East German Riots in 1953 Cost Beria His Life and Blocked German Reunification until 1989, Khavkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 5 – Between the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the rising in East Berlin three months later, Lavrenty Beria and most of the Soviet leadership will willing to sacrifice socialism in what became the GDR, promote the unification and neutralization of Germany, and reduce international tensions, Boris Khavkin says.

            But the professor at the Historical Archive Institute of the Russian State Humanities University says that the risings in East Berlin and across the Soviet zone led Beria and other Soviet leaders to change course and to place all the responsibility for what happened on the secret police chief (nvo.ng.ru/history/2020-08-07/1_1103_germany.html).

            As a result, Khavkin says “the chances for reforming socialism after Stalin” not only in East Germany but across the entire Soviet bloc “were missed” and would not return until 35 years later at the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika.  In a detailed, archivally based article, the Moscow historian traces the history of this failure.

            In the spring of 1953, the historian continues, “the German problem” was intertwined with the issue of the Soviet succession, but Beria had taken a clear position a year earlier when in March 1952 after speaking with Stalin, he began working toward setting the foundations for the establishment of “a single, democratic, and neutral Germany.”

            At the end of April 1953, Beria told colleagues that such a Germany was in Moscow’s interest and would strengthen the international position of the USSR. On May 18, he offered a draft resolution for consideration by the Presidium of the Council of Ministers. There was some back and forth on this, but his draft in essentials was adopted on May 28.

            The GDR leaders were called to Moscow and immediately responded that such an arrangement was totally unacceptable. The Soviet leaders weren’t used to such insubordination and directed Soviet commanders to “immediately arrest” the East Germans.  But because of the rising that broke out in East Berlin, that never happened.

            Judging by their slogans, the East Germans were at least at first more outraged by their own communist leaders than they were by the Soviet occupation. Soviet commanders initially behaved in a restrained fashion, so restrained that Beria demanded that they start shooting people and introduce martial law.

            Nine days later, however, the rest of the Soviet leadership who also were in shock by the events in the Soviet zone of Germany turned on Beria, had him arrested, blamed for the events that had occurred in Germany and subsequently had him executed for that and charges that he had been a British agent already in the 1920s.

            According to Khavkin, “the crisis in the GDR and ‘the Beria case’ put an end to vacillations in the Soviet leadership,” something that allowed Ulbricht and the hardliners to retain power in East Berlin and made “impossible the realization of the plan of the peaceful unification of Germany.”

            “Only the peaceful revolution of the fall of 1989 in the GDR, which Gorbachev’s perestroika in the USSR opened the way to and the non-interference of Soviet forces in domestic German affairs made possible free elections in the east of Germany and the unification of the country,” something that brought to an end the Cold War.