[to seize control in the Soviet Union, and…]

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to seize control in the Soviet Union, and instal his closest friends and deputies alongside him.

But he had made powerful enemies, who for reasons of selfaggrandisement or simple selfpreservation were not willing to see him step into Stalin's shoes. Among those with axes to grind were Molotov, Malenkov, Bulganin, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and Khruschev.

Khrushchev

Between these leading figures, whose servile readiness to "obey orders" had enabled them to rise through the ranks of Stalin's Party, trampling on the bodies of purged and murdered comrades, there were rivalries and disagreements: yet they shared a common interest in preventing the consolidation of power in Beria's hands.

Nikita Khruschev, one of Stalin's inner circle, appears to have been the prime mover against Beria, securing the early agreement of Bulganin. Initially, however, he bided his time as a compromise collective leadership was established immediately after Stalin's death, and Beria reelected once again to control the MVD and MGB.

Khruschev himself took the key position of Secretary to the Central Committee, effectively in charge of the entire Party apparatus and CC departments. Bulganin took control of the armed forces.

To preserve the fiction of unity and normality, the new leadership announced an amnesty for non-political prisoners, and a series of price reductions of foodstuffs, clothing and vodka. Behind this confident facade, Beria was- assembling his support, while Khruschev too was manoeuvring for position.

Khruschev was the most successful. He enlisted the support of Malenkov, the nominal head of government, who was irked - and no doubt alarmed - by Beria's lack of deference towards him. Arrangements were made to arrest Beria at a meeting of the Central tee in the Kremlin.

Khruschev arrived at the meeting carrying a gun. He had arranged for a group of soldiers led by General Zhukov (the successful World War 2 commander, pushed to one side by Stalin), to be waiting in the speak. method, reced sto $ own years previously it had been revealed to the Central Committee that Beria had been in the pay of British intelligence since 1918! The source of the information, Grigori Kaminsky, had then been arrested, said Khruschev, who went on to accuse Beria of favouring the promotion of fellow Georgians in the MVD at the expense of supreme cynicism, was communist but a careerist, for whom there was no place in the and long-lasting: the secret police apparatus was placed firmly under the control of the leading. Party committees (which in turn were to fall increasingly under the control of the rising Nikita Khruschev).

Beria was held prisoner for six months before being brought to a secret "trial" and sent to the firing squad on December 23, 1953. His execution was agreed as desirable from the first moment of his arrest: the delay appears to be due in part to his refusal to make the required "confessions" while secrecy of the trial appears to be due to the amount Beria could have revealed about the criminal involvement of Khruschev and the new leadership with Stalin's purges.

Few tears will have been shed for Beria, who as much as anyone epitomised the callous, dog-eat-dog careerism of the bureaucratic climbers who survived and prospered in Stalin's party from the late 1920s onwards.

Though Beria had become active as a Bolshevik organiser in 1917 and first acquired the skills as a policeman on the side of the victorious workers' revolution, his rise up the ladder in the GPU and the Party began simultaneously with the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and the consolidation of Stalin's power within it.

As the brutal repression and drive to "liquidate the Kulaks (middle peasants) as a class" generated millions uf prisoners and casualties in the countryside the net was soon thrown wider among Stalin's actual or potential political opponents and rivals.

In 1931 Beria was transferred from his post in the Caucasian State Police to become second, and then first secretary of the 100%.

The purge trials and mass arrests which began on the pretext of the murder of Stalin's sidekick Sergei Kirov in December 1934 (arranged by Stalin himself were further to sever any link between the CPSU and its revolutionary past.

This delighted the most conscious imperialist observers, one of whom reported back to Whitehall that "Stalin is getting rid of the hotheads."

Kirov

By the mid 1930s, many of the victims of the Moscow Trials were in fact far from hotheads: they were broken, cowed relics of Lenin's Central Committee, smashed and destroyed by Stalin's political pressure and by physical torture.

First victims were Lenin's comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were accused of revolutionary plot" involving Trotsky. * Jailed for this in 1935, they were again put on trial in 1936, this time accused of conspiring with the Nazis.

With the hysterical disregard for truth or even common sense, the Stalinists began to link up •'Trotskyism" with "fascism" concocting 'weird and terrible intrigues and plots as a pretext for an ever-widening sweep of persecution, imprisonment, torture and death.

Many years after these terrible events, Khruschev was to reveal the methods of Stalin's Commissar for State Security in Leningrad, Zakovsky.

«With unbelievable cynicism Zakovsky told about the vile mechanism for the crafty creation of fabricated 'antiSoviet plots". . "You yourself," Zakovsky said, "will not need to invent anything. The NKVD [secret police] will prepare for you a ready outline for every "gulag" slave camps.

Presiding over the beginning of these proceedings was GPL chief Yagoda. For ten years he had been Stalin's chief confidan and ally in his efforts to stamI out political supporters of Trotsky and the Left Opposi tion. But Yagoda himself was to bi among the victims of the purge: when he showed himself reluc tant to extend the slaughte too widely amongst his persona friends and old Bolsheviks. H was arrested, declared "enemy of the people" , ani replaced by Yezhov, who i turn subjected Yagoda to th now routine tortures ani pressures.

Between them Yezhov anı Yagoda also initiated what wa to be in every way a devastatin purge of the Red Army - whic had been built by Trotsky afte 1917 in the heroic battles t defend the world's first workers state against the combine imperialist and white armies. Continued next week • 0000000.

CLASS ¡up pius postage irom 214 Sickert Court, London N1 2SY.

----- pull-quotes -----

next room, with a document authorising Beria's arrest. Malenkov called thrushened,

announcenationalitie Beria, Khrushers not a

complicity in the murder of Kirov as part of a "counter-

FIGATEI Scrap the bosses: stop the BOMB!