The marshal who personally arrested Beria and berated his own men as 'enemies of the people'
26 June 1953, the Kremlin. Moskalenko walked into the Presidium with a pistol under his coat, Georgy Zhukov at his side. At Nikita Khrushchev's signal he approached Lavrentiy Beria: "You are under arrest." A single sentence brought down the most feared man in the Soviet Union.
A Ukrainian peasant who rose through the artillery, he commanded the 1st Tank Army at Stalingrad and the 40th Army at Kursk, winning his first Hero of the Soviet Union star at the Dnieper. In June 1953, acting on Khrushchev's orders, he smuggled a pistol into the Kremlin and personally arrested Lavrentiy Beria, the defining stroke of the post-Stalin succession. He later shaped the Soviet nuclear deterrent as the first Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces, though his explosive temper and habit of branding subordinates 'traitors' and 'enemies of the people' made him feared by his own men.
Career Timeline
- 1920–22Red Army, First Cavalry Army in the Civil War
- 1939–41Winter War, then 1st Anti-Tank Brigade commander
- 1942–431st Tank, 1st Guards, 40th Armies: Stalingrad to Kursk
- 1943Hero of the Soviet Union for the Dnieper crossing
- 1943–4538th Army: liberates Kiev, Poland, Czechoslovakia
- 1953Leads Beria's arrest; Moscow Military District commander
- 1955/1960–62Marshal of the USSR; C-in-C Strategic Rocket Forces
- 1978Second Hero of the Soviet Union
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionCivil War veteran
- 1939.11–1940.03The Winter Warserved
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic Warcommander of the 1st Tank Army
- 1953The Fall of BeriaLed the arrest squad and held Beria in custodyOn Khrushchev's orders, he smuggled a pistol into the Kremlin and personally arrested Beria; he then held Beria in the bunker of his Moscow Air Defence headquarters and sat on the Special Judicial Presence that sentenced him to death in December.
- 1957The Anti-Party GroupCentral Committee member
The 1957 Denunciation of Zhukov
In June 1957, Georgy Zhukov played a decisive role in crushing the Molotov-Malenkov-Kaganovich 'Anti-Party Group' on Khrushchev's behalf, and was rewarded with full membership in the CPSU Presidium. Yet barely four months later, in October 1957, Khrushchev resolved to remove him, judging that Zhukov had been weakening the party's political organs within the military and harbored 'Bonapartist' ambitions.
At the October plenum, Moskalenko was one of the most aggressive accusers. He attacked Zhukov with passion, charging him with attempting to seize power through the army. Zhukov shot back from the floor: 'What are you accusing me of? You yourself told me many times: "What are you looking at? Take power into your own hands!"' Moskalenko fell silent. Khrushchev later wrote in his memoirs that he was shocked by the virulence of Moskalenko's denunciation.
The episode crystallized Moskalenko's character. In 1953 he had stood beside Zhukov to arrest Beria; four years later he led the charge to destroy Zhukov; and a few years after that, in 1962, he himself was dismissed as Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces. Khrushchev called him 'a third Moskalenko, an opportunist, an unprincipled and illogical man.' In 1999, a commission under the President of the Russian Federation formally cleared Zhukov of all charges.