As soon as the election procedure was over, the next day of the 20th Congress, which was the day of the so called free reports, Khrushchev reserved the right to present his own report, specially prepared for the occasion. As it was later reported, tens of the participants had suffered heart attacks and strokes. The medical personnel were withdrawing the fainting people from the congress hall one after another. Professor Simon Maskharashvili has more.

GJ – The sequence of events clearly

SM – One of the presumed versions is that Beria was apprehended at the airport at the moment of his return from Germany where, as I said before, after Stalin’s death the anti-Soviet manifestations were taking place. Beria was pushing the idea of uniting the bisected Germany.

GJ – Which was not a very palatable idea for the Kremlin dwellers, was it?

SM – Of course not! Actually, the improvement of relations with the West was one of the main ideas, contemplated by Beria for introducing changes in the Soviet Union. As it becomes known in our days, Beria was accompanied in the trip to Germany by very skilled and experienced secret servicemen who were very faithful to the Soviet cause and to Beria personally. This fact made Beria’s liquidation even easier to implement. Beria had all his resources concentrated on Germany. There is a second presumable version of his liquidation, according to which he was arrested in the politburo room at the government premises for official meetings. Khrushchev managed to slip generals Moskalenko and Zhukov into there who had presumably taken Beria into custody. Both of those versions now sound like a possibility and might be absolutely valid, but what matters most is that Beria had truly taken a course towards democracy having loosened the Stalinist tentacles, and gave a chance to people to express their own opinions freely. It is a historical irony that namely the people who had felt freer and happier thanks to Beria’s reforms had seized and detained him.

GJ – Yes, this truly sounds like one more historical paradox  . . .

SM – If we analyze well enough the historical reality of that time, this was more a moralistic issue than a historical paradox. Those people – Khrushchev, Malenkov, Kaganovich and Molotov – used to be a bunch of regular murderers. Let us go back to ‘The Repentance’ – the film of the famous Georgian movie director Tengiz Abuladze, which was one of the first loudly pronounced critical words against the communist regime. The main character of the film – a party official Aravidze is screaming loudly in one of the episodes: ‘Get it dark, get it dark! Or else the sunlight might enter my head.’ All these people were, literally all of them got scared to death to see the light entering their lives when somebody decided to move the iron curtain, pulled by Stalin to separate the Soviet Union from the rest of the world. They were just hysterical and they panicked like crazy. As a result, they attacked Beria together like a pack of hungry wolves, thus assaulting the possibility of progress in general. These were the communist leaders whose blood-stained hands had once perpetrated atrocious crimes against the entire Soviet people and humanity.

GJ – Yes, but Beria was one of those criminals, wasn’t he?

SM – Yes, he was! But Beria was a professional scout. His job was in secret service. For him, manslaughter was not an end in itself. He knew very well what a monster Stalin used to be. Often, he was forced into putting up with the circumstance suggested by life – sometimes not without the instinct of self-preservation. The rest of those Soviet murderers were no scouts or spies, nor were they the secret servicemen or professional investigators. They were regular Soviet officials who once advocated the social equality, but finally had made it a routine to be signing the papers of execution of innocent people.