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.

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 ).

The silence oppressed him, made him bend low over the horse's neck as if to hide from a wind that had begun to blow far away and was twisting slowly through the darkness in its slow search.

He was too old -- when he passed up and through the corridor of pines that lined the trail he could see ahead, he was passing from life.

The bullet had torn through the flesh just above the knee, inflicting an ugly gash that was forming a pool of blood on the floor.

The water was there, so much of it that it spread all through the dead orchard.

It was partially cemented by ages and pressure, yet it crumpled before the onslaught of the powerful streams, the force of a thousand fire hoses, and with the gold it held washed down through the long sluices.

The slight flutter that had disturbed the motion of her heart when she entered the forest was gone now, and even the dim groves of trees through which she occasionally passed did not reawaken her fear.

A lamp burned inside, but Brannon, peering through the window, saw that the office was empty.

He paused only long enough to ascertain that Jess's buckskin was still missing and that his own gray was all right, then climbed through a back window and dropped to the ground outside.

Russ ran through the bills and named an amount it was highly unlikely any cowpuncher would come by honestly.

It was a rough long ride through the mud and pot holes.

As far as he could see there was no hole to climb through it.

It was only a fifteen-minute flight, but before it was through Greg felt himself developing a case of claustrophobia.

There was no real sign of the river now, just a roiling, oily ribbon of liquid movement through muddy waters that reached everywhere.

Ramey heard the words again inside, weakened, the way moving water sounds through a grove of trees, until he was not sure whether it was sound or light-headedness pressing in his ears.

Keith Sterling had looked down on the Brahmaputra more times than he could remember, during the war days when he flew over the Hump of the world, thinking it high adventure in those times before man was guiding himself through outer space.

All he had to do was light the fuses of the dynamite sticks, run to within ten yards of an open window in the barn and hurl the sticks through.

Hands-off the economy was replaced by conscious guidance through planning -- the economic side of the constitutional revolution.

Even two decades ago in Go Down, Moses Faulkner was looking to the more urban future with a glimmer of hope that through its youth and its new way of life the South might be reborn and the curse of slavery erased from its soil.

Often it is recognized that all the details of the pattern may not be essential to the outcome but, because the pattern was empirically determined and not developed through theoretical understanding, one is never quite certain which behavior elements are effective, and the whole pattern becomes ritualized.

He points out that from the time of Jackson on through World War 1,, evangelical Protestantism was a dominant influence in the social and political life of America.

Riding trains, hitching hikes on trucks across Germany, slipping through guarded frontiers with the help of secret guides, he eventually reached Vichy France, and, by the winter of 1943, was back in Virginia.

Governor Alfred E. Smith was the official host at the children's party.

A politician was approached by a man seeking the office of a minor public official who had just died.

The radical nature of the innovation in the Congo was not emphasized in the official announcements.

Typical of such an experience was the occasion of a somewhat formal official welcome in the offices of the Union of Soviet Artists.

He was the official procurer for King Farouk, now in exile.

Although there was no doubt in my mind and we've been handling it as one I'm glad to have it made official ''.

But as the tour reached Pensacola a month ago, Player was leading Palmer in official winnings by a few hundred dollars, and the rest of the field was somewhere off in nowhere.

Then his son did something '' -- Rachel threw up her hands -- `` I don't know what, but something, to an official here -- it was during the Mandate -- and the son was imprisoned.

The President said the primary goal of his actions as president ( he used the first person pronoun and explicitly refers to his " official duty ") was preserving the Union:

Using former slaves in the military was official government policy after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system.

An the other hand, the armed forces of the MPLA ( now the official armed forces of the Angolan state ) and of UNITA fought each other until the leader of UNITA, Jonas Savimbi, was killed in action, in 2002.

He was the official world champion from 1975 to 1985 when he was defeated by Garry Kasparov.

The official winners were Peugeot and Panhard as cars were judged on their speed, handling and safety characteristics, and De Dion's steam car needed a stoker which was forbidden.

The official winner was Paul Koechlin in a Peugeot.

However, during the tour of Australia in 2006 / 7, the MCC official accompanying the urn said the veil legend had been discounted, and it was now " 95 % certain " that the urn contains the ashes of a cricket bail.

There was more chopping and changing in the teams, given that there was no official board of selectors for each country ( in 1887 – 88, two separate English teams were on tour in Australia ) and popularity with the fans varied.

Renan's head was turned away from the building, while Athena, beside him, was depicted raising her arm, which was interpreted as indicating a challenge to the church during an anti-clerical phase in French official culture.

On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for " the appalling way he was treated ".