http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/5279.html
She contends that despite his crimes -- he was, in addition to being a torturer, a mass murderer, blackmailer, and a tyrant's hatchetman, a serial rapist -- that he was, in the brief period after Stalin's death and before his own execution, a genuine reformer. Here is a summary of her argument (and a dismissal of Sergo Beria's book) from an article by Stephen Kotkin in TNR, which is not a usual source for me, but the article is useful on this question, despite the usual kneejerk anticommunism of the mag. Basically, it's true that Beria tried to position himself as a reformer after Stalin died, though not as a Gorbachevite. It's also true that he was brought in to cool down the terror after Yezhov, his late unlamented predecessor as chief secret policeman, and hard as it may be to believe, he did so.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030331&s=kotkin033103
De-Stalinization would seem to be a secure feather in Khrushchev's cap, and yet his historic claim has been questioned. Huge uprisings in the Gulag in 1953-1954, when it held at least 2.5 million prisoners, had to be put down with tanks and fighter planes, demonstrating that Stalin's terrible legacy would confront his heirs whether or not they confronted it themselves. Also, Khrushchev initially resisted efforts to probe and to criticize Stalin's rule, seeking instead to scapegoat Beria for the millions of arrests, executions, and deportations. And it was Beria who initiated de-Stalinization, in the months between Stalin's death in March 1953 (happy fiftieth anniversary!) and his own execution in July--that is, three whole years before Khrushchev's secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress. Stalin was barely cold when his police chief Beria acted on his own to repudiate the Doctors' Plot and other falsified cases, to release Gulag prisoners en masse, and to launch numerous self-serving but unorthodox initiatives in domestic and even foreign affairs, such as an unauthorized rapprochement with Tito and a proposal to cashier East Germany.
So was Lavrenti Beria, notorious rapist and torturer, the true "liberal reformer," and Khrushchev merely a schemer--not to mention an anti-Semite--who tweaked and therefore in effect preserved Stalinism? Such was Amy Knight's "revisionist" argument in her serviceable if overwrought biography, Beria, Stalin's First Lieutenant, which appeared in 1993. Such is also the contention of an unusual work that Knight uncomfortably denounced (in the Times of London) for its attempt to rehabilitate Beria, but that uncannily conveys the flavor of its subject: namely, Beria--My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin. Sergo Beria's inevitable apologia for his father, who here stands for everything good and opposes everything evil, is too absurd to warrant refutation. . . . .
Beria was a statist, dismissive of the party. He detested Communist agitprop and its accompanying censorship, and he proposed eliminating entirely the party's role in managing the economy and instead relying exclusively on the state apparatus, which was his power base. He did not advocate the market or political pluralism, nor did he want to dismantle the Soviet Union; but he did seek to curtail Russification, preferring to augment the autonomy and the loyalty of the non-Russian elites, his other power base. In the aftermath of the war Beria looked askance at establishing Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, but not because he was anti-empire. On the contrary, he evidently wanted to use military types to consolidate two blocs or federations, one in the north centered on Poland, the other in the south centered on Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, which would be nonCommunist but economically oriented toward the Soviet Union. Were these consistent views? Could any of this have worked? Would a more federalized Soviet Union and two loyal non-Communist blocs have lasted longer than the Russian-dominated USSR or its Communist satellites?
Beria recognized his own vulnerabilities for his utmost complicity in monstrous bloodshed, and also the similar and larger vulnerabilities of the Soviet system, and he was alive to many overlooked opportunities. Alone in the hierarchy he seems to have appreciated the strategic significance, during and after the war, of Turkey and Iran. . . .
Khrushchev wrote that Beria was the sole person able to proffer frank advice to Stalin on foreign policy, but Stalin seems not to have followed it. Neither did Khrushchev, whose triumph over Beria signaled the re-assertion of the party over the state, and of Communist ideology over realpolitik. Both Beria and Khrushchev were Stalinists, but with significant variations. They offered different paths of de-Stalinization, with divergent implications: cautious retrenchment founded on dangerous cynicism versus dangerous risk-taking founded on ultimately disabling idealism.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Relatedly, in Sergo Beria's book on his dad, he
> talks
> about his Vater's proposed reforms after Stalin's
> death. If Beria Jr. is to be believed, they were
> grandiose in scope -- rehabilitating Trotsky,
> reunifying Germany, etc. Now, Beria Jr. is not a
> disinterested party. So, anybody know about this? I
> mean the nature, scale of B's proposed reforms, not
> his reasons for them or his uckiness or non-uckiness
> as a person. (So, a certain person, spare me endless
> Wikipedia citations on Beria's evil.)
>
> (B. Jr. BTW says he wrote his book so that Russians
> would stop blaming everything on the Georgians and
> accept some responsibility themselves.)
>
> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > A two-part contribution from the Marxist Literary
> > Group's resident
> > Stalinist, Grover Furr:
> >
> > >Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform,
> Part
> > Two
> > >
> > >http://eserver.org/clogic/2005/furr2.html
> > >
> > >Part One:
> http://eserver.org/clogic/2005/furr.html
> > ___________________________________
> >
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
> Nu, zayats, pogodi!
>
>
>
> __________________________________________
> Yahoo! DSL – Something to write home about.
> Just $16.99/mo. or less.
> dsl.yahoo.com
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL – Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com