USSR would Have Fallen Apart Much Sooner if Khrushchev hadn’t Shot Beria, Bavyrin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 16 – Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, has been criticized for his plans to make concessions to the West on the Baltic countries to usher in détente with the West, even being denounced as the supposed model of Khrushchev’s “thaw” (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/05/1953-beria-thaw-model-for-khrushchevs.html).

            And he has been attacked for his supposed liberalism on the nationality question, a position he adopted as a Georgian to try to win support from party leaders outside of Moscow (windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/08/window-on-eurasia-was-beria-liberal-on.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/01/berias-bet-on-republics-in-1953.html).

            Now, Beria is being pilloried as a precursor of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika, with Vzglyad commentator Dmitry Bavyrin saying that the Stalinist policeman wanted to restore Lenin’s approach and pull ethnic Russians out of positions of power in the republics (vz.ru/politics/2021/12/22/1135224.html).

            Such an approach would have led to the demise of the USSR far earlier than that “geopolitical catastrophe” came, had Khrushchev who according to other analyses picked up on Beria’s approach more generally, Bavyrin says. Thus, Khrushchev’s decision to have Beria shot saved the USSR for another 40 years.

            At the dawn of the Soviet period, Lenin had insisted on putting non-Russians in the republics in positions of power, a policy known as korenizatsiya that Stalin opposed but initially went along with before reversing course in the 1930s and using ethnic Russians to cement the empire together.

            Immediately after Stalin’s death, Bavyrin continues, “Beria concentrated in his hands enormous power and sought more by gaining the support of “the non-Russian borderlands.” His approach, which immediately came to be called “’the new course,’” involved “not only massive amnesties but also an acceleration of korenizatsiya.”

            The secret police chief began this restoration of Lenin’s policy in his two primary fiefdoms, the ministry of the interior and the ministry of state security, and did a great deal there without much notice. But then he began to extend it to the party leadership of the republics and that alarmed many in Moscow.

            Cadres began to be removed only because they weren’t the right nationality, and in most cases, Bavyrin says, that meant that they weren’t ethnic Russians. “Phrases like ‘go home to Siberia’ were words Russians thus heard long before perestroika.” They heard them in 1953. In the Baltic republics, they were welcomed with enthusiasm. Elsewhere, people were in shock.

            “At first, even Nikita Khrushchev supported Beria,” the Vzglyad commentator says. “In places, the Khrushchev apparatus sent out directives analogous to those Beria was sending.” Most likely, this was part of a broader power play given the Khrushchev was assembling his “own alliance” against Beria.

            Clearly, Bavyrin says, Beria’s policy regarding non-Russian cadres was one of the reasons that the Politburo united against him. According to Beria’s son, his father felt that putting non-Russians in position of authority in the republics was correct, even though others viewed it as a form of “national communism.”

            “When Beria was shot,” Bavyrin says, “korenizatsiya was immediately reversed” just as Lenin’s policy had been reversed by Stalin. But “the next and last period of korenizatsiya began in the republics already after the collapse of the USSR,” whose fall had been pushed back by Khrushchev’s execution of the author of the second round of this mistaken approach.