The first post-war thaw in the USSR is inherently associated with Nikita Khrushchev and his famous lecture. In fact, the clumsy Khrushchev was just aping the ideas of one of his former party colleagues. De-Stalinization, breaking with the cult of personality and breaking the purges - all these changes were invented and started to be implemented by ... Lavrenty Beria. A ruthless Stalinist criminal, jointly responsible, among others, for the Katyn massacre and deportation of several hundred thousand Poles.
Immediately after the death of Stalin (who died on March 5, 1953), it was Lavrentiy Beria - the head of the NKVD during the war - who was the most serious candidate for his successor. In the new, collegial leadership of the USSR, he quickly gained the strongest position and began vigorous reforms.
Many historians who were not entirely aware of the subject had dark visions of what would happen if Beria were to permanently sit on the throne of the "red tsar". Meanwhile, dear state, world and citizens of the USSR could only benefit from it. Beria immediately began to ... dismantle Stalinism.
Contrary to popular belief, it was not Nikita Khrushchev who was the father of de-Stalinization.
Almost all political processes have been disrupted started during the lifetime of Stalin's paranoia. Beria took on former employees in his interior ministry, arrested in the 1940s and 1950s and now released from prisons .
He also led to a serious limitation of the cult of personality - for example, on his initiative, portraits of Soviet leaders were no longer displayed during various ceremonies.
Later, colleagues from the party leadership accused him of trying to condemn Comrade Stalin's name to oblivion . Moreover, it shook the structure of the USSR, restoring importance to the national elite from individual republics.
Stalin tried to suppress all deviations from Russianness. Meanwhile, Beria wanted to go back to the Leninist model in which the individual nationalities had something to say.
Beria also tried to separate the party leadership from the state leadership, and reportedly (as his political competitor Georgy Malenkov accused him) considered giving up East Germany and allowing their real democratization.
Although Beria (second from the right) was an obedient executor of the "red tsar" orders and has the blood of thousands of people on his hands, after Stalin's death he decided to introduce radical reforms.
According to the Russian historian Rudolf G. Pichoji - the author of the book "The History of Power in the Soviet Union 1945-1991" - he also wanted to dismantle the Gulag (which he had led himself before!), lead a calmer and more amicable international policy, stave off the conflict with Yugoslavia and end the rule of terror and curb the exploitation of peasants.
A criminal or a reformer?
How does all this relate to the figure of Lavrenty Beria, known from Polish history textbooks? Why did the ruthless executioner suddenly decide to liberalize the country and abandon terror?
Rudolf G. Pichoja offers two convincing answers. First, Beria was by no means the only criminal in the ranks of the Soviet leadership. He became the most famous for various reasons, but his associates, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, were equally responsible for Katyn and other crimes.
For example, on orders for executions, also of Polish officers, Molotov, not Beria, signed the most. In turn, the famous "great terror" was the work of not so much Beria, but his predecessors:Yagoda and Yezhov. Stalin was behind everything, without whose consent none of the great crimes of the 1930s and 1940s would have happened.
Beria's morality, according to Pichoji, was in no way different from the ethical level of his party comrades. His intellectual level differed:he was much more cunning and calculating than the rest of the Soviet tops.
As the Russian historian Rudolf Pichoja emphasizes, Beria was not at all worse than other Soviet leaders. Contrary to popular opinion, it was not him who was mainly responsible for the great terror, which was the work of his predecessors:Jagoda and Jeżów (first from the right in the photo). Acting, of course, on the orders of Stalin.
He sought to de-Stalinization not out of the goodness of his heart, but as a result of cold calculation. He knew that a reign of terror and paranoia would completely destroy the country in the long run. Seeing an opportunity to consolidate his power, he preferred to rule a real power, rather than a crumbling empire with a broken-neck economy.
This, of course, was not to the liking of the other Stalin's aides. On June 26, 1953, Beria was arrested and killed shortly thereafter. Malenkov and Khrushchev accused him, among other things, of departing from Stalin's teachings. Soon after, Khrushchev also got rid of Malenkov, took over Beria's postulates and took a stand against Stalinism.
Source:
Trivia is the essence of our website. Short materials devoted to interesting anecdotes, surprising details from the past, strange news from the old press. Reading that will take you no more than 3 minutes, based on single sources. This particular material is based on:
- Rudolf G. Pichoja, The history of power in the Soviet Union. 1945-1991 , Polish Scientific Publishers PWN.