. It is unlikely that Beria was a convinced Marxist and an ardent fighter for the establishment of social justice in his youth, but he wanted to enter the elite of post-revolutionary Russia and chose the Bolshevik Party.
The party sent him to work in the state security organs, and Beria showed energy, initiative and high professionalism there, although the matter was not without intrigue. Soon he happened to meet with Stalin, who came to Georgia on vacation. Beria promoted to leader good impression. At the suggestion of Stalin, Beria became the first secretary of the Central Committee of the party of the Transcaucasian Federation.
Beria lived very modestly. Even being the head of the entire Transcaucasus, he lived with his wife and son in an ordinary four-room apartment. When Stalin, who had come to see his mother, came to visit him, he looked around the apartment with surprise and said:
“And this is the apartment of the first secretary of all Transcaucasia? Yes, in Moscow, a different designer lives better ... The fact that you live modestly, I humanly praise. But as a leader - I can not allow this. You are the head of a republic, even, one might say, of three republics, so you not only can, but you must live according to your position. Otherwise, our Caucasians will stop respecting you.” And at the insistence of Stalin, a decent mansion was built for Beria.
Beria fulfilled Stalin's order - to write a "true" history of the Bolshevik organization in Transcaucasia. The book showed the decisive role of Stalin in the creation of this organization and its leadership. Stalin was pleased.
Beria led healthy lifestyle life, did not smoke, did not drink strong alcoholic drinks, but drank only good Georgian wines, went in for sports, played volleyball well. This also impressed the leader, who was surrounded by many alcoholics.
But Beria was especially needed by Stalin when the terror unleashed in the country in 1937-1938 assumed such proportions that the flywheel of repression, which had gained unprecedented momentum under Yezhov, was even difficult to stop. What was needed here was a person devoted to Stalin, who had an iron character and indomitable energy, and, moreover, the highest professional. No matter how much Stalin sorted through his cadres, he could not find anyone better than Beria. Beria was summoned to Moscow and appointed first as deputy people's commissar, and after Yezhov's removal from office, as people's commissar of internal affairs. Then he entered the first row of the ruling elite of the USSR - he became a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
Beria said that he was called because the country, exhausted by terror, was on the verge of an uprising. He managed to reduce the scale of repressions, many deliberately exaggerated cases of enemies of the people were reviewed, thousands of innocently convicted people were released, many were reinstated in the party and again took prominent places in the party, Soviet, economic apparatus, in the army and navy, in cultural construction. However, it is possible that Beria had his own plans and his own, selective approach to rehabilitation.
With Beria's move to Moscow and his entry into the ruling elite, he made new friends, including Malenkov and Khrushchev. It was then that Beria developed an idea of Khrushchev as a temperamental and energetic leader, but an ingenuous person, which subsequently played a cruel joke on Beria. Beria's first connections with the Moscow, mostly academic, intelligentsia also began, which subsequently served him well. And yet, work in Moscow did not fully satisfy Beria.
Most Caucasians, outwardly resigned to the entry of their region into Russia, and then the USSR, in their hearts dreamed of restoring national independence. That is why they did not like Russia, this huge empire, crushing them by the very fact of its existence. And Beria, although he tried to look like a man of Great Russian culture (as Stalin considered himself), remained a Georgian nationalist at heart. And as the Soviet state grew stronger, this dissatisfaction with Beria, who realized that he was working to strengthen the hated monster, grew.
But with Beria it did not result in intellectual grumbling. After all, he stood at the levers of the state machine and could both delay its progress and achieve some benefits and benefits for his native Georgia. And he served. It is better to make a career in this alien country than nowhere, than to vegetate in obscurity. This does not mean that Beria was just a saboteur. He had his own ideal of social organization - Western democracy, he wanted to best country and did everything possible to undermine the totalitarian Soviet system and transform it into a bourgeois-democratic one, but acted in such a way that he would not be accused of sabotage.
Stalin, who keenly felt the mood of his comrades-in-arms, suspected Beria of insincerity, which seriously complicated the relationship between these two Georgians in the Soviet leadership.
Stalin and Beria
Those "patriots" who see in Beria almost the main reason for the failures Soviet policy in the last years of Stalin's life, they cannot articulate in any way how it is that the good and wise Stalin could keep such a bad and harmful Beria with him for so many years without seeing his vile little soul.
This is usually explained by the fact that Stalin needed a good master of repression, although such an assertion is hardly substantiated.
After all, Beria came to the leadership of the NKVD only in 1938. And he not only stopped the machine of repressions, but also came up with the initiative of a comprehensive review of the cases of all those who were repressed over the previous few years. Although there is an opinion that Beria needed this in order to throw the huge forces of the Chekists into such an occupation of the “era of early rehabilitation”, make it difficult for them to complete their current tasks and thereby weaken the Soviet state monster. There were also side effects. Firstly, it is an opportunity to shift all the sins on the predecessor (Yezhov). Secondly, the growth of authority among the Chekists (due to the ruthless cleaning of the apparatus from those who did not believe in the correctness and strength of the rehabilitation course). Finally, the reassurance of the public and the decline of the reigning country in the previous years of spy mania, especially since a turn in relations with Germany towards friendship was already expected. (True, Beria did not approve of rapprochement with Germany and believed that it was not worth signing a pact with Hitler; at the same time, he also did not trust either England or France.)
The Moor has done his job, the Moor can leave. Repression weakened, justice prevailed as far as possible, the public was reassured. And at the beginning of 1941, the NKVD was disaggregated, an independent People's Commissariat of State Security was separated from it, military counterintelligence was transferred to the People's Commissariat of Defense. It seemed that Beria's star had set: roughly speaking, only the police and fire brigades remained under his command. And he, they say, was happy with this turn of events, because he himself proposed these transformations. He was not just burdened by work in the organs, and for a long time. He knew that sooner or later the chief of the security forces would himself be put on the line and blamed on him for all the repressions and other atrocities. Therefore, when only the leadership of the NKVD remained behind him and responsibility for the work of the defense industry was still assigned to him, he was doubly happy: he was relieved of a dangerous position, and remained extremely necessary to Stalin.
In June 1941, Stalin received many warnings about Hitler's planned attack on the USSR in the near future. Information is extremely contradictory, and calming voices are heard: Hitler, who has not yet managed to defeat England, cannot decide on a war with such a powerful power as the USSR. And just on June 21, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Beria, submits a note to Stalin in which he declares the rumors of a German attack to be false and provocative.
But on June 22, the Germans attack the Soviet Union. Stalin is shocked that Hitler deceived him, outplayed him, but he calmly gives orders, being sure that the valiant Red Army will throw the impudent invaders out of Soviet soil in the coming days. After all, it was precisely this that his Soviet military leaders convinced him of. “And on enemy soil we will defeat the enemy with little blood, with a mighty blow,” we sang, boys, at the beginning of 1941.
But events develop quite differently. The Germans are rapidly moving inland, the leadership of the People's Commissariat of Defense does not even know the situation on the fronts, hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers are captured. Dejected, Stalin leaves for the dacha and stays there alone - just at the moment when the army, the party, the people, the country are waiting for his word.
And then Beria finds a way to regain his former influence and even strengthen his position in the ranks of the Soviet ruling elite. They say that it was he who, recalling the experience of the Civil War in the USSR (and he studied historical precedents in every situation), when the entire life of the country was controlled by the Defense Council, suggested that members of the Politburo go to Stalin's dacha with an appeal to take full power into their own hands as chairman State Committee Defense.
It is known that Stalin was not happy when members of the Politburo came to his dacha. Some even claimed that he was frightened, thinking that they wanted to remove him from the leadership and arrest him. But when he heard that it was proposed to create a State Defense Committee, he only asked who would be the chairman. Hearing that he would remain in power, he asked one more question: who would become members of the State Defense Committee. Here Beria named those who should be included in the GKO, including himself. Stalin agreed.
The war demanded that all special services be gathered into a single fist as part of the NKVD. A member of the GKO, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria, was awarded the title of General Commissar of State Security, which was equivalent to the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union.
Now Beria had to deal not with the rehabilitation of the victims of Yezhovshchina, but with the elimination of enemy spies and saboteurs and carrying out sabotage that would complicate the enemy’s operations. Alas, many workers who were called upon to prepare for such sabotage fell under the hammer of repression, including at the time when the NKVD was headed by Beria. It is impossible not to mention the fact that at that time numerous cases were noted when, during the retreat of our troops, important bridges across the rivers were left unblown to the enemy. Once, during the evacuation, the lists of our residency behind enemy lines were “lost”. Other blunders of the state security organs were also alarming, but Stalin, who was overburdened with the leadership of military operations, had no time to deal with this.
In October 1941, when the Germans stood at the gates of our capital, Beria was the only member of the Politburo who believed that Stalin should remain in Moscow. He promised Stalin to turn Red Square into an airfield if the situation still required the evacuation of the leader. Thus, he again proved vital to Stalin.
In 1942, the work of railway transport was on the verge of stopping, which threatened the imminent defeat of the USSR in the war. The “Iron Commissar of Railways” Kaganovich, who in peacetime liked to report on the successes of his industry (and he was then given huge funds from the budget), in military conditions (when it was necessary to use internal reserves) did not cope with his tasks. The question arose of who to put at the head of the People's Commissariat of Railways. Among others, Beria's candidacy was also named, but he fought back with all his might from this order, realizing that he would not be able to cope with such a colossus as railways. For a short time, the head of the rear of the Red Army, General Khrulev, became People's Commissar.
And in 1943, when a radical change in the course of the war became apparent, the NKVD was again divided, the state security agencies and military counterintelligence were removed from its composition. Beria again remained the head of the police and firefighters, although he took part in the work of the Tehran Conference of the heads of the three powers among those accompanying Stalin. It was there that Stalin introduced him to the heads allied states as "our Himmler".
I have long been surprised by certain circumstances connected with the fate of Stalin's son Yakov Dzhugashvili. For a long time it was believed that Yakov was captured by the Germans, and a letter from him was handed over to Stalin. It seems that this seriously affected Stalin's state of mind. The point was not so much in Yakov himself (his father did not really like his first-born), but in the fact that the Germans used his name, agitating the soldiers of the Red Army to also surrender. Recently, on the basis of a handwriting examination, it was established that Yakov's letter to his father was a fake, a skillful forgery. Beria, no doubt, knew what a spiritual wound this whole story was for Stalin. Why didn't he, an ace of intelligence work, offer to conduct an examination then?
The finest hour for Beria came in 1946. In the USSR, they overlooked the possibility of creating an atomic bomb. And when it became known that the Americans were about to use this weapon of terrible destructive power, we decided to immediately begin work on the creation of our own atomic bomb.
A Special Committee was formed under the Council of Ministers of the USSR. At its head, Stalin put his closest colleague Molotov. But things went badly, Molotov, with his addiction to a paper, clerical style of leadership, did not find a common language with atomic scientists. Beria skillfully managed the flow of information, passing to Stalin first of all those documents and letters of scientists relating to atomic weapons, which noted the role of Beria and data received from intelligence. (The first intelligence data on the progress of work on the atomic project in the United States were obtained by our Chekists back when Beria was at the head of the united NKVD. The secret data was transmitted by Western scientists who were afraid of the US monopoly in the production of the atomic bomb.) And Stalin was forced to meet scientists halfway. On August 20, 1945, he put Beria at the head of the committee, agreeing to relieve him of his duties as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs and appointing him deputy chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars. This was necessary because three major sectors of the national economy were subordinate to the head of the committee: energy, engineering and transport, not counting the extraction of raw materials (including uranium and nickel).
But why did scientists seek the appointment of Beria as the head of the committee? Because the academicians of that time, especially physicists, were dissidents at heart, and they felt the slightly dissident attitude of Lavrenty Pavlovich. Academician Semyonov recalled how, in a conversation with him about Academician Kapitsa, Beria uttered a phrase that was unthinkable to hear from any of the orthodox communists: "Such a talented person, but he works for the Bolsheviks." Later, geneticists, persecuted at the Academy of Sciences, found shelter in the institutes that were in the department of Beria. Therefore, for scientists, Beria was "one of his own among strangers" partocrats. And for the scientists who directly worked on the atomic bomb project, during these years, when in many regions of the country people swelled and died of hunger and even there were cases of cannibalism, he created fantastically favorable conditions, including supply “according to needs”. And for each successful result, a rain of awards and prizes rained down on them. You can probably believe Academician Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov when he said: if it were not for Beria, the USSR would not have had an atomic bomb for a long time. But the same can be said about the many other cases that were placed on the shoulders of Beria.
By the way, this dissident attitude helped Beria, allowed him to delve deeper into the essence of the problems being studied. After all, he looked at them from two sides - both from the position of the party, and from the point of view of dissidents, this made his view more capacious.
Enormous resources were allocated to the disposal of the Beria committee - monetary, material, intellectual, human. And Beria could report to Stalin that the Soviet atomic bomb had been created and successfully tested. Here is how S. Semanov describes it, with reference to the witnesses of the bomb test:
“Beria showed an undoubted organizational talent in his work on the leadership of the“ atomic project ”, although he showed his cold cruelty with might and main here too ... The climax of events occurred in August 1949 ... The entire zone was lit up for a short time with a very bright light. Thirty to forty seconds remained before the arrival of the first powerful blast wave ... The first thunderous roar was heard ... Kurchatov froze, uttering only one word: "It's out!"
Beria warmly, wholeheartedly hugged Kurchatov, then Khariton ... And everything was whispered in their faces: “It would be a great misfortune if it didn’t work out!” ...
Beria called Stalin ... "She exploded! Like the Americans! "I already know". And retreat.
Beria was furious. Stalin, it turns out, has already been reported. While he was kissing with these scientists, he was ahead of him.
This is not the only time that Beria was late and was ahead of him, the last time it cost him his life.
Stalin, of course, was pleased when people admired his genius, but he did not like open flattery. And he did not tolerate talkers who did not know how to organize the case. Stalin did not like Beria, but when a person was required to organize an important matter for the country, sometimes to prevent a catastrophe, Lavrenty Pavlovich had to be called. And when the deed was done, Beria was again relegated to secondary roles.
Stalin many times accused the members of the Politburo of laziness and inability to work, unwillingness to study. Indeed, they were tired of the terrible tension for decades and finally wanted to take a break from the labors of the righteous. And Beria was full of energy, and he always successfully completed the tasks assigned to him (although he also knew how to refuse those cases that would not bring him political dividends).
The writers Mikhail Prishvin and Iona Druta have similar statements, the meaning of which can be conveyed as follows: a German is good when it comes to possible things. But when it is required to accomplish the impossible, the Russian person is most suitable for this. Beria knew this feature of the Russian people and knew how to mobilize people for impossible achievements.
Beria said that Stalin had no human attachments, people for him were just tools for solving certain problems. It uses the person and then ruthlessly discards. If this person, moreover, is aware of certain matters, information about which could damage the reputation of the leader, then such a person was not only discarded, but also went into oblivion. And therefore, Beria believed that the key to his survival in the environment created by Stalin was the creation of situations in which he would be constantly needed by the leader.
While Stalin was aging and losing the threads of governing the party and the country, Beria was strengthening his position in the leadership of the USSR. There was no trace of his former selfless devotion to the leader. He was increasingly critical of Stalin and worked out his own, alternative political course, incomparably more liberal. And Stalin needed Beria because atomic bombs we still had much less than the United States, and it was impossible to curtail the nuclear project. And to change its leader on the go would mean ruining the case, and there was no one to appoint Beria in place.
Stalin also needed people capable of constructive criticism of his views and actions. And around were mostly people who, after listening to the leader's instructions, clicked their heels and hurried to show their diligence. And for this reason, Stalin needed Beria, just like Malenkov, who, as secretary of the Central Committee, apparently did not have tender feelings for Stalin, who had lately been heading towards weakening the influence of the party.
Stalin was already beginning to fear Beria. After all, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe omnipotence of the leader is nothing more than a myth. Perhaps Stalin was going to remove Beria, but did not have time.
So Beria remained deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and chairman of the special committee until the day of Stalin's death.
What did Beria offer?
Beria ascended the Soviet political Olympus late, at the end of the 30s, when the leading core of the party and the state had already been formed. Observing the rules of the political and ideological game adopted in the Stalin era, Beria spoke in public as a Marxist-Leninist and a loyal ally of Stalin. However, apparently due to a deeper knowledge of real life than that of the leader’s comrades-in-arms who had long been sitting in their Kremlin offices, he saw earlier than others the discrepancy between the rosy picture of the country’s successes and its true state. It seemed to him that Western democracy offered more opportunities for all-round progress than social system established in the USSR. This led him to a conflict with the system and with those leaders of the CPSU who habitually assessed the life of the country through the prism of Marxist dogmas.
Let's start with an analysis of his foreign policy initiatives. Beria proposed to liquidate the socialist GDR and carry out the unification of Germany as a peace-loving democratic bourgeois state. He motivated this by the fact that the GDR, which requires daily assistance from us, is a weight on the legs of the Soviet economy. And a united Germany will be forever grateful to the USSR for agreeing to its unification and will provide economic assistance to our country. On the world stage, such a Germany would serve as a counterbalance to the United States and Great Britain.
Molotov, supported by Khrushchev, opposed this initiative of Beria. These figures believed that the socialist East Germany would serve as an attractive showcase, demonstrating the advantage of the "socialist way of life", and would captivate the proletariat of Western Europe, and not only Europe, by its example.
The paradox here was that everything turned out exactly the opposite. West Germany has become a showcase for East. A mass exodus of Germans began from east to west, and not in the opposite direction. Moreover, in June 1953, an uprising began in East Germany, which was suppressed by Soviet troops. And it was Beria who sent the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU to “put things in order” there, who had already offered to give East Germany to the West. And the comrades in the Presidium took advantage of Beria's absence, and the conspiracy against him entered a decisive phase. There is even a version, expressed in the press, that the uprising in East Germany was provoked by Khrushchev, Malenkov and Molotov in order to send Beria to suppress it at that time.
Subsequently, the Soviet leaders agreed to the unification of Germany on the principle of "one country - two systems", that is, the GDR and the FRG would become two parts of the new state, with the preservation of socialism in one part and capitalism in the other. And what will be the prospects of socialism in competition with capitalism - let the German communists think about it. But Gorbachev simply surrendered the GDR to the West.
Beria, like Stalin, was against the dismemberment of Germany, because then the main thing for the Germans would be the desire for reunification. But Beria also believed that we should not annex East Prussia, it would be enough to create our military bases there. And the best thing, in his opinion, would be for the USSR to return to the old borders of 1937.
It seems to me that such an argument against Beria's position on the German question is essential. It is known that the inhabitants of the GDR immediately after the reunification of Germany succumbed to a sense of euphoria, but for most of them soon came sobering. Despite the fact that West Germany has invested trillions of marks in the economy of the former GDR, the eastern lands remain less developed, unemployment is higher there, and the standard of living is lower. But that's not the point. And today, many years later, East Germans ("Ossies", as they are dismissively called in the west of the country) for the most part regret the loss of the social benefits that they had in the GDR, and despise their Western brethren ("Wessies") for their lack of spirituality and stupid pursuit of material wealth. The West Germans repay them with poorly concealed hatred. In other words, socialism in the GDR took deep roots, and if not the betrayal of the Gorbachev clique, it remains to be seen how the development would have gone Central Europe.
Beria's calculation that a united bourgeois Germany would become a neutral country, like Austria, would hardly have been justified. Too great was the interest of the US ruling circles in turning Germany into a powerful military force capable of confronting the Soviet Union in a conflict that both opposing sides considered almost inevitable (I hope I will not reveal military secrets, if I say that the Soviet General Staff was developing plans for the exit of our tank columns to the English Channel in response to plans for Americans to strike at major cities THE USSR).
Beria believed that in other countries of Eastern Europe, Soviet-style socialism should not be planted. In particular, he dissuaded Stalin from carrying out collectivization in Poland. In his opinion, it would be better to have in Poland not a communist, but a coalition government loyal to the USSR, which would also include the leaders of the exile cabinet of ministers who had dug in London. They say that those figures cannot do anything at all, and therefore it is necessary to give them honorary positions in which they would live out their lives.
Even before the war, when the fate of the captured Polish officers who were in Soviet camps and taken to Katyn was being decided, Beria offered to save this force in order to use it to create an allied Polish army in case Germany attacked the USSR. But Voroshilov, Malenkov, Zhdanov, Molotov and Kaganovich saw the future of Poland only as socialist, and its army as a worker-peasant army, for which the captured officers - class enemies. Sergo Beria writes that Molotov subsequently admitted that he was wrong on this issue.
Beria considered the best solution to be the unification of the Slavic countries of people's democracy into two federations - around Poland and Bulgaria. Let the leaders of these democratic states stand for socialism, but not for Bolshevism. He apparently understood that the centuries-old hatred of the Poles (in any case, the Polish gentry) for Russia and the Russians would hardly make it possible for Poland to become our faithful ally.
Beria also believed that the break with Tito was a mistake, and planned to correct it. (“Let the Yugoslavs build what they want.”) In contrast to Stalin, who viewed Yugoslavia as an important base for penetration into Western Europe, Beria saw the civilizational incompatibility of Russia and the Western Slavs, who had long been striving towards the West. The peoples of the "countries of people's democracy" of Eastern Europe, although they have become our allies, nevertheless belong to European civilization and are alien, if not hostile, to Russia, and no proletarian internationalism will be able to eliminate their alienness to us.
According to Beria, the implementation of the policy he proposed would allow us to hope for an end to " cold war", the blame for which he laid on Stalin. Moreover, under the new conditions, the USSR could count on American assistance under the Marshall Plan. Probably, he was simply not aware of the secret agreement between Roosevelt and Stalin.
The fact is that for the United States, the main goal in World War II was not to defeat Nazi Germany. They needed the victory over the Germans as a means to solve a more important task - the collapse of the British Empire. The USA wanted to oust England from her colonies, whose resources were to be placed under the control of American monopolies. Stalin also wanted the collapse of the colonial empires, because he considered the national liberation movements in the colonies as an ally in the struggle for the victory of socialism throughout the world. That is why Stalin much more often found mutual understanding with Roosevelt than with Churchill.
So, on the issue of the future post-war structure of the world, Stalin and Roosevelt reached an agreement. In fact, it was a plan to divide the world between two superpowers. The USSR took part not only in the creation of the United Nations Organization, but also in the formation of the "financial UN" - the International Monetary Fund, in whose board the two superpowers were to play a decisive role. The USSR even paid a solid initial contribution to the IMF. And the initial outlines of the future "Marshall Plan" also took into account the interests of the Soviet Union. But after the death of Roosevelt (which occurred under mysterious circumstances), Truman, a protege of a completely different financial group, became president of the United States, and a sharp turn took place in US policy.
Beria, apparently, did not know all the details of the agreement between Roosevelt and Stalin and did not see the predatory essence of the Marshall Plan in the new edition, which pursued the goal, if our country accepted it, to drag it into debt bondage and seize it natural resources. Beria was afraid of breaking the allied relations with the West that we had established during the war, because then the external support needed to establish a democratic system in the USSR would be lost. Beria was convinced that Stalin would soon unleash a new world war which he will win, but it will have disastrous consequences for all mankind. Before the start of this war, Stalin, according to Beria, had to destroy the opponents of these plans of his in his immediate environment. And Beria's struggle against Stalin's plans was for him a struggle for his own survival.
Beria considered the pro-Arab position of the USSR in the Arab-Israeli conflict to be a mistake and offered to bet on Israel, which would provide us with the support of the entire world Jewish diaspora. He seriously considered it possible for Jewish capital to help restore the economy of the USSR destroyed by the war.
Now, when the world is faced with various manifestations of Islamic terrorism, of which thousands of our compatriots have become victims, it has become obvious that a certain bias has been made in our position on the Middle East issue. In general, there was not a single country in the Arab world in which the ideas of socialism would fall on favorable ground.
Among the measures he domestic politics there were a lot of smart ones. I'll start with particulars. Why would Soviet people going to the May Day demonstration carry portraits of members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, especially since they often did not know who was depicted in these portraits?
Beria insisted on stopping the "great construction projects of communism", which, he believed, were depleting the economy and served only as a smokescreen for the country's increased militarization. According to his calculations, if a tenth of military spending were spent on the production of consumer goods, the standard of living of the working people could be raised four times! Why build hundreds of kilometers of canals if the people are hungry, undressed and undressed? And before digging canals in the desert, it would be necessary to raise the Non-Black Earth region. Together with the construction sites, which smacked of gigantomania, the completely justified works from the “Stalinist plan for the transformation of nature” were also stopped. For example, the planting of windbreaks, which would have protected large areas in the European part of the country from deadly droughts, has ceased.
Beria instructed a group of specialists to draw up true story The USSR and the CPSU, having de-Stalinized it, evaluating events and figures without labels. For example, Trotskyism should be viewed as an ideological trend, and not as a collection of spies from foreign states. (He even ordered the publication of the works of Bukharin and Trotsky, as well as Stolypin, Witte, and a number of other figures of pre-revolutionary Russia.) Such a change in the assessment of the former opposition currents should also have helped attract Jewish capital into the Soviet economy. However, he did not take into account that, having embarked on the path of first ideological and then political struggle, the opposition, fearing defeat, is also capable of embarking on the path of direct betrayal of national interests, examples of which are countless in the annals of history, including Russian (including Soviet ).
Beria believed that it was necessary to build a Pantheon in Moscow for the burial of the great sons and daughters of the Motherland, freeing the Kremlin from the remains of heroes.
It seems that the members of the Politburo would have liked Beria's proposal to build state dachas for them, so that the ones they currently occupy could be inherited by children. But Khrushchev opposed this, fearing that such a decision could later be used by Beria as compromising evidence.
Beria initiated a broad amnesty for prisoners. Over a million people fell under it (in total, according to some sources, there were 2.5 million prisoners in the Gulag system). On the one hand, it was like an act of justice and mercy. On the other hand, thousands of dangerous criminals were amnestied, who were not going to reform and live an honest working life. This led to a strong surge in crime in the "cold summer of 1953", but at the same time, it seemed to give grounds for increasing the role of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the life of the country, which was to Beria's advantage.
Beria's proposals for the reorganization of the Soviet state were also serious.
As a first step, Beria considered it necessary to transfer the management of the economy and culture of the Union republics into the hands of national cadres and give there national languages state status. This, they say, will be an expression of the confidence of the national republics in the Center. Next, it was supposed to create national military units(against which Marshal Zhukov objected), later to establish national orders.
Beria had close ties with the leaders of the Tatar ASSR, and he sought to make it a union republic and provide it with access to the Caspian Sea, justifying this by the fact that Astrakhan is not a Russian, but a Tatar city ... In this case, the entire block of the Volga Muslim territorial entities would have received direct access to the allied Muslim republics and even to Iran (through the Caspian Sea). And in Tatarstan, separatist sentiments had deep roots!
And the next steps can be regarded, in fact, as a proposal to dissolve the USSR, free the union republics from economic dependence on the Center, so that these countries, having become independent, create a new association on a voluntary basis. He saw that Europe was moving towards economic integration, but independent states will stay there for a long time. And the USSR, in his opinion, must go back, since the republics are economically united and it is only necessary to ensure the revival of nations. With such a development of events, Europe will not oppose the USSR, but the United States. And the Americans will be forced to leave Europe.
Beria understood that it was impossible to eliminate the CPSU hated by him in the coming years, so it was necessary to gradually reduce its role to nothing. Even during Stalin's lifetime, he said that the party in the USSR was not doing its own thing, managing the economy, not being responsible for the results of its leadership. Party leadership was needed as long as we used bourgeois specialists, and now all our cadres are Soviet, why do we need control over them? It is necessary that the country be ruled not by the Central Committee of the CPSU, but by the Council of Ministers of the USSR. And the party is engaged in ideology, education, culture, the formation of a new person. Intrigue flourishes in the party because it does not have its own business. Let the party, if it cannot lead and be responsible for the results of its activities, at least not hinder the development of the economy.
Beria contributed to the softening of Stalin's attitude towards religion and the Church. But if Stalin was guided by considerations of benefit for the state, then Beria probably saw in religion a force that could, if not resist Marxism, which he hated, then at least weaken the influence of this doctrine, even if on a small part of society. In addition, he wanted the state to meet not only Russian Orthodox Church but also the Vatican. He justified this by the desire to maintain a channel for influencing the West and obtaining information from there, although it is possible that he wanted to create conditions for the emergence in our country of another church schism.
It is easy to understand that Beria did not revere Marx very much, believing that the theory of Marxism leads the socialist countries into a dead end. And Lenin, who led the party to the seizure of power, but did not know what to do next, Beria generally considered incapable of anything but intrigue. And he had a lot of documents in his special depository, showing not the benevolent image of Lenin created by propaganda, but the real one - a cynical and cruel ruler who, with this cruelty, covered up his inability not only to solve, but even to understand the new tasks facing the country. When Beria's son Sergo, in his youth, began to admire Lenin too much, his father brought him one of the folders with such materials and thereby saved him from this kind of idolatry.
Beria not only accepted with satisfaction Stalin’s decision to dissolve the Comintern, “a hotbed of intriguers and informers,” but also spoke in his home circle about the party, of which he himself was a member of the leadership: “Even our party bodies, these gatherings of scorpions, are far from the Comintern” . He also hated the political agencies in the Soviet armed forces.
Speaking in essence, Beria proposed de-ideologizing the life of the country. The question of whether society needs an ideology or whether it only hinders its development requires separate consideration. But Beria, after all, could not help but understand that the party was already left without an advanced ideology. The ruins of the Marxist ideology still remained some kind of obstacle in the way of the bourgeois ideology, which penetrated the USSR through thousands of channels. And complete de-ideologization would have meant, under those conditions, only capitulation to bourgeois ideology, which is what we are seeing today.
If we ignore the specific situation of those years, then there was a lot of reasonableness in Beria's proposals. But even what in them could be considered generally correct, for the most part turned out to be untimely or, at least, in need of ideological preparation, and from the positions, Beria, completely alien.
But the main weak point in Beria's views was that he did not understand the Russian people and the greatest, world-historical significance of our main achievement - the Soviet way of life.
In the Russian people, Beria saw only the bearer of a slave psychology, which can only be controlled with the help of a large club. And, accordingly, in Bolshevism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, he noticed only one, repressive, side.
No matter how Beria dressed up in the clothes of a faithful disciple of Lenin - Stalin, no matter how high he rose in the party hierarchy, he remained a petty bourgeois in his worldview. The following examples are illustrative in this regard.
Stalin, seeing how the front crumbled in the first days of the war, asked in a rage: “Where is this damned working class of yours?” He could not understand why thousands and thousands of fighters and commanders retreat, even run away without a fight, and tens of thousands surrender. And Beria explained to him: because they are not owners. If they owned property, they would fight like lions.
I don't know why Stalin didn't object to him: French army there were many owners, but she did not really fight the Germans, but gave her country under the heel of the invaders. The petty bourgeois is ready to defend his property when they directly encroach on it, alone, but about the people, the country, national interest and national dignity his head does not hurt. On the other hand, in Russia, when Napoleon attacked it, not only peasants, but also merchants and nobles burned their houses with all their property, but did not submit to the invading enemy. It is now that the idea of the small proprietor as the main force of society is being implanted in every possible way, but it still does not really take root in Russia.
Beria, dreaming of the establishment of bourgeois democracy in the USSR, relied on Soviet soldiers and officers who have passed along the roads of war not only of their country, but also of half of Europe. In his opinion, these people, who saw that those “liberated” from the yoke of capital live in a free society and are materially better off than their “liberators”, when they return home, they will want to rebuild the life of the country on the same principles that made Western society rich. But, to his surprise, the Soviet people, Russian soldiers and officers did not become "new Decembrists", they did not at all want such a restructuring and did not understand those who dreamed of establishing a Western order of life in our country.
The Soviet system, even in imperfect form, in which it was formed under Stalin, turned out to be much more familiar to the Russian people than the system of Western democracy desired by Beria.
If we imagine the problem in the most simplified form, then it will look something like this.
Societies, civilizations, economic systems can be divided into two types - purposeful and market.
Societies in which people have left the animal state strive to become better, more perfect, more just, and therefore they have an ideal. This is what distinguishes a person who has left the animal state from a person who remains an animal. The classics of Marxism understood communism in this way - "the final exit of mankind from the animal world." The need to lift humanity to a higher high step moral development - one of the central themes of Russian culture, especially literature. The hero of Chekhov's story "A House with a Mezzanine" suffered from the fact that "man remains the most predatory and unscrupulous animal on earth."
In societies of a purposeful type, the role of the state is great, the economy is controlled centrally. But they must also be provided with sufficient freedom of personal initiative, otherwise they quickly degenerate.
Market societies, in which people simply strive to snatch everything they can, for themselves, for their families, for their corporations, by and large represent herds of animals.
Purposeful societies, in turn, can be divided into utopian, state-socialist and real-socialist. Utopian societies include, in particular, communist (according to Marx and Lenin) and Nazi (“Third Reich” according to Hitler). Soviet society under Stalin can be called state-socialist. The beginnings of real socialism were traced in Russia in the 20s of the last century - in the period from the liquidation of the NEP to the establishment of the Stalinist regime.
Market societies are predatory societies, even if they are state-market (as in the modern West) or dominated by transnational corporations (where modern globalists are leading the world). During the period of decline, market societies turn into gangster ones (as we see in the example of modern Russia).
Our country had to move forward from a society of state socialism to a society of real socialism. Beria, like all previous and subsequent liberal reformers, called and pulled the country back to Western-style democracy, that is, back to animal world. Consequently, in politics he was a reactionary.
This made Beria inadequate to the country, whose life he was going to rebuild so abruptly. Therefore, you can be sure that even if he had not been eliminated, by and large he would not have been able to become the leader of the country, the leader of the people. However, with an unfavorable development of events, he could shed a lot of blood, destroying this country alien to him along the way. Therefore, his removal from the political arena of the USSR as a whole should be considered a positive phenomenon.
Beria hoped to remove his colleagues in the leadership of the party and the country, after intimidating them with what he would tell about their immediate and active participation in mass repressions, and was preparing a new congress of the CPSU. If his plan had succeeded, then we would have heard a report not about the enemy of the people of Beria, but about the enemies of the people Khrushchev, Malenkov and other associates of Stalin. But he made a number of mistakes, and his opponents got ahead of him.
It is easy to see that almost everything that Beria proposed was subsequently carried out in part by Khrushchev, and the rest by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It is no coincidence that such a liberal "reformer" as Alexander Yakovlev positively assessed many of Beria's steps. This means that Beria was not a successor to Stalin's cause, but rather a predecessor of Gorbachev.
It remains to be seen how events developed in the country and its leadership after the essence of the “perestroika” initiated by Beria became clear to the rest of the members of the Presidium of the Central Committee.
And tobacco apart
The friendship between Khrushchev and Malenkov was the first to crack. Immediately after they took up their new posts, they were on an equal footing, but gradually Khrushchev began, as they say in such cases, to “pull the blanket over himself” more and more. To tell the truth, he had every reason to do so.
When Khrushchev returned from Ukraine and again became the first secretary of the party organization of Moscow and the Moscow region, he was struck by the desolation villages near Moscow, even located an hour from the capital. Small collective farms, in which if anything was given out for a workday, then a hundred or two grams of grain, impassability and rampant drunkenness of the peasants reigned everywhere. All this was in sharp contrast to the Ukrainian collective farms. And for Agriculture answered in the Politburo Malenkov, who did not understand this matter at all.
Malenkov was considered the second (after Stalin) person in the party, but he was a typical apparatchik. “Scribe,” Stalin said about him; they say, he will write you a resolution competently, but you cannot entrust him with a specific case, he does not know it. It wasn't entirely fair. Indeed, during the war, Malenkov, as a member of the State Defense Committee, was instructed to control the production of certain types of weapons, and later, when Beria headed the atomic project, Malenkov was responsible for the work on the creation of missiles. But Khrushchev believed that Malenkov felt extremely uncomfortable in these areas of work. Khrushchev, who was a member of the Military Council of the front during Battle of Stalingrad, saw how Malenkov, seconded by Stalin to the Stalingrad front, showed his complete incompetence in military matters. But he was a first-class master of the hardware game, which is often perceived as a negative characteristic. Meanwhile, for a politician and an organizer, knowledge of the mechanics of apparatus struggle is absolutely necessary. Although some authors consider Malenkov to be the main organizer of the "Leningrad case" and a number of other similar actions, which did not add to his popularity in the party, in the first months after Stalin's death he managed to make a significant contribution to ensuring a peaceful transition to subsequent transformations.
However, according to Khrushchev (I repeat, not entirely fair), and in the new post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Malenkov did not prove himself a competent leader. Khrushchev, at meetings of the Presidium of the Central Committee, increasingly corrected his unlucky colleague and gradually took the initiative in raising and resolving the issues under discussion in his own hands.
Malenkov was offended, but one day, when he was late for a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Khrushchev had already firmly taken the chair, and Malenkov, who entered, was offered to take minutes. And more Malenkov did not speak on equal terms with Khrushchev.
But Malenkov misjudged the situation in the leadership of the country as a whole. Firstly, he decided that since he had already been appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, then Beria's help was no longer needed for him. Moreover, he began to fear that Beria, who considered the post of prime minister the most important in the country, would now strive to take this position. If Beria also enters into an alliance with Khrushchev, directed against him, Malenkov, then the prime minister cannot be retained.
In fact, these fears of Malenkov were not entirely unfounded. At one time, reports appeared in the literature about the conspiracy of Khrushchev, Bulganin and Beria against Malenkov. Khrushchev intended to use Beria to appoint Bulganin, who was closer to him, to the post of chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, whom he could manipulate (he achieved this two years later). Khrushchev could also count on the fact that he would be able, carrying out his unpopular measures, to do it with the hands of Beria, so that he himself would then evade responsibility. He, who admitted that his hands were up to the elbows in the blood of the victims of repression, after all, later managed to present the matter as if other associates of Stalin, and not he, were to blame for the extermination of innocent workers. However, Khrushchev may have needed this alleged alliance with Beria to lull the vigilance of his main opponent and to cover up his own plans of a completely different kind.
Beria also had an interest in removing Malenkov. In addition, Beria made a big miscalculation: he compiled a dossier on Malenkov, collecting documents testifying to his leading role in the most important cases of the period of mass repression. By showing this dossier to Malenkov, Beria believed that he had thereby intimidated and neutralized him. The effect turned out to be the opposite, Malenkov wanted to get rid of the person who had been blackmailing him like that. And therefore, Malenkov, who usually subtly felt where the wind was blowing, restrained his irritation, decided to get closer to Khrushchev in order to distance him from Beria.
This was a fatal mistake by Malenkov, which radically changed the alignment of political forces. Khrushchev seemed to be just waiting for this moment, and during a walk in a forest near Moscow he managed to convince Malenkov of the need to eliminate Beria.
Then Khrushchev involved Molotov in the conspiracy. Beria returned to Molotov his beloved wife, who had been arrested under Stalin and was serving a link away from Moscow. And yet, Molotov, who met with hostility many of Beria's initiatives, not only joined the conspiracy himself, but also became a link between Khrushchev and the old members of the former Politburo. Soon Kaganovich and Voroshilov were involved in the conspiracy.
All these actions of the conspirators were carried out secretly, only during personal meetings in secluded places, without using phones, which they all had tapped. If we remember how high the probability of betrayal was there, then we must admit that the conspirators risked their heads.
The fatal miscalculation of Lavrenty Beria
Beria, in principle, could have neutralized his opponents on March 5, immediately after Stalin's death. Even Zhukov, who did not have friendly feelings for Beria, believed that this was exactly what had to be done. Beria did not do this, perhaps fearing accusations of "Bonapartism." And now he did not have the opportunity to immediately take power into his own hands, because for this he had to place his people not only in the state security agencies, but also in other structures, he still had no support either in the Armed Forces or in the party apparatus . Later, Gorbachev, elected General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, finding himself in approximately the same position, gradually, lulling the vigilance of his comrades-in-arms with empty speeches, strengthened his positions, and only then, having gathered ordinary members of the Central Committee of retirement age, thanked them for their service to the Motherland and invited them to write statements about resignation, which they immediately did. After that, his hands were untied, he had already managed to place his people in key positions - such as Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze.
But Beria did not have such opportunities, and he could not wait long. However, one gets the impression that Beria did not intend to eliminate either Malenkov or Khrushchev, realizing that for the second time in a row at the head of Russia - the USSR could not become a Georgian. Apparently, it seemed to him that it would be enough to assign his “commissars” to Malenkov and Khrushchev as deputies, without whose visa not a single order of the “first persons” would be valid.
Here he could rely on the experience of previous years. Under Stalin, any decision of the Council of Ministers was sealed with his signature not only by himself, the chairman, but also by the manager of affairs (Chadaev).
Similarly, the decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were signed by the chairman (Shvernik) and the secretary (Gorkin). Theoretically, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council could sign any decree. But in practice, the decree came into force only after the secretary of the Presidium sealed it and gave instructions to register it in the book and make the appropriate number of copies for distribution to the appropriate authorities.
Yes, and the director of the enterprise could sign any document, but if the paper was related to finance, then the chief accountant had to put his signature under it. Suppose the chief accountant objected, but the director did not agree with his arguments. Then the chief accountant put his signature, but at the same time he had to report the fact of unjustified, in his opinion, spending of funds to his superior. Not to mention the fact that all the actions of business executives were under the control of party bodies, which monitored the compliance of these actions with the political line set by the Central Committee. So Beria, I think, had the expectation that he would become the de facto head of the country, a dictator, even if formally Malenkov and Khrushchev would be its first persons.
And this was already a fatal mistake of Beria. Khrushchev was not one of those who would humbly agree to play the role of someone's henchman. For too long he disguised himself as a harmless and unambitious simpleton under Stalin, so that now, when the opportunity has opened up for him to carry out his plans for socio-economic transformations (I note right away - ominous, which will be discussed below), now dance to the tune of some Beria.
In a situation where the old members of the former Politburo were in a daze after the death of Stalin, and Khrushchev lay low, hatching his plans for coming to sole power, Beria was the only active member of the party leadership. Success in carrying out the first measures he had planned plunged him into a state of euphoria and weakened his usual vigilance. In addition, he knew that after Stalin's death, a tacit agreement had been reached in the ruling elite not to resort to executions for political reasons. And he did not even want to think about the fact that he could simply be removed from his posts. Much earlier, he said that an attempt to eliminate him would lead to an uprising of the Chekists, and this is such a threat that no power can ignore. And for him it was a complete surprise to be eliminated by the conspirators led by Khrushchev.
Are the accusations against Beria correct?
The fact that Beria's opponents tried in every possible way to denigrate him and in many ways slandered him is beyond doubt. And that the charges brought against him then looked completely implausible, is also a fact. But exactly fifty years have passed since the trial of Beria, and in the light of what happened to the country during this time, much in the sentence to the criminal looks completely different. Let's take a look at some of the accusations.
Well, such an item as the desire to seize power can be omitted. Both Khrushchev and Malenkov were guilty of this sin, and later many other leaders of the country. Of course, if the seizure of power is also understood as the physical elimination of rivals, then it will have to be considered a crime.
More important must be considered the accusation of a desire to liquidate the Soviet worker-peasant system, to carry out the restoration of capitalism and to restore the rule of the bourgeoisie. Suppose Beria did not want to directly restore capitalism. But he undoubtedly believed that the power should not be workers' and peasants', but the people's, democratic, without the dictatorship of the proletariat or any other class of society. In a certain sense, the desire can be considered commendable, but the events in our country that took place after August 1991 should convince even the blind that the elimination of the CPSU as the leading and guiding force of society, without developing the correct ideology that expresses the urgent needs of the state, can only result in the collapse of this state. Perhaps Beria could not have assumed this, subjectively this justifies him to some extent, but objectively it does not make his intentions less criminal.
Beria was accused of undermining the friendship of the peoples of the USSR. Perhaps Beria only sought to create more favorable conditions for the growth of national cadres employed in the party, Soviet and economic bodies of the Union republics, their creative workers. But we saw what such care resulted in after 1991. Where there is no firm centralized leadership of the ideological life of the entire country, instead of the growth of national cadres, rampant nationalist and separatist sentiments reigned. Under this nationalist frenzy fell (hopefully for a while) the broad masses of the people, who now bitterly regret the lost achievements and values of socialism. The party elite of the union republics led the nationalist movements demanding independence from the Center, and the USSR collapsed, or rather, was destroyed by the joint efforts of degenerates and traitors in the center and locally, with the full support of the reactionary circles of the West.
And what about Beria's accusation that he was an English agent, a foreign spy? He undoubtedly had some contacts with the West through his agents, among whom there were probably double agents who worked both for the USSR and for foreign intelligence services. After all, he established contacts with Rankovich (“Yugoslav Beria”) long before official ties arose between the leadership of the USSR and the SFRY. But if convincing evidence of his direct espionage activities has not yet been presented, then at least Beria was undoubtedly an “agent of influence” of the West, the first in the Soviet leadership, a conductor of liberal bourgeois ideology and dissident views.
So if the accusations brought against Beria then seemed ridiculous to many, then over time, oddly enough, they turned out to be very reasonable. And the elimination of Beria, I repeat once again, was a positive phenomenon. It would be quite positive if it did not open the way to power for a much more serious enemy of the Soviet system - Khrushchev, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
