Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 26 – One of the more
unusual and simultaneously amusing and disturbing developments in recent Russia
history has been the revisionist treatment of Stalin’s notorious secret police
chief Lavrenty Beria, with some Russians presenting him as the best and certainly
most underrated of Stalin’s comrades in arms at the end of his life.
Now, the Russian7 portal which regularly
runs stories about various personalities and events in Russian and Soviet
history has weighed in with a lengthy article suggesting that the Soviet Union
and indeed the world would have been far better off if Beria rather than
Khrushchev had succeeded Stalin (russian7.ru/post/chto-by-bylo-esli-by-beriya-prishel-k-vlas/).
The portal’s Taras Repin argues that
on Stalin’s death, there were only four real pretenders for his position:
Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin. But Beria because of his control over
the force structures was “the real head of the country” in the first weeks
after Stalin’s passing.
Using his position, Beria replaced the
interior ministers and the heads of interior ministry offices “in all union
republics and in a majority of the regions of the RSFSR,” and they in turn
installed people loyal to Beria and his position in subordinate posts, Repin
continues. Beria also organized an
amnesty for most prisoners and ended several cases against political prisoners.,
Even more radically, he took steps
intended to “liquidate the collective farm system and broaden the rights of all
the republics within the USSR” and supported “a rapprochement between the USSR and
the West.” Had he used his police powers
against his opponents, he might have set himself in place to rule for years.
“Many contemporary historians,”
Repin says, “suppose that with the death of Beria, we lost a talented and
active figure. They are certain that socialism under Lavrenty Beria would have
continued to develop ‘successfully and harmoniously’ and the construction of a communist
society in the USSR would have become completely real.”
Beria biographer Sergey Kremlyev
argues that the USSR has good prospects in the 1950s and that a Malenkov-Beria
regime with Beria being the power behind the throne would have changed the
entire future of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev might have retained a place in the
Politburo but without a significant power base.
Further, the historian says, “had
Beria remained in power, then the entire history of the planet could have
developed according to an entirely different scenario: one not defined by militarization
and capitalization but by the construction of a worthy and just community of
toilers.”
Many give Khrushchev credit for
overthrowing the cult of Stalin, but in fact, Repin says, Beria took the lead
in that, having ended the doctors’ plot Stalin had initiated and releasing all
those who had been falsely charged. “All
of them were rehabilitated in the course of a two-week period.”
,
“
Many are “certain” that if Beria had
remained in power he would have reviewed and overturned the cases of all those
who were repressed; and some argue that he would have promoted democracy by
giving passports to the peasants, something the Soviet leadership didn’t do
until the 1970s, and giving the soviets a dominant role in economic life.
One of the reasons Khrushchev gave
in 1956 for removing Beria from the leadership in 1953 and ultimately ordering
his execution was the fear of the other communist leaders that Beria intended
to split apart the USSR by supporting nationalists in the republics at the
expense of those who looked to Moscow.
But Beria had few chances to survive
in any case, and they would have depended on his acting more like Stalin toward
his opponents than he was willing or able to do. According to one human rights activist, the
spirit of Stalinism was still too strong in 1953 for Beria to achieve his
goals.
Consequently, Nikita Petrov, the
vice president of Memorial says, when Beria did not act as Stalin had, the others
acted against him in a “completely Stalinist” manner.
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