Word: beria
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...That in ordering the doctors' purge in January, he intended a drastic shake-up in the higher echelons, with Lavrenty Beria (whose police were accused of laxity) marked out as one of the first victims. ¶ That Malenkov got wind of Stalin's intentions, and-fearing that such a purge might involve himself sooner or later- made common cause with Beria. ¶ That something historic happened in the Kremlin the night of Feb. 15, two weeks before Stalin's death. Fact: at the bottom of the back page of Izvestia Feb. 17 appears this laconic death notice...
...That Stalin was then either murdered by Beria's cops or-old and ailing-had his death hastened by emotional SHOCK which brought on his fatal stroke. ¶ That Beria-who saved his own life by plotting against his master's-is thus the key man in the new regime. But it would be too obvious and jarring to the public for the policeman to assume full powers himself, especially after Malenkov, during the last Party Congress, had been made to appear "most likely to succeed." "The Russians," wrote a U.S. expert, "are purists of power. They pass...
...Beria, not Malenkov, who announced that the accused doctors were innocent victims of false persecution. It was he who deposed and then arrested the former Deputy Minister of State Security -a man named Ryumin-as "a secret enemy of our state" who had attempted to kindle in the Soviet people "feelings of national hostility" (i.e., anti-Semitism). But the principal fall guy is Semyon D. Ignatiev, Stalin's last Minister of State Security, and a bureaucrat who was elevated shortly after Stalin's death to one of the five secretariat seats on the party's powerful Central...
Bull-necked Lavrenty Beria has had previous experience in purging purgers: in 1938, when Police Chief Yezhov was destroying his predecessors for staging "medical murders," Beria moved in, destroyed Yezhov's apparatus and became in his stead the killer of killers...
Meanwhile, a small pyre must be built for those who had helped prepare the plot against the doctors. They, said Beria's communique, "have already been arrested and brought to criminal responsibility." Besides Ryumin and Ignatiev, there was another victim: Lidiya F. Timashuk, a grandmother and a physician. Lidiya Timashuk was decorated last January with the Order of Lenin,the Soviet Union's top order, "for exposing the doctor assassins." "She fought," said Pravda, "as one fights with enemies of the homeland-a life and death struggle." Last week Dr. Timashuk was stripped of her decoration because...