RUSSIA: Purge of the Purger

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The power to make the charge was the power to make it stick. Did any of these feared and fearing men challenge Malenkov, demand to know what evidence there was to sustain so grave a charge, or rise to Comrade Beria's defense? The subsequent communique said only that the Central Committee had decided to expel Beria from the party as "an enemy of the people."

A few days later, the 33-man Presidium of the Supreme Soviet met, formally removed Beria from his state and ministerial jobs, and ordered him to trial before the Soviet supreme court. The charge: treason.

The Wolves. None of this was made public at the time; but on July 6, the day before the Central Committee's meeting, the government newspaper Izvestia curtly remarked that a Soviet leader, who was not paying proper attention to Communist theory, was going to find his days of authority numbered.

The public naming of names waited for a meeting of the Moscow district of the Communist Party last week. In the marble Hall of Columns in the House of Unions, once a nobleman's club, 2,000 party members heard Nikolai Mikhailov, Moscow district party leader, read out the communiques of the Plenum and the Presidium. One of Communism's great wolves had fallen, and the lesser wolves were tearing at his carcass. Reported Tass: "Speakers at the meeting spoke in wrathful indignation of the foul enemy of the party and the Soviet people—the international imperialist agent Beria," and the audience cheered.

The official party newspaper Pravda laid down the indictment: Beria 1) had been using the MVD (secret police) "against the party and its leadership and against the government ... by selecting workers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of personal loyalty to himself"; 2) had "impeded decisions on the most important and urgent problems concerning agriculture . . . with a view to undermining the collective farms and creating difficulty in the country's food supply"; 3) had striven "to activize bourgeois nationalist elements in the Union republics."

The Façade. Pravda's accusation, appearing 13 days after the tanks rumbled down Sadovaya, brought the first news to the Russian public. In Moscow, long lines of people formed at the newspaper kiosks; some paused to read their newspapers in the street, which is unusual in Moscow. Others crowded around the wall newspapers. Then they went stoically about their business. It was a warm, sunny day. Moscovites who were not working went picnicking, and the swimming places on the Moskva River were crowded. Moscow's crack Torpedo soccer team played the Kiev Dynamos, lost 3 to 1. The diplomatic corps met at the Argentine embassy for evening cocktails, chatted amiably with Andrei Vishinsky, who had been summoned from his Long Island mansion at the end of May. To prepare a new purge trial? Diplomats wondered, but, of course, no one put the question to smiling, casual-seeming Prosecutor Vishinsky.

The news of Beria's downfall reached the outside world in a dawn broadcast from Radio Moscow, followed by an official Tass announcement. Then the speculations began. PURGE DECIDES POWER BATTLE FOR MALENKOV, headlined the Detroit News; MOLOTOV RISES AS PURGE PERILS MALENKOV, headlined the New York World-Telegram, which later front-paged,