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Sixty years ago today
Jun. 26th, 2013 10:45 pmOn June 26, 1953, at a special meeting of the Presidium of the Soviet Communist Party, representatives of the military arrested vice-premier and minister of the interior Lavrenty Beria, who was summarily stripped of all his posts and expelled from the Party. Just three months before, Beria, whom Stalin had planned to get rid of, vaulted into the leading position of power in the wake of the dictator's sudden death. The much-feared former secret police chief was now Minister of Internal Affairs (including State Security), and Assistant Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and had taken a surprisingly liberal tack, proposing the release of the bulk of the GULag prisoners, the relaxing of internal passport controls, and even the reunification and neutralization of Germany under a non-Communist government.
We will never know what exactly went on behind the thick Kremlin walls; Khrushchev claimed Beria was making a play for supreme power, and he and his colleagues called in the usually distrusted military to arrest Beria and keep him away from his friends in the secret police. Convicted of treason by a soecial military court, Beria woud be executed in December with several of his allies. State Security itself would be reduced from a ministry to a mere committee attached to the Council of Ministers, and many of its officials would be arrested and shot.
Beria was condemned as a careerist, a sexual deviant, a monster, and no Bolshevik, a man out to wreck the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 would blame Beria for many of the excesses of Stalin's dictatorship. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, many former leaders purged by Stalin have been officilly rehabilitated, but not Beria.
Yet the Federal Security Service, the organization formerly known as Cheka, OGPU, GUGB, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, and KGB, has a long-winded defense of Beria posted on its Web site. They say he was a patriot who played a pivotal role in the defeat of Hitler, and that Khrushchev and his allies wrongly accused and persecuted him.
I think the real lesson here is that a disproportionately large state security apparatus is a threat to life and liberty far greater than any terrorist group; in the absence of enemies such an apparatus will manufacture them in order to justify its arrogation of power and resources; and in the end not even the highest ranking public servants will be safe, let alone the average citizen.
It is a lesson we need to learn swiftly.
We will never know what exactly went on behind the thick Kremlin walls; Khrushchev claimed Beria was making a play for supreme power, and he and his colleagues called in the usually distrusted military to arrest Beria and keep him away from his friends in the secret police. Convicted of treason by a soecial military court, Beria woud be executed in December with several of his allies. State Security itself would be reduced from a ministry to a mere committee attached to the Council of Ministers, and many of its officials would be arrested and shot.
Beria was condemned as a careerist, a sexual deviant, a monster, and no Bolshevik, a man out to wreck the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 would blame Beria for many of the excesses of Stalin's dictatorship. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, many former leaders purged by Stalin have been officilly rehabilitated, but not Beria.
Yet the Federal Security Service, the organization formerly known as Cheka, OGPU, GUGB, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, and KGB, has a long-winded defense of Beria posted on its Web site. They say he was a patriot who played a pivotal role in the defeat of Hitler, and that Khrushchev and his allies wrongly accused and persecuted him.
I think the real lesson here is that a disproportionately large state security apparatus is a threat to life and liberty far greater than any terrorist group; in the absence of enemies such an apparatus will manufacture them in order to justify its arrogation of power and resources; and in the end not even the highest ranking public servants will be safe, let alone the average citizen.
It is a lesson we need to learn swiftly.
