Second person in the country
Lavrentiy Beria entered the big political league in 1938, heading the NKVD. In this post, he replaced Nikolai Yezhov, one of the authors of the Great Terror, with whose departure the wave of repression subsided. But Beria was not a great humanist either, and under his leadership the NKVD planned to shoot thousands of Polish officers captured in Katyn and extinguish oppressed peoples (Chechens and other inhabitants of the North Caucasus, Turks, Kurds and others). Among his positive achievements as security chief, the creation of a successful worldwide intelligence network is often cited, which provided great assistance to the USSR during World War II.
After its completion, Beria left the NKVD, leaving former deputy Sergei Kruglov on the farm, and devoted his time entirely to creating the atomic bomb.
In 1949, the project was successful, and Beria actually became the second person in the country. Therefore, when Stalin died in March 1953, the former security chief became his unofficial successor (although officially he only returned to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs).
There is a view that Beria had a hand in Stalin’s death by preventing doctors from helping the leader, who was paralyzed by a stroke.
Berievskaya thaw
Beria’s reign was short-lived, as he was arrested by a group led by Nikita Khrushchev in June of that year. It is interesting that the former head of the NKVD managed to initiate a “thaw” even before Khrushchev: he stopped the banned “Doctors’ Conspiracy”, which many considered the new Great Terror, which saved more than a million people from the Gulag. Detainees were tortured by the MGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Most passport restrictions have been lifted.
This incident showed that Stalin was personally responsible for the policy of repression and that his closest ally abolished this practice in the first month of his coming to power.
But it is even more surprising that a security official with many years of experience and curator of the Soviet nuclear project plans to carry out much more radical reforms than stopping the punitive machine.
First, Beria aimed to reverse the fusion of party bodies with state bodies. For example, few people can accurately name Stalin’s official positions in the 1930s-1950s, but everyone in the world understood that he was the leader of the party and, therefore, the de facto leader of the country. Beria intended to transfer public administration into the hands of the Council of Ministers, and the Central Committee of the CPSU was supposed to deal with personnel issues and the promotion of communist ideas in society. Under Beria, portraits of Soviet leaders were also prohibited from being carried in the May 1 demonstration.
Secondly, the new head of state abandoned Stalinist economics, which focused on confronting the whole world at all costs and concentrating all resources in the hands of the leader. For example, a large number of construction and industrial departments were removed from the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs: Dalspetsstroy in Kolyma, the Hydroproekt Institute (specializing in the construction of hydroelectric power plants), numerous oil, transport and water management enterprises. In addition, a number of “major construction projects of communism” were stopped: an irrigation canal from the Amu Darya River to Turkmenistan, a tunnel to Sakhalin, a transpolar highway from Murmansk to Chukotka and many other projects.
National communism without collective farms
Beria’s ideas on national and foreign policy were much more unexpected. Apparently, the former head of the NKVD adhered to national communist views: each nation must build communism independently, and the power of one people over another is unacceptable. The most striking embodiment of these ideas were the decrees on the “indigenization” of the Soviet republics.
For example, according to his plan, only people of the same nationality were to serve in the power structures of the republic: in the RSFSR – Russians, in the GSSR – Georgians, in the Karelo-Finnish ASSR – Karelians and Finns, etc. Open.
In May 1953, Beria managed to issue an order to change the leadership of the local Ministries of Internal Affairs in Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine according to this principle. Exactly the same policy was applied in every sphere of life and government.
On the one hand, this caused approval from national elites, and on the other hand, it provoked angry protests from people of unofficial nationalities who were proposed to be discriminated against. In addition, these reforms seemed frankly eccentric and ill-conceived: some nominal peoples were not in the majority in their respective republics, and some peoples did not have their own territorial existence. Therefore, Khrushchev cited these ideas as one of the main reasons for dismissing Stalin’s successor.
Finally, Beria planned radical steps towards reconciliation with Western countries. There is no reliable information about most of them, but it is known that he proposed a number of steps to improve the economic situation in GDR (East Germany).
“a) abandoning the current path of building socialism in East Germany and establishing collective farms in the countryside;
b) Review the measures recently taken by the East German government for the liquidation and restriction of capitalist elements in industry, commerce and agriculture, with a view to fundamentally canceling these measures;
c) Revising the overly intensive economic development plans outlined in the five-year plan to reduce them…” – Wrote President of the USSR.
It is characteristic that Beria in private conversations criticized the protection of collective farms in the USSR.
In general, according to the story of Lavrenty’s son, Sergo Beria, his father planned to end the Cold War and leave the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. (Sergo wrote a big book about this: “My Father – Lavrentiy Beria”) . If these ideas are implemented, it is highly likely that East Germany will fully unify with West Germany.
For the sake of compromise, Beria was ready to give Königsberg to Germany, the Southern Kuril Islands to Japan, and the part of Karelia conquered in 1939-1940 to Finland. At the same time, as Father Sergo conveys his thoughts, rejection of the Sovietization of Eastern Europe will force Western countries to stop seeing the USSR as a threat, which will lead to the establishment of good neighborly relations and a break between Europe and the USA. States. Presumably, Beria truly believed in communism and believed that a socialist country did not need to have a repressive apparatus and a closed system of power.
It is not known what these ideas will become in practice, because on June 26, 1953, on the initiative of Khrushchev, Beria was arrested. Six months later, he was found guilty of conspiracy to seize power and treason.
On December 23, Beria was shot.