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After Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Beria's ambitions sprang into full force. In the uneasy silence following the cessation of Stalin's last agonies, he was the first to dart forward to kiss his lifeless form (a move likened by Montefiore to "wrenching a dead King's ring off his finger"). [59]
In November 1941, Beria successfully lobbied Stalin to simplify the procedure for carrying out death sentences issued by local military courts so that they would no longer require approval of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court and Politburo, for the first time since the end of the Great Purge.
Beria's son, Sergo Beria, later recounted that after Stalin's death, his mother Nina told her husband that, "Your position now is even more precarious than when Stalin was alive." [ 11 ] This turned out to be correct; several months later, in June 1953, Beria was arrested and charged with a variety of crimes but, significantly, none relating to ...
Amongst them Malenkov, Beria and Molotov [8] formed an unofficial Triumvirate (also known by its Russian name Troika) immediately after Stalin's death, but it collapsed when Malenkov and Molotov turned on Beria. [9] After the arrest of Beria (26 June 1953), Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed collective leadership as the "supreme principle of our Party".
After Stalin's death, Malenkov ruled as part of a troika alongside Lavrentiy Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov, [41] Despite initially succeeding Stalin in all his titles and positions, he was forced to relinquish most of them within a month by the Politburo. [42] The troika would ultimately break down when Beria was arrested later that year. [43]
9 Aghasi Khanjian (murdered by Lavrentiy Beria or suicide) August. 22 Mikhail Tomsky (suicide) 25 Grigori Zinoviev, [1] Lev Kamenev, Grigori Yevdokimov, Ivan Bakayev, Sergei Mrachkovsky, Ivan Smirnov, Vagarshak Ter-Vaganyan. September. 25 (Genrikh Yagoda dismissed from his post as head of the NKVD, and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov) October
Finally, he ordered a halt to physical and psychological abuse of prisoners. Beria also declared a halt to forced Russification of the Soviet republics; Beria himself was a Georgian. The leadership also began allowing some criticism of Stalin, saying that his one-man dictatorship went against the principles laid down by Vladimir Lenin. The war ...
Vsevolod Merkulov stated that these experiments received authorization from NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria. [5] Following Stalin's death and Beria's subsequent arrest, Beria attested on August 28, 1953, that "I gave orders to Mairanovsky to conduct experiments on people sentenced to the highest measure of punishment, but it was not my idea". [5]