Given a short time with a psycho-politician you can alter forever the loyalty of a soldier in our hands or a statesman or a leader in his own country, or you can destroy his mind.
He who is not blind sees that our party, during its difficult days, is closing its ranks still more closely, that it is united and unshakable.
“Let us once and for all root out the seeds of individual ambition. Let us smash any manifestation of anti-party groupism, put an end to efforts to destroy party discipline, in whatever form these efforts manifest themselves”
“Let our enemies know that anyone who attempts to raise a hand against the will of our people, against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed”
That’s it for Beria quotations. From History Today these excerpts show some of the efforts of Nikita Kruschev to improve liberty in the Soviet Union following the death of Stalin:
“Accounts of what happened vary considerably, but it seems that Beria’s downfall was engineered by Nikita Khrushchev, secretary to the Party Central Committee, who quietly secured the support of other powerful figures, including Malenkov and a number of generals. On June 26th, apparently, at a hastily convened meeting of the Presidium, Khrushchev launched a blistering attack on Beria, accusing him of being a cynical careerist, long in the pay of British intelligence, and no true Communist believer. Beria was taken aback and said, ‘What’s going on, Nikita?’, and Khrushchev told him he would soon find out. The veteran Molotov and others chimed in against Beria and Khrushchev put a motion for his instant dismissal. Before a vote could be taken, the panicky Malenkov pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They immediately burst in, seized Beria and manhandled him away.
Beria’s men were guarding the Kremlin, so the officers had to wait until nightfall before smuggling him out in the back of a car. He was taken first to the Lefortovo Prison and subsequently to the headquarters of General Moskalenko, commander of Moscow District Air Defence, where he was imprisoned in an underground bunker. His arrest was kept as quiet as possible while his principal lieutenants were rounded up – some were rumoured to have been shot out of hand – and regular troops were moved into Moscow.”
This is the official story – there’s a legend that Nikita, in the aftermath of Stalin’s death, personally put a bullet into Beria, and that the arrest and subsequent trial made use of a stand-in. Still, while Stalin referred to Beria as “my Himmler”, obviously there was a problem with Beria’s style of management. “Show me the man and I’ll find the crime isn’t always a winning philosophy.”
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