Lavrentiy Beria - Postwar Politics

Postwar Politics

With Stalin nearing 70, the post-war years were dominated by a concealed struggle for succession among his supporters. At the end of the war, the most likely successor seemed to be Andrei Zhdanov, party leader in Leningrad during the war, who was in charge of all cultural matters by 1946. After 1946 Beria formed an alliance with Malenkov to counter Zhdanov's rise.

In January 1946, Beria resigned as chief of the NKVD while retaining general control over national security matters as Deputy Prime Minister and Curator of the Organs of State Security under Stalin. But the new chief, Sergei Kruglov, was not a Beria man. Also, by the summer of 1946, Beria's man Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov was replaced as head of the Ministry for State Security (MGB) by Viktor Abakumov. Abakumov was the head of SMERSH from 1943 to 1946; his relationship with Beria was marked by close collaboration (since Abakumov owed his rise to Beria's support and esteem), but also by rivalry. Stalin had begun to encourage Abakumov to form his own network inside the MGB to counter Beria's dominance of the power ministries. Kruglov and Abakumov moved expeditiously to replace Beria's men in the security apparatus leadership with new people. Very soon Deputy Minister Stepan Mamulov of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs was the only close Beria ally left outside foreign intelligence, on which Beria kept a grip. In the following months, Abakumov started carrying out important operations without consulting Beria, often working in tandem with Zhdanov, and sometimes on Stalin's direct orders. Some observers argue that these operations were aimed – initially tangentially, but with time more directly – at Beria.

One of the first such moves was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair that commenced in October 1946 and eventually led to the murder of Solomon Mikhoels and the arrest of many other members. This affair damaged Beria; not only had he championed the creation of the committee in 1942, but his own entourage included a substantial number of Jews.

After Zhdanov died suddenly in August 1948, Beria and Malenkov consolidated their power by a purge of Zhdanov's associates known as the "Leningrad Affair". Among the executed were Zhdanov's deputy, Aleksei Kuznetsov; the economic chief, Nikolai Voznesensky; the Party head in Leningrad, Pyotr Popkov; and the Prime Minister of the Russian Republic, Mikhail Rodionov. It was only after Zhdanov's death that Nikita Khrushchev began to be considered as a possible alternative to the Beria-Malenkov axis.

During the postwar years, Beria supervised the successful establishment of Communist regimes in the countries of Eastern Europe, usually by coup d'etat, and hand-picked the leaders. A substantial number of these leaders were Jews, which drew the attention of Stalin. Starting in 1948, Abakumov initiated several investigations against these leaders, which culminated with the arrest in November 1951 of Rudolf Slánský, Bedřich Geminder, and others in Czechoslovakia. These men were generally accused of Zionism and cosmopolitanism, but, more specifically, of providing weapons to Israel. Beria was deeply disturbed by these charges, as large amounts of Czech arms had been sold to Israel on his direct orders. Beria wanted an alliance with Israel to advance the communist cause in the Middle East, while later Soviet leaders chose instead to form a powerful alliance with countries in the Arab World. Altogether, 14 Czechoslovak Communist leaders, 11 of them Jewish, were tried, convicted, and executed (see Slánský trial). Similar investigations in Poland and other Soviet satellite countries occurred at the same time.

Around that time, Abakumov was replaced by Semyon Ignatyev, who further intensified the anti-Semitic campaign. On 13 January 1953, the biggest anti-semitic affair in the Soviet Union was initiated with an article in Pravda that began what came to be known as the Doctors' plot, in which a number of the country's prominent Jewish physicians were accused of poisoning top Soviet leaders and arrested. Concurrently, an anti-semitic propaganda campaign, euphemistically termed the "struggle against rootless cosmopolitanism", occurred in the Soviet press. Initially, 37 men were arrested, but the number quickly grew into hundreds. Scores of Soviet Jews were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, sent to the Gulag, or executed. It is alleged that at this time on Stalin's orders the MGB started to prepare to deport all Soviet Jews to the Russian Far East or even massacre them. The issue of how much Stalin (and Beria) were involved in the Doctor's Plot is still disputed (see discussion in Doctors' plot article). Some historians claim that no such deportation was planned, or that the planned deportations were in an early planning stage when abandoned. Days after Stalin's death on 5 March, Beria freed all the arrested doctors, announced that the entire matter was fabricated, and arrested the MGB functionaries directly involved.

In other international issues, Beria (along with Mikoyan) correctly foresaw the victory of Mao Zedong in the Chinese Civil War and greatly helped the communist success by letting the Communist Party of China use Soviet-occupied Manchuria as a staging area and arranging huge weapons shipments to the People's Liberation Army, mainly from the recently-captured equipment of the Japanese Kwantung Army.