Policeman on Trial

Five months after his arrest startled the world, the Kremlin announced abruptly last week that Lavrenty P. Beria. ex-boss of the Soviet secret police, chief of Russia's atomic program and longtime comrade-in-arms of Malenkov. had broken down and admitted to the "most serious crimes against the state." Beria. added Radio Moscow, will face trial "at a special sitting of the Soviet supreme court."

This somber announcement was greeted with what Pravda called "spontaneous demonstrations of the Russian workers and peasants." In Tiflis, capital of Beria's home state, "the entire Georgian people" was said to be condemning the traitor for "sowing poisonous seeds of distrust of our great brother Russian people."

The "confession" and the carefully controlled outcry were to be expected. What was new was the publication of a list of Beria's alleged accomplices: a who's who of Communist cops. Apparently Beria's group had taken advantage of Stalin's death to establish the MVD as a private enterprise of their own. But in the labyrinthine complexity of Soviet "monolithic" leadership, no such separation of powers can be permitted: Russia's elaborate intertwining of soldiers, party, commissars and secret police is designed to prevent such coups. Beria's apparatus had to be eliminated and loyal Malenkov men substituted as chiefs of the secret police. Whether the new regime had to call in the army to assist in the purge is still not clear, but one fact is: never before in the 36 years of Communist rule until the arrest of Beria, had the Kremlin found it necessary to announce that the leaders of the armed forces supported the authorities in the measures taken.

Last month the commissars of Leningrad, Armenia and Tula disappeared. More recently the Minister of Agriculture, Ivan Benediktov, was publicly denounced. Last week's announcement named six ministers and MVD generals to stand trial with Beria on charges of "high treason." They were all of Cabinet rank:

BOGDAN KOBULOV, deputy minister of internal affairs of Georgia.

PAVEL Y. MESHIK, an NKVD department head and minister of the interior in the Ukraine.

LEV E. VOLODZIMIRSKY, the major general in charge of MVD's "vitally important matters section."

VLADIMIR G. DEKANOZOV, minister of the interior in Georgia and Soviet Ambassador to Berlin in the heyday of the Nazi-Soviet alliance.

SERGEI A. GOCLIDZE, MVD boss of the Siberian regions.

VSEVOLOD N. MERKULOV, the MVD's top-ranking spy catcher.

Capitalists in Disguise. Together with Beria, these six men had controlled the secret police of the Soviet Union. With some 15 divisions of elite troops and informers in every workshop, they wielded power that until recently was practically unlimited. Merkulov was confirmed as Minister of State Control by Malenkov himself, and he was still officially in office until last week. Goglidze, "the czar of Soviet Siberia," controlled an area almost as big as the U.S. and was responsible, under Beria, for the vast new arms plants that Moscow hopes will one day supply the Red armies in the Orient.

By charging such men with treason, the new regime was asking Russians to believe that for the past 20 years their lives, their security and, of late, their atomic energy program was controlled by a "morally depraved" police chief and a gang of "criminals" who were really "bourgeois capitalists" in Red revolutionary clothing. On Stalin's death it was Beria who nominated Malenkov as Premier of the Soviet Union, and Malenkov returned the compliment by naming Beria his deputy.

Case Study of Terror. According to the official indictment, Beria began "betraying" the Soviet regime 34 years ago, before it was properly established. In 1919, in Baku, "he carried out secret agency duty . . . under the control of British intelligence." During the '205 in Georgia, he "planted spies" throughout the Soviet bureaucracy and perfected "as his basic method, slander, intrigues and various provocations against honest government workers who were an obstacle to him."

"With the aid of these criminal methods," the Soviet public prosecutor said, "Beria got responsible posts." By implication, he is accused of the murder of Sergo Ordzhonikidze (Soviet industrial chief, intimate crony of Stalin), "who felt a distrust toward him." and more specifically, of "wreaking vengeance on Ordzhoni-kidze's family ... It has also been established." the indictment says, "that the plotters carried out terrorist murders of persons from whom they feared exposure. In this way. Beria put to death M. S. Kedrov. a member of the Communist Party since 1902."

Purger's Dream. The prosecutor further accused Beria and his henchmen of "spying for imperialist reactionaries . . . resuscitating remnants of bourgeois nationalism," and--presumably as a sop to powerful Agriculture Boss Nikita Khrushchev--of "sabotaging the Soviet farm program."

There was no hint when the trial would be held, except for the ominous side note that Beria & Co. will be tried "in accordance with the law of Dec. 1, 1934"--an edict issued on the day Stalin's friend Kirov was murdered, before the great purge trials began. Its requirements, a purger's dream:

P:"The case must be heard without the participation of the parties."

P: "Sentences to the highest degree of punishment (i.e., death) are to be carried out immediately."

P:"Appeal against the sentence and petitions for pardon are not to be admitted."

On the basis of this law. there will apparently be no great trial in which Beria appears publicly and recants. He may already be dead, the secret trial simply a case of dictatorship trying to bury its crimes under a cloud of retroactive "legality."

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