In the first official reports about the arrest of Beria, which appeared on June 26, 1953, the charges were formulated in a rather standard way - "sabotage", "espionage", "conspiracy".
The massacre of Beria stands out from a series of Kremlin palace coups. First, it was not the head of state that was overthrown, but only the applicant for this vacant position. Second, the coup was not the result of a carefully planned conspiracy, but a kind of improvisation. Thirdly, yesterday's comrades-in-arms who struck a blow not only did not spare Beria, but literally mixed his very name with mud.
The fall of the marshal
At the time of his arrest, Lavrenty Pavpovich was the first Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR, he had the rank of marshal, that is, in the government he was the second person, in the power unit - the first, simultaneously led the police, state security, border and convoy troops. A separate area was overseeing the "atomic project", in which several powerful departments, including the Ministry of Defense, took part, which gave him leverage over the army as well.
Periodically, Beria was thrown into other breakthrough areas: for example, it was he who in 1944-1947 oversaw the laying of the country's first main gas pipeline Saratov-Moscow (of course, named after Stalin).
Lavrenty Pavlovich was removed from all posts not on the day of his arrest, but almost two weeks later, on July 7. At the end of the month, a decree was issued on the seizure of his artistic portraits, printed images, books, articles, both telling about him and written by him.
The special investigative group to investigate the Beria case was personally headed by the USSR Prosecutor General Roman Rudenko.
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The guilty verdict, according to which Lavrenty Pavlovich was shot, spoke about espionage in favor of Great Britain and other countries, the accused's plans to eliminate the Soviet system and restore capitalism.
When it came to the "enemies of the people," such accusations looked standard. The point that Beria abused his power and falsified thousands of criminal cases sounded significant - thus, the people were shown who exactly was to blame for all the excesses that had taken place since 1937. Everyone remembered the precedent with Nikolai Yezhov, who was shot for similar crimes, so it was logical to hang all the dogs on Beria, who replaced him as the chief of the NKVD.
An interesting nuance consisted in the fact that Yezhov was also accused of "moral corruption" and even sodomy, but the Kremlin did not bring this out to the general public.
Beria did not delight his opponents with sodomy, but the topic of his mistresses was discussed on a scale uncharacteristic for Soviet propaganda that avoided piquant topics.
Now let's see how the charges brought against Lavrenty Pavlovich were true.
Conspirator?
Beria did not have the need to organize a "conspiracy" if we put into this concept the use of force to seize the supreme power. He got to the very top so that he could reach it by completely legitimate means.
On March 5, 1953, immediately after the death of Stalin, Lavrenty Pavlovich was appointed first deputy head of the government of the USSR and at the same time the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which also incorporated the state security structures.
The corresponding decision was made at a joint meeting of the Party Central Committee, the Council of Ministers and the Supreme Soviet, but, of course, it would have been impossible to carry it out without the support of other key figures - Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin.
The people perceived Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich as old companions-in-arms of Stalin, although in the last months before the death of the leader they looked like birds with clipped wings. All three of them had impressive compromising evidence. On Molotov - along the line of his Jewish wife. Kaganovich was himself a Jew, and his brother was shot as an "enemy of the people." During the Great Patriotic War, Voroshilov made many mistakes that could well be interpreted as "sabotage" and "betrayal".
As soon as Beria became the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, all investigations into this trio were stopped. With Malenkov, Beria was generally an old ally. Relations with the head of the party nomenklatura as the first secretary of the Central Committee Khrushchev and the Minister of War Bulganin looked neutral.
Formally, after Stalin's death, instead of mentioning the name of the only leader, official propaganda spoke of "collective leadership." However, taking into account the Russian-Soviet specifics, it was clear that such a leader would soon appear as a result of, so to speak, natural selection. And this raised the question: what will he do with his colleagues?
Beria, having become the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, honestly fulfilled his obligations, covering up the “doctors' case” that is potentially dangerous for everyone, ordering to reconsider the “aviation case” that compromises Malenkov, as well as curtailing the “Megrelian case” that was hitting his Caucasian comrades-in-arms and him personally.
And that was just the beginning …
Reformer but not a traitor
The Ministry of Internal Affairs issued an order "On the prohibition of the use of any measures of coercion and physical pressure against those arrested."
The note presented to the Presidium and personally pleasant for Lazar Kaganovich about the need to rehabilitate his brother indicated a tendency towards rehabilitation of other convicted "enemies of the people." Indeed, already on April 10, 1953, the Presidium decided to “approve the ongoing comrade. Beria LP measures to uncover criminal acts committed over a number of years in the former Ministry of State Security of the USSR, expressed in fabricating falsified cases against honest people, as well as measures to correct the consequences of violations of Soviet laws.
Note that the periods when Beria was in charge of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the state security (December 1938 - December 1945 and March - June 1953) were not accompanied by mass repressions and high-profile trials against the "enemies of the people", but they were remembered for the rehabilitation of many victims of "Yezhovism" ". The names of other members of the Presidium were not associated with such good deeds, but they were associated with repression in specific regions (Kaganovich - Moscow, Khrushchev - Ukraine, Malenkov - Leningrad).
By initiating the process of revising the results of political repressions, Beria received leverage on the nomenklatura, since it depended on him who would be rehabilitated in the first place, and who would be attracted for denunciations and “excesses”.
Another strong move was the amnesty adopted at his submission, according to which more than 1.2 million people were released from the camps and criminal prosecution was stopped against 400 thousand more. Since the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council signed the corresponding decree, the people called this amnesty "Voroshilovskaya" at first.
The country was covered by a wave of crime, which gave Beria reason to demand special powers.
Moreover, Lavrenty Pavlovich began to get into areas that had no relation to his department, but were available for his intervention as a deputy chairman of the government and a member of the Presidium of the Party Central Committee.
He advocated the normalization of relations with the Western powers and even the unification of the FRG and the GDR into a single neutral, but not socialist state. Conducted a probe for the restoration of diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia.
Literally all of Beria's initiatives were sanctified by the authority of the Communist Party. And only the idea of the unification of the two Germanies can be interpreted as an attempt to "restore capitalism" (although not in the Soviet Union).
Of course, the amnesty, which was quite rightly hung up on Beria retroactively, can drag on an enemy action. But even here the accusations look very shaky. The unloading of the overcrowded "Gulag archipelago" was still inevitable, and in order to start rehabilitating political prisoners, it was necessary to somehow prepare public opinion.
All that remains is to agree with the opinion of Mikhail Smirtyukov, a major party official: “There was no“Beria conspiracy”about which they talked so much later, in fact, did not exist. His comrades in the Presidium of the Central Committee arrested him preventively. They were very much afraid of his intriguing abilities. They were afraid that he would be able to do something like that. But the conspiracy was invented later in order to somehow explain to the masses why Stalin's most loyal disciple was arrested."
The accusations of espionage against the person who led the state security during the Great Patriotic War sounds wild, since an enemy who found himself in this period and in this post could easily lead the country to disaster.
Attempts to explain Stalin's blindness with regard to the date of the Nazi attack by the intrigues of Beria are not confirmed by documents. Stalin believed in what he wanted to believe, and the then People's Commissar of State Security Vsevolod Merkulov and his deputy in charge of intelligence, Bogdan Kobulov, had to bring to him an objective picture.
If Stalin saw some kind of guilt behind Beria, then after the start of the war he would not again unite the NKVD and the NKGB under his leadership, and also entrust him with the evacuation of industrial enterprises to the east, the defense of the Caucasus, and so on.
The history of the "atomic project" removes from Beria the suspicion that he was an agent of the Americans or the British, since the receipt of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union was not part of the West's plans.
In general, the only "spy track" is Beria's service in counterintelligence of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1919 - a service that he never concealed, since he was introduced into the Musavat secret services by the Bolsheviks. The ADR surrendered in the spring of 1920 to the Red Army practically without resistance, which confirmed the effectiveness of the communist agents.
A victim of pre-vegetarian times
It is the precariousness of the espionage accusations that explains why the investigators were so enthusiastic about promoting the facts of "moral decay."
A picture is clearly imprinted in the popular mind: Beria's henchmen are driving around Moscow in a black car, grabbing the beauties they have liked and bringing them to his mansion, where they yield to his harassment in order to save loved ones from death.
Beria rapes the obstinate, sometimes having given him sleeping pills.
In fact, such a scenario was, to put it mildly, atypical, although Beria's bodyguards sometimes really acted as pimps (Sardion Nadaraya and Rafael Sarkisov).
Of course, Lavrenty Pavlovich did not disdain to use his official position in order to win the woman he liked. On the other hand, the favor of the People's Commissar brought concrete material benefits and facilitated the solution of many problems of everyday life. So it was not so difficult for him to achieve reciprocity.
About friends and comrades
In addition to Beria, as members of his "gang", prominent officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and State Security were sentenced to death: Vsevolod Merkulov, Sergo Goglidze, Pavel Meshik, Vladimir Dekanozov and Lev Vlodzimirsky.
In Georgia, the case of the Republican Minister of State Security Nikolai Rukhadze was promoted, with whom seven more people went to the scaffold. It is also worth highlighting the case of the head of Azerbaijan, Mir Jafar Bagirov. About a hundred generals and colonels of the state security and the Ministry of Internal Affairs were deprived of awards, expelled from service, and in many cases received prison sentences.
Most of the notorious "accomplices of Beria" were natives of the Caucasus and, to one degree or another, were indebted to the marshal for their careers. However, this audience was very motley, unfriendly and by no means always loyal to Lavrenty Pavlovich.
Considering the details of their criminal cases, one gets the impression that the victorious leaders of the party destroyed first of all those who knew too much about their own participation in the repression.
One way or another, the massacre of Beria and his "gang" drew a line under the era of tough internal party wars, when the losers were put up against the wall or, at least, were killed in the GULAG. It's just that the Kremlin has not yet mastered other ways to get rid of rivals in the summer of 1953.
Under Stalin, the fear that had eaten into the souls of Soviet officials pushed them under the banner of Khrushchev, who promised a calm and comfortable existence. Probably, Beria wanted to offer the same to the nomenclature, but did not have time. And in "natural selection" he lost to Nikita Sergeevich.
Other times were coming. As Anna Akhmatova said, "more vegetarian".
It's easy to forget
The fate of the last passion of Beria Valentina (Lyalya) Drozdova, with whom the intimate theme began to unfold, is indicative.
Immediately after the publication in Pravda of the message about the arrest of the marshal, she wrote a statement to the prosecutor's office that she had been raped and lived with him under the threat of physical harm. After Beria, Lyalya's lovers were the currency speculator Yan Rokotov (shot in 1961) and the shady knitwear worker Ilya Galperin (shot in 1967). This woman knew how to get settled in life, although, probably, she could complain that the Soviet power constantly broke her life. By the way, the daughter of Lavrenty Pavlovich and Lyalya married Alexander Grishin, the son of the first secretary of the Moscow city party committee.
Dmitry MITYURIN