At the Kremlin Corral

At the Kremlin gates, the boys were unceremoniously frisked for hidden weapons. Then Russia's rulers hurried to the Politburo conference room for an emergency meeting. It was June 1953.

Not since Stalin's death three months earlier had the men at the top seemed so jittery. Suety Georgy Malenkov nervously eyed dour old Vyacheslav Molotov, his longtime rival for Stalin's favor and now his partner, along with Lavrenty Beria, in the triumvirate chosen to run Russia. Even bouncy Nikita Khrushchev was unwontedly subdued. Only prim, beady-eyed Beria, Russia's top cop, seemed unconcerned. Of all the men in the conference room and an adjoining office, only Beria was ignorant of the meeting's real purpose.

Soon after Stalin's death, Beria's colleagues became leary of Lavrenty. With a vast private army of secret police and 15 divisions of elite troops, the ambitious policeman was in a perfect position to grab control. After tailing Beria for a few weeks, the Party Presidium realized that his coup could come any moment, and so they decided to spring the trap. Acting Party Boss Khrushchev buttonholed Marshal Kirill S. Moskalenko, then commandant of the Moscow antiaircraft defenses, asked him bluntly: "Have you some men who are willing to risk their lives?" Replied Moskalenko: "I have."

Beria was invited forthwith to a special evening conference. To explain the presence of Moskalenko's men, he was told the meeting was to review defense problems. True to his word, Moskalenko had managed to smuggle a submachine gun into the building. He waited in the next room as the others started grilling Beria. They charged that he had been a secret agent for the British army during its occupation of Azerbaijan in 1918. Cried Khrushchev: "You are not a true Communist and never even joined a party organization." Beria, who was presumably above being frisked by his own men, pulled a gun. Khrushchev leaped on him, and Malenkov stubbed a floor buzzer to summon Moskalenko's men, who (according to slightly differing versions) either led him out of the room or machine-gunned him on the spot.

So went the newest chapter in the great Beria whodunit. Officially, the Kremlin announced six months after his arrest in 1953 that he had been secretly tried and executed for murder, espionage, treason, sabotage, and for good measure, perversion. Ever since, there have been many, often conflicting, accounts of Beria's real end. The latest account, leaked in Warsaw last week by Polish delegates back from the 22nd Party Congress in Moscow, was the most detailed version to date and, said they, was told by Khrushchev himself at a glittering champagne party.

In Moscow, the Warsaw chiller was branded "false and fantastic." However the story really ended, the Politburo is apparently trying hard to prevent the rise of another Beria. It abolished the MVD, freed many of its prisoners, and handed over police functions to a Committee on State Security (KGB), which is supposed to be accountable to the party as a whole. In keeping with its friendly new face, the Kremlin last week appointed as its new KGB boss a model of the rising young Soviet-style executive. The new top cop: Vladimir Semichastny, 37, who has been the leader of the Young Communist League, got his first taste of glory in 1958 when he declared that to compare Boris Pasternak to a pig "is unfair to the pigs." It is not known how well he handles a machine gun.

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