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Beria was a fucking mass murderer, who created two generations of people who were scared to death to speak freely. "Wanted to liberalize the system" my ass.

• arethuza 7y ago
  Absolutely - the guy was a complete monster both at a personal level and through his actions as a senior member of Stalin's regime.
• cryptonector 7y ago
  They all were monsters and murderers. Kruschev was in charge of the party purges at Leningrad. Beria was something special, but then, he had to be: all the serial NKVD heads were and had to be, but Beria was more monstrous than the rest. Now, maybe Beria intended to liberalize once in power, and maybe he even did a bit, just as Kruschev did later too. But it's hard to say that Beria wasn't going to continue being a monster. Now, Kruschev and the rest of the politburo certainly didn't want to be led by Beria -- they knew Beria was a monster and would eat them alive, so Beria had to go. Of course, if Kruschev had meant to be an uber monster himself once in power, Beria would still have had to go. There's no two ways about it: monsters have to take the competition down. Beria had less than four months in power, so it's hard to judge how it would have gone from there had he stayed in power as long as Kruschev. All I know is they were all monsters. Stalin had seen to it that they so be -- they all had to have skin in the game to protect Stalin.