Why was Beria shot, Explain the reason
Answers
Lavrentiy Beria was shot by political rivals on December 23, 1953, at the age of 54. After Stalin's mysterious death earlier that year, Beria had overestimated his power. He had billed himself as an anti-Stalinist reformer and begun installing anti-Stalinist policies.
Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian, like Stalin, who called him ‘my Himmler’. Involved in revolutionary activities from his teens and head of the secret police in Georgia in his twenties, he supervised the ruthless 1930s purges in the region and arrived in Moscow in 1938 as deputy to Nikolai Yezhov, ‘the blood-thirsty dwarf’, head of the Soviet secret police. He soon succeeded Yezhov, who was shot on Stalin’s orders, apparently at Beria’s prompting. Beria, who went on to run the Soviet network of slave-labour camps, was notorious for his sadistic enjoyment of torture and his taste for beating and raping women and violating young girls. Bald and bespectacled, by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 he was one of the most hated men in the country.
With Stalin gone, Beria quickly came to an understanding with Georgi Malenkov, an old ally, and was given the combined ministries of State Security and Internal Affairs, which put him in control of both the secret and the regular police as well as a small private army of infantry divisions. He now improbably began to urge an easing of Stalinism that went further than his colleagues were ready for. Many of them feared him almost as much as they had feared Stalin himself and a lethal plot was hatched against him.
Accounts of what happened vary considerably, but it seems that Beria’s downfall was engineered by Nikita Khrushchev, secretary to the Party Central Committee, who quietly secured the support of other powerful figures, including Malenkov and a number of generals. On June 26th, apparently, at a hastily convened meeting of the Presidium, Khrushchev launched a blistering attack on Beria, accusing him of being a cynical careerist, long in the pay of British intelligence, and no true Communist believer. Beria was taken aback and said, ‘What’s going on, Nikita?’, and Khrushchev told him he would soon find out. The veteran Molotov and others chimed in against Beria and Khrushchev put a motion for his instant dismissal. Before a vote could be taken, the panicky Malenkov pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They immediately burst in, seized Beria and manhandled him away.