Historical processes, as a rule, proceed in a measured and unhurried manner, often due to inertia accumulated over many years. But there are times when whole countries are at a crossroads, and the actions of a very few people determine where many millions will move next.
A PRECONDITIONER
It was the last days of February 1953. The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the leader and teacher Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was dying. He did not die immediately. The leader of the country would come to his senses, then again he fell into a heavy oblivion.
At some point, lower Soviet leaders gathered around him. As Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, the government curator of the MGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, recalled, while the leader of all times and peoples was in oblivion, he scolded him with his last words. But as soon as Stalin came to his senses for a moment, Lavro, with the readiness of a faithful dog, hypocritically rushed to him and began to kiss his hands.
And when Stalin died, Lavrenty Pavlovich for some time became de facto man No. 1 in the vast expanses of the USSR. This situation lasted for three "post-Stalin" months, but during this time Lavrenty Pavlovich managed to do so much paradoxical that in our times he is sometimes declared almost the first "petrel" of perestroika and market reforms. Already at the mourning rally on March 9, Beria broadcast from the rostrum of the Mausoleum: "He who is not blind sees that in these mournful days all the peoples of the Soviet Union in fraternal unity with the great Russian people have rallied even more closely around the Soviet government and the Central Committee of the party." Thus, for the first time in the history of the Bolshevik verbal balancing act, the "government" was placed before the "Central Committee of the Party."
Before Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, an old Baku comrade, Beria revealed himself almost completely. Mikoyan writes in his memoirs "Once I asked him:" Why do you need the Ministry of Internal Affairs? " And he answered: “We need to restore the rule of law, this situation in the country cannot be tolerated. We have a lot of people arrested. They must be freed, and people should not be sent to the camps in vain, the Ministry of Internal Affairs must be cut …”And, indeed, soon the purge and downsizing of the Ministry of Internal Affairs apparatus and, at the same time, the intelligence department began. “The connections with many valuable centers have been lost, the KGB apparatus in Germany has been drastically weakened, the residences of Soviet intelligence services in capitalist countries have been stripped,” complains the new Minister of Internal Affairs Krugloye at the July plenum of the Central Committee.
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DANGEROUS REFORMS
Beria's de-Stalinization was unprecedented. If in April and the first half of May Stalin's name was still mentioned in Pravda, the most important newspaper of the country of the Soviets, then in the period from the end of May and all of June the leader and teacher was mentioned in it only once. The publication of Stalin's works ceased. The last to come out of the printing house was the 13th volume of his complete collected works. The set of volumes 14 and 15 was scattered.
And on May 9, 1953, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU adopted a decree "On the design of columns of demonstrators and buildings on public holidays", which strictly prescribed to hold celebrations without portraits of party and government leaders. Not only the cult of Stalin was swept out of Soviet reality, but also the very idea of leaderism. On the initiative of Lavrenty Pavlovich, over a million prisoners left the torture chambers of the "Gulag Archipelago". However, along with the political ones, many criminals were released, which destabilized the situation in the country.
The self-proclaimed reformer also took up the solution of the national question. On June 12, a resolution was adopted on the allocation of local personnel in the national republics and the transition of office work to the national language. In addition, Beria proposed introducing his own orders for the union republics and, according to his son Sergo, seriously discussed with Marshal Zhukov the possibility of organizing national armies on the ground, albeit at first and operetta ones.
The last straw that overflowed the patience of his comrades-in-arms was that Lavrenty Pavlovich started talking about the fact that there was nothing to do with the construction of socialism in Germany, that it was enough for West and East Germany to unite as a peace-loving bourgeois state. Under his pressure, the so-called "Berlin Document" was adopted, which instructed the leadership of the SED "to adhere to the course of creating a united democratic and independent Germany."
SIMPLE PLACES
The generator of the idea of neutralizing the all-powerful Lavro was Comrade Khrushchev, at that time one of the secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee and the first secretary of the Moscow Regional Party Committee. He talked rather carefully with other responsible comrades. Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, reinstated in his previous post, readily agreed with Nikita Sergeevich: "I fully support that he should be removed, expelled from the Politburo." Khrushchev was also supported in his endeavor by Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Malenkov and, probably, most importantly, by a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, former Defense Minister Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bulganin. He just as carefully spoke with a number of marshals and generals, however, knowing well in advance that Beria and his subordinates have long been with the military, as they say, in their livers.
Lavrenty Pavlovich at the same time developed a vigorous activity, preparing to strike a blow at the party organizations. He fabricated some kind of document on the state of affairs in the leadership of Ukraine, preparing to strike the first blow against the Ukrainian party organization. The chief of the MGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Molotov and Malenkov did not see serious rivals, and Khrushchev did not take into account at all - he was too peasant for him and not educated. But the party, in alliance with the army, struck first. The star of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria set on June 26, 1953, on the day when an extraordinary meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee was convened. There are still many ambiguities in the details of Beria's arrest, as if the Smoker from the TV series about agents Mulder and Scul-Pee had shrouded everything in a veil of several levels of lies. However, to "launch into circulation" several versions of the arrest,and later, the rustic and baggy Nikita Sergeevich guessed the execution of the once all-powerful Lavro.
It can be reliably said that at the meeting, colleagues subjected Lavrenty Pavlovich to sharp criticism. Then Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov entered the hall, accompanied by several generals. The generals pointed their pistols at Beria, and Marshal Zhukov approached him from behind and ordered: “Get up! You're under arrest! At the same time, the legendary commander slightly wrung his hands and, raising them, shook them. Then Lavrenty Pavlovich turned very pale and temporarily lost the power of speech. '
FROM ARREST TO VERDICTION
From the Kremlin, surrounded by a tight guard of the MGB-MVD, Beria was either taken out in a representative ZIS, wrapped in a carpet so that the guards would not suspect anything, or they brought cadets of the CEC school into the territory of the Kremlin and took him out under an escort of 30 communist officers as part of a whole column of five ZIS-110. At the same time, the regiment of Beria troops stationed in the Lefortovo barracks was blocked by army units. Lavrenty Pavlovich was taken first to the garrison guardhouse, and then to the headquarters of the Moscow Military District, where he was assigned a separate room with an area of 12 square meters.
In early July, a special Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee "On the criminal anti-party and anti-state actions of Beria" was convened. Khrushchev was entrusted with leading the meeting, and the main speaker was Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. During the plenum, party comrades found out that Lavrenty Pavlovich was not any comrade, but was "the most vile traitor and traitor to the interests of the party", "scum", "scoundrel" and "scoundrel." During the debate Malenkov said: "He considered us simpletons." Khrushchev supported him: "But we were not such simpletons as he thought."
Beria, I must say, felt rather well in captivity. He regularly made scandals: he demanded "decent food", then a woman, then he was indignant at the fact that he was arrested by "random people." The investigation lasted several months. The trial was held behind closed doors on the first floor of the same building of the Moscow Military District from 18 to 23 December 1953, under the chairmanship of another outstanding Soviet commander, Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev. The public prosecutor was the USSR Prosecutor General Roman Andreevich Rudenko, known for being the Chief Prosecutor from the Soviet Union at the Nuremberg trials in the case of Nazi criminals. In accordance with the verdict of the court, Beria and six of his closest henchmen were shot on New Year's Eve.