Beria was defeated at the next Presidium plenums by a majority against him, and not long after, Khrushchev and Malenkov started to plan Beria's fall from power.

Accounts of Beria's fall vary considerably.

As Beria's fall from power began, Sarkisov sent the list to the new NKVD chief ( and former wartime head of SMERSH ), Viktor Abakumov, who was already aggressively building a case against Beria.

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.

Many of Beria's subordinates, proteges and associates were also arrested, among them Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov, Sergey Golgidze, Vladimir Dekanozov, Pavel Meshik, and Lev Vlodzimirskiy.

At Lavrenty Beria's insistence, the RDS-1 bomb was designed as an implosion weapon similar to the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan ; RDS-1 also had a solid plutonium core.

However, Khrushchev and Malenkov were able to gather enough support for Beria's ouster, but only when a rumour of a potential coup led by Beria began to take hold within the party leadership.

Beria's downfall led to the collapse of his " empire "; the powers of the MVD was curtailed, and the KGB was established.

Beria's overconfidence in his position after Stalin's death led him to misjudge the feelings of his associates, many of whom still had relatives in his prisons.

" Sarkisov reported that Beria's sexual appetite had led to him contracting syphilis during the war, for which he was secretly treated without the knowledge of Stalin or the Politburo ( a fact Beria later admitted during his interrogation ).

It is believed that Stalin felt Beria's power was too great and threatened his own.

Stalin gave it absolute priority and the project was completed in under five years in no small part due to Soviet espionage against the West organized by Beria's NKVD.

Stalin had begun to encourage Abakumov to form his own network inside the MGB to counter Beria's dominance of the power ministries.

Support for the assertion that Stalin was poisoned by Beria's associates has been presented from several sources, including Edvard Radzinsky in his biography Stalin and a recent study by Miguel A. Faria in the journal Surgical Neurology International.

Beria's sexually predatory nature was well-known to the Politburo, and though Stalin took an indulgent viewpoint ( considering Beria's wartime importance ), he was fearful after learning that his daughter Svetlana was alone with Beria at his house.

The first page of Lavrentiy Beria | Beria's notice ( oversigned by Joseph Stalin | Stalin ), to kill approximately 15, 000 Polish officers in the Katyn massacre | Katyn Forest and other places in the Soviet Union

Well acquainted with the typical Stalinist bureaucratic precursors to eventual dismissal and arrest, Yezhov recognized Beria's increasing influence with Stalin as a sign his downfall was imminent, and plunged headlong into alcoholism and despair.

The reversal caused by Beria's arrest and execution brought an end to much of the arbitrary arrest and the system of forced labour in Gulags that had marked the Stalin era.

Warfarin ( 4-Hydroxycoumarins ) is cited as the likely agent ; it would have produced the symptoms reported, and administering it into Stalin's food or drink was well within the operational abilities of Beria's NKVD.

Within days of the events in Germany, Khrushchev persuaded the other leaders to support a Party coup against Beria ; Beria's principal ally Malenkov abandoned him.

Beria's bodyguards reported that their orders included handing each girl a flower bouquet as she left Beria's house, with the implication being that to accept his parting gift made her his consensual mistress ; those who refused risked being arrested.

Within a year Beria's downfall caused the MVD to be split up again ; after that, the MVD retained its " internal security " ( police ) functions, while the new KGB took on " state security " ( secret police ) functions.

Although Beria's name is closely identified with the Great Purge because of his activities while deputy head of the NKVD, his leadership of the organisation marked an easing of the repression begun under Yezhov.

Kruglov and Abakumov moved expeditiously to replace Beria's men in the security apparatus leadership with new people.

In 1939, the unit was renamed the Special Technical Bureau at the NKVD USSR ( Особое техническое бюро НКВД СССР ) and placed under the leadership of General Valentin Kravchenko, under Beria's immediate supervision.

The compliance of the NKVD was ensured by Zhukov's troops, and after interrogation Beria was taken to the basement of the Lubyanka and shot by General Pavel Batitsky along with Beria's most trusted associates.

Beria's mother, Marta Ivanovna, was a deeply religious, church-going woman ( she spent so much time in church that she died there ); she was previously married and widowed before marrying Beria's father, Pavel Khukhaevich Beria, a landowner from Abkhazia, Georgia.

When the death sentence was passed, according to Moskalenko's later account, Beria pleaded on his knees for mercy before collapsing to the floor and wailing and crying energetically, but to no avail: the other six defendants were executed by firing squad on 23 December 1953, the same day as the trial, while Beria was fatally shot through the forehead by General Batitsky after the latter stuffed a rag into Beria's mouth to silence his bawling.

After Lavrenti Beria's arrest in 1953, Rudenko was the judge of his trial in which Beria was sentenced to death.

At Beria's urging the East German government sent the public signals about an easing up in the regime thus raising expectations but when they equivocated on implementing changes such as cancelling a plan to increase labour production ( and thus workload on individual workers ) a mass protest movement resulted that threatened the existence of the government and resulted in a hard crackdown using Soviet troops ( see Uprising of 1953 in East Germany ).

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.

After Stalin's death from pulmonary edema brought on by the stroke, Beria's ambitions sprang into full force.

Based on Beria's own statements, other leaders suspected that in the wake of the uprising, he might be willing to trade the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War for massive aid from the United States, as had been received in World War II.

The Russian government did not acknowledge Sarkisov's handwritten list of Beria's victims until 17 January 2003, and the names will not be released for another 25 years.

Beria's decision to avoid immediately calling a doctor was silently supported ( or at least not opposed ) by the rest of the Politburo, which was rudderless without Stalin's micromanagement and paralyzed by a legitimate fear he would suddenly recover and wreak violent reprisal on anyone who had dared to act without his orders.

According to Knight, " Smith noted that Beria's escapades were common knowledge among embassy personnel because his house was on the same street as residence for Americans, and those who lived there saw girls brought to Beria's house late at night in a limousine.

Under Beria's command, police terror was used to strengthen the party's political hold on the population and suppress all expressions of nationalism.

Beria's uncompromising ruthlessness in his duties and skill at producing results culminated in his success in overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project.

In December 1944, Beria's NKVD was assigned to supervise the Soviet atomic bomb project (" Task No. 1 "), which built and tested a bomb by 29 August 1949.

In July 1945, as Soviet police ranks were converted to a military uniform system, Beria's rank was officially converted to that of Marshal of the Soviet Union.

The East German uprising convinced Molotov, Malenkov, and Nikolai Bulganin that Beria's policies were dangerous and destabilizing to Soviet power.

" These allegations were due to Beria's suggestion to his assistants that to improve foreign relations it was reasonable to transfer the Kaliningrad Oblast to Germany, part of Karelia to Finland, the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic to Romania and the Kuril Islands to Japan.

He was the top member of the Secretariat and, with Beria's support, Malenkov became Premier of the Soviet Union.

Serov became the Ukrainian Commissar of the NKVD in 1939, and from this point onwards he played a major role in many of the actions of the Soviet secret police in World War II, helping to organize the deportation of the Chechens and the peoples of the Baltic States, becoming Beria's primary lieutenant in 1941.

Khrushchev was unable to win conservatives in the Presidium such as Molotov to his side until one of Beria's initiatives, his German policy, resulted in calamity for Soviet power.