Nikita Khrushchev and allied Presidium members had Lavrentiy Beria, the feared head of the Soviet secret police, arrested during a Kremlin meeting, fearing his growing power and knowledge of state secrets in the wake of Stalin's death three months earlier. Beria was secretly tried and executed by December 1953, marking a decisive turn away from the terror apparatus that had defined the Stalin era.
Stalin's death in March 1953 left a dangerous vacuum, and Beria, who had run the NKVD/MVD security apparatus responsible for the Gulag system and mass executions, moved quickly to consolidate power, releasing some prisoners and proposing reforms that unsettled his Presidium colleagues. Khrushchev, sensing that Beria intended to use his control of the secret police to eliminate rivals, secretly organized a conspiracy with military support, including Marshal Georgy Zhukov.
At a Presidium meeting in the Kremlin, armed officers, prearranged by Khrushchev, burst in and arrested Beria before he could react—a dramatic reversal for a man who had orchestrated countless arrests of others over two decades. He was held incommunicado, tried in a secret military tribunal on charges including treason and rape, and shot in December 1953, with his execution disclosed only sparingly to the public afterward.
Beria's fall marked a genuine turning point: the security services were reined in and partially subordinated to Party control, and the mass terror characteristic of the late Stalin years receded. It cleared Khrushchev's path to eventually consolidate leadership and, three years later, deliver his own reckoning with the Stalinist past in the 1956 Secret Speech.
Key people: Lavrentiy Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Zhukov