“A double was shot”: what really happened to Beria
The death of the head of a world power always entails an inevitable struggle for power, even if an official successor has been appointed. The actions of Stalin’s entourage, who unexpectedly left in the spring of 1953, were no exception to the rule. Party and military functionaries, rightly fearing possible reprisals by L.P. Beria, accused him of treason, and then shot him. The only question is when it was done: illegally at the time of arrest or after the trial, in compliance with all legal formalities? No one doubted that the party elite, tired of the constant purges of its ranks during Stalin’s lifetime, would try to eliminate L.P. Beria, who had concentrated the levers of control over the USSR special services in his hands. The unfolding struggle for power was not a revelation for Lavrenty Pavlovich himself. True, he planned to come out of it victorious, but miscalculated. He was betrayed even by his closest friend and colleague G.M. Malenkov, who was immediately appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. At the same time, it should be noted that L.P. Beria was largely ruined by excessive self-confidence. He had at his disposal not only the entire repressive apparatus of the country, but also a huge package of documents compromising all the country’s leaders. He knew perfectly well all the hidden pages of their biographies, which they themselves sincerely wished to forget.
However, as the saying goes, don’t corner your cat. It was in the position of such a cat that the leaders of the country and the party, who were left alone with Lavrenty Pavlovich after the death of J.V. Stalin, felt themselves. However, they had no real power to rely on in the confrontation with their main rival for power in the country. In this situation, a significant role was played by the military, which recently emerged victorious from the bloodiest war of mankind. Combat generals were able to act quickly and decisively, moreover, they had an army behind them, and the authority of G.K. Zhukov was indisputable. Soon, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU (July 2-7, 1953), taking advantage of the absence of L.P. Beria, the party bosses formulated the accusations that they planned to bring against their victim. Beria was going to be blamed for: the creation of a nervous situation in the circle of people surrounding J.V. Stalin; espionage of members of the state and party leadership; criminal links with Josip Broz Tito; the desire to organize a united state of bourgeois Germany, as well as work in his youth for the intelligence of the capitalist countries – Azerbaijan and Georgia.
When Beria’s fate was finally decided, the question arose of how to implement the plan. Further scenarios differ significantly. According to the official version, L.P. Beria was arrested at a meeting of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on July 26, 1953 by a group of military men headed by G.K. Zhukov. However, the participants of this event later described its details in different ways. However, minor inconsistencies in their words can be explained by the desire of each to ascribe to himself the main merit in this matter. After his arrest, Beria was placed in the guardhouse of the headquarters bunker of the Moscow Military District. A closed trial and execution of L.P. Beria on December 23, 1953 also took place here.
The most surprising thing is that, according to a number of researchers, it was not L.P. Beria who was arrested, but his double, specially trained for such cases. It was he who was shot on December 23, 1953. Moreover, this hypothesis arose almost immediately after the events described and was quite popular in the corridors of power of those years. First of all, for some reason, Beria was not recognized at the trial by his former associates, who were not involved in the conspiracy against him. Secondly, historians have not found an act on the cremation of Beria’s body, while similar documents on the cremation of his closest deputies shot on the same day have been preserved. Thirdly, there are the memoirs of contemporaries who claim that, according to their information, on the day of his arrest, machine gun shots were heard in Beria’s mansion, and then a body covered with a tarpaulin was taken out of the building, which, judging by the outlines, could have belonged to Beria. The main proponent of this version is L.P. Beria’s son Sergo. We will most likely never know how it all really happened. Intelligence agencies know how to keep their secrets.