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 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 ).

In his biography, he mentioned only his sister and his niece, implying that his brother ( or any other siblings for that matter ) either was dead or had no relationship with Beria after he left Merkheuli.

After the city's capture in April 1920, Beria was saved from execution only because there was no time to arrange it and Sergei Kirov saved him.

Although he had no compunctions about using political terror to achieve his ends when it logically benefited him, the purge affected all aspects of the Soviet state and forced Beria to sacrifice several of his loyalists, thus actually undermining his attempts to create a stable personal power base in Georgia.

On 5 March 1940, after the Gestapo – NKVD Third Conference was held in Zakopane, Beria sent a note ( no.

Beria and the others were tried by a special session (" Spetsialnoye Sudebnoye Prisutstvie ") of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union on 23 December 1953 with no defense counsel and no right of appeal.

In particular, attempts to initiate peace talks with Hitler in 1941 through the ambassador of Bulgaria were classified as treason ; no one mentioned that Beria was acting on the orders of Stalin and Molotov.

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.

While internal party struggles would result in expulsions there were no executions of party members after the execution of Lavrentiy Beria in 1953.

On November 17, 1938 a joint decree of Sovnarkom USSR and Central Committee of Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the subsequent order of the NKVD undersigned by Lavrentiy Beria cancelled most of NKVD orders of this type ( but not all, see, e. g., NKVD Order no.

Beria's fall also led to criticism of Stalin ; the party leadership accused Beria of using Stalin, a sick and old man, to force his own will on the Soviet Union during Stalin's last days.

But the new chief, Sergei Kruglov, was not a Beria man.

When Beria told Stalin about the Manhattan Project and its importance Stalin handpicked Molotov to be the man in charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project.

Mikoyan originally argued in favor of keeping Stalin's right-hand man Beria from punishment but later gave in to popular support among Party members for his arrest.

After Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953, Beria had been arrested and shot by Stalin's successors, and Vladimir Petrov evidently feared that, if he returned to the Soviet Union, he would be purged as a " Beria man ".

A keen footballer in his youth, Beria had played against Starostin in the 1920s, suffering humiliating defeat.

The events in Germany convinced conservatives and supporters of Beria such as Molotov, Malenkov and Bulganin that his policies were dangerous and destabilising to Soviet power ( his policy towards the nationalities was seen as a threat to the unity of the USSR itself ).

In 1949 Suslov became a member, along with Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria, and Lazar Kaganovich, of a commission created to investigate charges levied against Moscow's local Communist Party First Secretary, Georgy Popov.

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.

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.

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 and Malenkov together with Abakumov organized massive executions of their rivals in the Leningrad Affair where all leaders of Leningrad and Zhdanov's allies were killed, and thousands more were locked up in Gulag labour camps upon Stalin's approval.

In violation of the promise made by Beria to the arrested opposition leaders, mass arrests and executions continued.

The political memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claimed that Beria had boasted to Molotov that he poisoned Stalin: " I took him out.

Khrushchev wrote in his ( unreliable ) memoirs that Beria had, immediately after the stroke, gone about " spewing hatred against and mocking him ", and then, when Stalin showed signs of consciousness, dropped to his knees and kissed his hand.

Some former Soviet scientists said they were actually hampered by Fuchs's data, because Beria insisted that their first bomb (" Joe 1 ") should resemble the American plutonium bomb (" Fat Man ") as much as possible, even though the scientists had discovered a number of improvements and different designs for a more efficient weapon.

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.

Although he publicly supported Stalin's efforts to purge the Georgia party apparatus, Beria had little to gain from the disorder and upheaval of the Great Purge.

Stalin had thoughts to appoint Lazar Kaganovich as head of the NKVD, but chose Beria probably because he was a professional secret policeman.

Although he had never held a traditional military command, Beria made a significant contribution to the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II through his organization of wartime production and his use of partisans.

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.

Beria was deeply disturbed by these charges, as large amounts of Czech arms had been sold to Israel on his direct orders.

Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after the stroke, gone about " spewing hatred against and mocking him.

Notably, Beria never explicitly stated whether he had initiated Stalin's stroke or had merely delayed his treatment in the hope he would die ( as argued by Sebag-Montefiore and consistent with evidence ).

" In December, the paper announced that Beria and the six accomplices mentioned, " in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies ," had been " conspiring for many years to seize power in the Soviet Union and restore capitalism.

Prior to 2002, available historical accounts noted that Beria had a notorious reputation that " almost certainly had some foundation ", but was ultimately inconclusive.

In one incident reported by Colonel Sarkisov, a woman who had been brought to Beria refused his advances and ran out of his office ; Sarkisov mistakenly handed her the flowers anyway, prompting the enraged Beria to declare " Now it's not a bouquet, it's a wreath!

" Beria knew her relatives had already been executed months before.

" 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 ).

The guards insisted that he had successfully claimed to be Lavrenti Beria.

The NKVD head Lavrenty Beria described Ulbricht as " the greatest idiot that he had ever seen.