Word: beria
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...Moscow, Bulganin called a meeting of the top army Chekists and a sprinkling of those genuine fighting marshals who are regularly on call to give luster to Chekist authority. Purpose of the meeting: to pledge support of Premier Georgy Malenkov's arrest of Internal Affairs (MVD) Minister Lavrenty Beria, himself an oldtime Chekist (TIME, July 20). The declaration was intended to 1) end speculation that the army may have acted independently of the government in the arrest of Beria, and 2) preserve the front of solidarity behind which the struggle for power is raging. It could not help...
Behind the façade of solidarity, the purge went on. Beria men were falling...
...Ministry of Internal Affairs prepared Beria's arrest? If the tradition of the service holds, it may well have been his successor: clam-faced Colonel General Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov, long a liaison man between the ministry and the Kremlin. At Yalta and Potsdam, Kruglov set up the protection screen which surrounded the Big Three,-was one of the very few who had free access to Stalin's quarters. At the San Francisco Conference, turned out in a blue serge suit and broad-toed shoes, he was Molotov's bodyguard. Although Kruglov's police career dates from...
...like his own. Rising to power by subterfuge and maneuver, Stalin destroyed every man of stature within his reach, at the same time paying vociferous lip service to "democratic centralism." Those he gathered around him, conditioning themselves to his homicidal suspicion, were small men, menials like Molotov, sycophants like Beria. Conscious of this, Stalin looked for successors among young party members, built them up to temporary power and fame, as often knocked them down. Such a man was Georgy Malenkov-with a difference. More subtle than the others, possibly more intelligent, he learned how to wait, how to accept demotion...
...millions of words of speculation about Beria's fall, some of the most cautious and sensible were to be found in a British intelligence appraisal prepared for Prime Minister Churchill. Its conclusion: the rule of oligarchy in Russia (i.e., "collective leadership") is disintegrating; the struggle for power is between bosses, not between clear-cut factions like the party and the police. The police apparatus, which survived the destruction of previous bosses, is now in Malenkov's hands...