The Fall of Beria

The Dictator's Last Winter: the Kremlin in March 1953

When Joseph Stalin collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage on the night of 1 March 1953, the Soviet Union was run by barely ten people. For eight years they had lived inside a system of terror that Stalin had personally designed.

After the war, Stalin virtually abolished formal Politburo meetings. Between September 1946 and his death, the full Politburo convened only twice. Instead, Stalin summoned five to seven men, Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, Bulganin and a few others, to his Kuntsevo dacha for marathon dinners that ran past four in the morning. At those dinners the state's most important decisions were made; absent Politburo members were notified afterward and asked to approve "by correspondence." At the same time, Stalin built a parallel structure of regularized expert committees under the Council of Ministers to handle economic and administrative routine. Malenkov was the man who ran those committees, and there, in the need to prepare agendas, hold votes, and reach collective decisions, the habit of collective governance began to form.

But at every crucial turn, Stalin reminded his inner circle who was master, and he did it the old way. In the 1949–50 "Leningrad Affair," the chairman of the State Planning Committee, Nikolai Voznesensky, and Central Committee secretary Alexei Kuznetsov were arrested and shot, along with dozens of Zhdanov's former associates. In November 1951, Stalin launched the "Mingrelian Affair": a purge of Georgian party officials from the Mingrelian ethnic subgroup, which was Beria's own power base. The message was unmistakable: even Beria's network could be destroyed, and Beria himself was being tested. In 1949, Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, was arrested because she was Jewish and sent to a labour camp. At the Central Committee plenum following the 19th Party Congress in October 1952, Stalin publicly attacked both Molotov and Mikoyan, and Khrushchev later wrote that "had Stalin remained at the helm for another several months, Comrades Molotov and Mikoyan probably would not have delivered any speeches at this Congress."

At that Congress, the Politburo was formally replaced by an enlarged "Presidium" of 25 members. But Stalin immediately created an unofficial "Bureau of the Presidium" of only nine. Molotov and Mikoyan were excluded from even that body. Stalin kept his succession plan to himself, and everyone understood that plan might involve their destruction.

As 1953 began, the terror had not let up. The so-called "Doctors' Plot" was underway. On 13 January 1953, Pravda's front page announced that a group of Kremlin physicians, most of them Jewish, had conspired with Western intelligence to poison the Soviet leadership. The case was driven by MGB (Ministry of State Security) chief Semyon Ignatiev, and arrests and torture were expanding. Multiple sources indicate Stalin intended to use the case as the fuse for a new mass purge.

The security apparatus itself was divided. Beria had been removed as head of the NKVD in 1945 and held only the vague title of "curator of the security organs." The MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) was run by Sergey Kruglov, and the MGB, after Viktor Abakumov's arrest in 1951, by Ignatiev. Neither was Beria's man. What Beria still controlled directly was the atomic bomb project and foreign intelligence.

Stalin was 74. He had suffered a myocardial infarction in October 1945 and lived with severe hypertension and atherosclerosis. In his final years, he kept a rhythm of all-night drinking sessions followed by sleep until noon and state business only in the afternoon. During the daylight hours when he slept, the Council of Ministers Bureau began to function almost as a collective leadership. But the moment Stalin awoke, any decision could be reversed.

When Stalin's death was certain, Beria's wife Nina reportedly told her husband: "Your position now is even more precarious than when Stalin was alive."

From the deathbed to the first cabinet: 1–6 March 1953

On the night of 28 February, Stalin watched a film at the Kremlin with Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev and Bulganin, then took them to the Kuntsevo dacha to keep drinking; the inner circle broke up only at 5 a.m. on 1 March. According to Khrushchev's memoirs, Stalin had drunk heavily and was in good spirits. All through that Sunday, no sound came from Stalin's room. The guards dared not enter: the room had motion sensors, and in the climate of the Doctors' Plot, even Stalin's own physician was being tortured in the Lubyanka basement. Not until 11 p.m. did the housekeeper cautiously open the door. Stalin lay on the floor in his pyjamas, unconscious, breathing heavily, incontinent.

Khrushchev and Bulganin were the first to be called, but terrified of Stalin's wrath, they would not enter the room. They summoned Beria and Malenkov instead. Beria arrived at 3 a.m. on 2 March. When the guard chief Lozgachev reported that Stalin was 'sick and needed medical attention,' Beria shouted, 'Don't bother us, don't cause a panic, and don't disturb Comrade Stalin!' and left. The summoning of a doctor was deferred for a full twelve hours.

Khrushchev later recounted a macabre scene. Beria, standing over the paralysed Stalin, was 'spewing hatred against him and mocking him.' Whenever Stalin showed a flicker of consciousness, Beria dropped to his knees and kissed his hand; the moment Stalin slipped back into unconsciousness, Beria stood up and spat. Montefiore likened it to 'wrenching a dead king's ring off his finger.'

At 9:50 p.m. on 5 March, Stalin died. Beria was the first to kiss the lifeless body, then strode from the room shouting for his driver. His voice rang, Stalin's daughter Svetlana recalled, with 'the ring of triumph unconcealed.' Mikoyan muttered to Khrushchev, 'He's off to take power,' and they dashed frantically to their limousines to intercept him at the Kremlin.

The very next day, 6 March, the new government was announced. Malenkov became Chairman of the Council of Ministers; Beria was named First Deputy Chairman and head of a newly merged Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The merger was decisive: the MGB (State Security) was folded into the MVD, placing the secret police, the regular police, and the entire Gulag system under one man's control. Beria had not directly commanded the security organs since 1945. Now he held more power than he had wielded even as NKVD chief fifteen years earlier. Kruglov was made his First Deputy; Merkulov became Minister of State Control.

Beria moved at once to dismantle the purges Stalin had been preparing at the end of his life: the Doctors' Plot and the Mingrelian affair. On 3 April, the MVD issued a formal statement declaring the Doctors' Plot a fabrication. The imprisoned physicians were freed and exonerated; the MGB investigator Ryumin, who had manufactured the case, was arrested. Ignatiev was dismissed from his post as CC secretary. Beria drafted an amnesty decree on 26 March; published under the Presidium's name the next day, it began the release of over 1.2 million prisoners. The Gulag's mammoth construction projects, such as the Salekhard-Igarka railway, were halted, and preparations began to transfer the camp system to the Ministry of Justice.

At Stalin's funeral on 9 March, Beria delivered one of the eulogies, standing beside Malenkov and Molotov, right next to Stalin's coffin. No one yet knew that in barely a hundred days, those same men would have him shot.

June 26, 1953: From the Presidium Chamber to the Underground Bunker

Beria entered the Kremlin on June 26 without a trace of suspicion. The agenda was the case of Semyon Ignatiev, the former State Security minister Beria had ordered arrested. In reality, it was an ambush Khrushchev had been laying since mid-June.

Khrushchev first broached the plan to Malenkov. "While he holds the security organs in his hands, our hands are completely tied," he argued. Malenkov, though a longtime Beria ally, agreed. Khrushchev then recruited Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Bulganin one by one, all outdoors to avoid eavesdropping. Only Mikoyan argued that demoting Beria to a provincial party post would suffice; he was overruled. The decisive moment came on June 21: Timofei Strokach, an MVD official in Ukraine whom Beria had dismissed and threatened, came to Khrushchev with a warning. Beria was moving special MVD divisions toward Moscow to prepare a coup, and soon "a regional MVD chief would no longer answer to the Party secretary."

Through Bulganin, Khrushchev enlisted Marshal Zhukov and put Kirill Moskalenko, commander of Moscow's air defense forces, in charge of the arrest squad. Bulganin's role was to get the armed generals into the Kremlin. At the time, anyone entering the Kremlin had to surrender weapons at the commandant's office.

When the meeting opened, Malenkov set aside the agenda and proposed discussing Beria's errors, particularly his personnel policy in the Baltic states and Ukraine. Khrushchev immediately opened fire, calling Beria an "imperialist agent engaged in anti-Party factional activity." Molotov and others piled on. A stunned Beria asked, "What's going on, Nikita?" Malenkov pressed a button under his desk, and Zhukov, Moskalenko, and their officers burst in with drawn pistols. Zhukov shouted, "Hands up! Stand! You are under arrest!" Beria reflexively reached for his briefcase on the windowsill behind him, but Khrushchev grabbed his hand. The briefcase contained no weapon.

Since Beria's men were guarding the Kremlin, the arrested man was held in a special room there until nightfall, then smuggled out in the trunk of a car. On Defense Minister Bulganin's order, the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division and Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division moved into Moscow to block any rescue attempt by Beria's loyalists. Beria was taken first to Lefortovo Prison, then to Moskalenko's bunker at Moscow Air Defense headquarters, where he would spend the next six months until his execution that December.

A Closed Court in December: The Trial That Wasn't One

On December 10, 1953, the Presidium settled the format of Beria's trial by special resolution. The Law of 1 December 1934, the accelerated procedure introduced after Kirov's assassination that stripped every defendant of the right to defense counsel, appeal, and clemency petitions and mandated immediate execution upon sentencing, would govern the proceedings. The instruction to try the case "in closed session, without the participation of the parties" meant Beria now stood inside the very legal framework he had applied to tens of thousands.

The Special Judicial Presence, convened from December 18 to 23, was chaired by Marshal Ivan Konev and composed of eight members: former head of state Nikolai Shvernik, General Kirill Moskalenko (who had commanded the arrest squad), Moscow party boss Nikolai Mikhailov, MVD First Deputy Konstantin Lunev, and others. Lunev's presence was especially pointed: Beria's own former agency now sat in judgment of its chief. The composition was a political tableau, with army, party, trade unions, and judiciary converging to pass sentence on the secret police. Isaac Deutscher called it "a duel between army and political police."

The indictment rested on RSFSR Criminal Code Article 58-1b (treason against the Motherland), Article 58-8 (terrorism), Article 58-11 (anti-Soviet conspiracy), and, for Beria alone, Article 58-13 (counter-revolutionary activity dating to his service in the Musavat regime's counterintelligence in 1919). The charges alleged that Beria had organized a conspiratorial group aiming to "restore capitalism and the rule of the bourgeoisie," that his treason began in Baku in 1919 when he served as a secret agent in Musavatist counterintelligence operating under British intelligence control, that he had attempted to let the Germans occupy the Caucasus, committed "terrorist acts against honest party workers" during the Great Purge, sabotaged the collective farm system, and sought to revive "bourgeois nationalism" in the non-Russian republics.

What the indictment did not charge was just as significant. Beria had been a central architect of mass repression in the 1930s and 1940s, but the prosecution did not pursue this in earnest. The reason sat outside the dock: every member of the Presidium, from Khrushchev and Malenkov to Molotov and Kaganovich, had been co-responsible for those same policies. As the historian Nikita Petrov notes, whenever Beria shot back under interrogation that "this was done on Stalin's orders," his answer was aimed not just at the courtroom but at the entire Kremlin. The defendants took the only line of defense available to them: admitting the crimes of the purge years while denying political conspiracy. In his final statement, Beria said: "While acknowledging that I am responsible for the excesses and distortions of socialist legality in 1937-38, I ask the court to consider that I had no selfish or hostile purposes in this. The cause of my crimes was the circumstances of that time."

On December 23, the Special Judicial Presence sentenced all seven defendants to death. Merkulov, Dekanozov, Kobulov, Goglidze, Meshik, and Vlodzimirsky were shot immediately after the verdict. Beria was executed separately. The execution act signed by General Pavel Batitsky records that at 19:50, in the presence of Prosecutor General Roman Rudenko and General Moskalenko, the sentence was carried out by gunshot. Beria allegedly fell to his knees and wailed, a final scene resembling that of Nikolai Yezhov, whom Beria himself had sent before a firing squad in 1940. His body was cremated at the Donskoy Crematorium. Beria's personal archive, said to contain compromising material on his former colleagues, was destroyed on Khrushchev's orders. Khrushchev's faction had no interest in letting Beria's kompromat outlive him. In January 1954, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia received instructions to "cut out with a razor blade" the entry for Beria and paste in an expanded article on the Bering Strait.

What Changed and What Did Not

Beria's execution meant the security apparatus would never again stand above the Party. In March 1954 the state-security functions were separated from the MVD to form the Committee for State Security (KGB). The KGB was placed under the Council of Ministers, supervised by the Central Committee, and its regional chiefs had to report to the local party first secretary. Its first chairman, Ivan Serov, was a security officer close to Khrushchev. When Abakumov was tried and shot that December for fabricating the Leningrad Affair, it showed that the Party could punish the crimes of the security organs after the fact.

A precedent was also set that losers in a power struggle would not be killed. When Khrushchev defeated the "Anti-Party Group" of Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich in 1957, they lost a Central Committee vote and were demoted, not shot. Molotov became ambassador to Mongolia; Malenkov was sent to run a power station in Ust-Kamenogorsk. Zhukov was dismissed as defence minister the same year but kept his life, and Serov's removal from the KGB in 1958 brought no bloodletting. Khrushchev himself, ousted by a plenum in 1964, lived out his days on a pension. Under Stalin, defeat had meant death.

Much, however, stayed the same. Party control rested on the political oversight of party officials, not on law, and the KGB remained an enormous apparatus watching the whole of Soviet society. Collective leadership did not last either: in 1958 Khrushchev combined the posts of First Secretary and premier, concentrating power in one man again. What the Beria affair ended was the era in which the security apparatus was one man's private instrument, not one-man rule itself. In 1982 the former KGB chairman Yuri Andropov became General Secretary, the first security chief since Beria to reach supreme power.

In 2002 the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court ruled Beria an organizer of political repression and refused his rehabilitation. He has never been officially rehabilitated in Russia or in Georgia.

What Historians Are Still Arguing About

First: was Beria actually planning a coup? Khrushchev's memoirs make Strokach's warning the decisive trigger, and contemporary Western analyses noted reports of MVD divisions moving toward Moscow, but there is no conclusive evidence. Most historians think that Beria was not so much preparing a coup as that the information and leverage he had amassed through the security organs were reason enough for his colleagues to strike first.

Second: when did Beria die? The official record says Batitsky shot him immediately after the verdict on 23 December 1953, and the execution reports and memoirs of Rudenko, Batitsky and Moskalenko support it. But his son Sergo maintained all his life that his father was killed on the day of his arrest, 26 June; on that view the December trial was a posthumous legalization. The trial was closed, and not one photograph or film of Beria survives from the six months between arrest and execution. Amy Knight judged the claim unlikely and most scholars accept the December execution, but with Beria's personal archive destroyed, the question has never fully closed.

Third: were Beria's reforms genuine? In the three months after Stalin's death he pushed through an amnesty of about 1.2 million prisoners, the reversal of the Doctors' Plot, preparations to transfer the Gulag to the Ministry of Justice, and the promotion of local cadres in the non-Russian republics; he called East Germany "a fake state kept alive only by Soviet troops" and floated a united, neutral Germany. In Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (1993), Amy Knight argued that this was too specific and coherent a programme to be mere manoeuvre, and Robert Service wrote that "no Soviet leader before Gorbachev had so broad a reform programme." Critics reply that the amnesty excluded political prisoners, that the new republican interior ministers he installed were all his own men, and that decentralizing nationalities policy strengthened the MVD's nationwide network. The paradox is that the men who removed him went on to carry out much of that programme, more slowly and more safely, in their own names.

Fourth: how far did the affair break with Stalinism? Writing in February 1954, Isaac Deutscher saw change in what Beria's trial lacked compared with the show trials of the 1930s: no public confessions, no chain of denunciations pointing to the next victims, no mass frenzy. Yet the charges still followed the old template of "foreign spy" and "conspiracy to restore capitalism." Beria was gone, but the way he was removed still followed the grammar of Stalinist politics.