The majority of the Central Committee members elected at the 17th Party Congress were killed during, or shortly after, the Great Purge when Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria headed the NKVD Grigory Kaminsky, at a Central Committee meeting, spoke against the Great Purge, and shortly after was arrested and killed.

Together with Malenkov's and Khrushchev's ascension of power, another figure, Lavrentiy Beria was also contending for power.

Beria, an ethnic Georgian, was the Presidium member for internal security affairs, and he was a strong supporter for minority rights and even supported reuniting East and West Germany to establish a strong, and neutral Germany between the capitalist and socialist nations.

It was Beria, through an official pronouncement by the Ministry of Internal Affairs ( MVD ) and not by the Central Committee or the Council of Ministers, who renounced the Doctor's Plot as a fraud.

Beria was no easy man to defeat, and his ethnicisation policies ( that a local or republican leaders had to have ethnic origins, and speak the language of the given area ) proved to be a tool to strengthen the MVD's grip on local party organs.

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.

However, this was no easy task, as Beria inspired was able to inspire fear in his colleagues.

This did not happen, and Beria was forced to resign from all his party posts on 26 June, and was later executed on 23 December.

Vovsi was released by Beria after Stalin's death in 1953, as was his son-in-law, the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg.

Lavrentiy Beria was informed and arrived a few hours afterwards, and the doctors only arrived in the early morning of 2 March in which they changed Stalin's bedclothes and tended to him.

A luxury villa near Gagri was given to him by Beria.

However, during an investigation in the Khrushchev Thaw it was established that he was killed by an NKVD operative under direct orders from Lavrentiy Beria.

Because of the manner in which the head of the Soviet project, Lavrenti Beria, used foreign intelligence ( as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the scientists, as he did not trust the information by default ) it is unknown whether Fuchs's fission information had a substantial effect ( and considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium they could procure, it is hard for scholars to accurately judge how much time this saved the Soviets ).

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (; ; 29 March 1899 – 23 December 1953 ) was a Soviet politician, Marshal of the Soviet Union and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus ( NKVD ) under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ( 1946 – 1953 ).

Beria was the longest lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after World War II.

Beria administered the vast expansion of the Gulag labor camps and was primarily responsible for overseeing the secret defense institutions known as sharashkas, critical to the war effort.

Beria was promoted to First Deputy Premier, where he carried out a brief campaign of liberalization.

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 was born out of wedlock in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, in the Sukhumi district of Kutaisi governorate ( now Gulripshi District, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire ).

On the early morning hours of 1 March 1953, after an all-night dinner and a movie Stalin arrived at his Kuntsevo residence some 15 km west of Moscow centre with interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev where he retired to his bedroom to sleep.

His demise certainly arrived at a convenient time for Lavrentiy Beria and others, who feared being swept away in yet another purge.

In 1919, when he was twenty years old, Beria started his career in state security, when he was hired by the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic while still a student at the Polytechnicum.

During his years at the helm of the Georgian OGPU, Beria effectively destroyed the intelligence networks that Turkey and Iran had developed in the Soviet Caucasus, while successfully penetrating the governments of these countries with his agents.

Some observers argue that these operations were aimed – initially tangentially, but with time more directly – at Beria.

There were allegations that " planning to seize power, Beria tried to obtain the support of imperialist states at the price of violation of territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and transfer of parts of USSR's territory to capitalist states.

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.

" After taking an interest in Marshal Kliment Voroshilov's daughter-in-law during a party at their summer dacha, Beria shadowed their car closely all the way back to the Kremlin, terrifying Voroshilov's wife.

In 1938, Lavrenty Beria, a senior NKVD official, created the Department of Special Design Bureaus at the NKVD USSR ( Отдел особых конструкторских бюро НКВД СССР ).

The same decree organized at Stavka " the institution of permanent counsellors of Stavka ": Marshal Kulik, Marshal Shaposhnikov, Kirill Meretskov, head of the Air force Zhigarev, Nikolay Vatutin, head of Air Defence Voronov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Lavrenty Beria, Voznesensky, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Mekhlis.

On March 5, 1940, pursuant to a note to Stalin from Lavrenty Beria, the members of the Soviet Politburo ( including Stalin ) signed an order to execute 25, 700 Polish POWs, labeled " nationalists and counterrevolutionaries ", kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus.

The phone at Litvinov's dacha was disconnected and, the following morning, Molotov, Georgii Malenkov, and Lavrenty Beria arrived at the commissariat to inform Litvinov of his dismissal.

Yezhov himself would suffer exactly the same treatment at the order of his successor and former deputy, Lavrenti Beria, before dying by the same executioner ( NKVD Chief Executioner Vasili Blokhin ) just two years later.

Lavrenty Beria, Nikolai Yezhov and Anastas Mikoyan ( front row-left to right ) at a reception of delegates from different parts of the USSR, September 1938.

Stalin was evidently content to ignore Yezhov for several months, finally ordering Beria to denounce him at the annual Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Just before the execution, Yezhov was ordered to undress himself and then was brutally beaten by guards at the order of Beria, the new NKVD Chief, just as Yezhov had ordered the guards to beat and humiliate his predecessor Yagoda before his execution only two years before.

The first Soviet bomb test, Operation First Lightning ( nicknamed Joe One by the Americans ) was conducted in 1949 from a tower at the Semipalatinsk Test Site, scattering fallout on nearby villages ( which Beria had neglected to evacuate ).

Georgia was at this time ruled by supporters of Lavrentiy Beria, who had been the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party from 1931 to 1938.

In June 1953, three months after Stalin's death, the members of the Presidium ( the renamed Politburo ) under the instigation of Khrushchev agreed to ambush Beria at a Presidium meeting surprising him by bringing in army officers to put him under arrest.

He was tried and shot in December 1953 though Khrushchev was later to claim that he shot Beria himself at the June meeting of the Presidium.

In 1920 or 1921 ( accounts vary ), Beria joined the Cheka – the original Bolshevik secret police.

In 1943, Stalin himself was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union, and in 1945, he was joined by his intelligence and police chief Lavrenti Beria.