How could the clown Khrushchev defeat the unstoppable manipulator Beria?

He wasn't a "psycho", Stalin was flawed and human though not to the point he'd assign tasks as critical as stealing US nuclear secrets to someone mentally ill. Beria was morally driven and genuinely believed in Stalin's cause, when he carried out his duties he thought he was doing it to protect millions of people.

Dosen't matter what he actually did, the rumours about his black car are enough of an excuse to get him strung up the minute he loses his sponsor as chief on internal security

Voroshilov was one of the few people who was able to do pretty much whatever he wanted. He was enough of a war-hero that killing him was never an option for Stalin, and Voroshilov even went so far as to denounce the Great Purge to Stalin's face. Moreover, he was the highest-ranking military officer for 15 years, and remained one of the highest ranking from 1925 to 1953 and was Hero of the Soviet Union. He was very highly regarded in the Party and in military circles (even if he was seen as a relic in the latter).

he sounds pretty based
all I remember from him was dropping a ceremony sword in front of the Big 3 in Tehran

> Pssst..Malenkov... I did him in, I saved your asses

top 10 anime betrayals

Lots of rumors were spread during the purges too, why are they false while this one is true?

How'd those rumours tend to go in the purge again? Why would this be any different, you need to clean house and not have a pro-Stalin head of internal security when you plan on denouncing him

He was a household name in the Soviet Union, along with Budyenny. We call Stalin an autocrat, but it's not quite the same, he had such power because had had powerbrokers in the early USSR (Voroshilov, Molotov, Budyenny, etc.); Beria, though, was never really a part of Stalin's clique, and was never liked by the members of that clique. When Stalin died, Beria had no one who could support him, and pretty much everyone put aside their differences to get rid of the guy they didn't like. Beria was a brainlet for thinking that he had any power independent of Stalin's good graces, and he was even more of a brainlet for thinking he could challenge, at the same time, Stalin's old clique *and* the other groups in Soviet politics.

>On warm nights during the war years, Beria was often driven slowly through the streets of Moscow in his armored Packard limousine. He would point out young women to be detained and escorted to his mansion where wine and a feast awaited them. After dining, Beria would take the women into his soundproofed office and rape them. Beria's bodyguards reported that their orders included handing each victim a flower bouquet as she left Beria's house. The implication was that to accept made it consensual; refusal would mean arrest. In one incident his chief bodyguard, Sarkisov, reported that a woman who had been brought to Beria rejected his advances and ran out of his office; Sarkisov mistakenly handed her the flowers anyway prompting the enraged Beria to declare "Now it's not a bouquet, it's a wreath! May it rot on your grave!" The woman was arrested by the NKVD the next day.[

so that means that Beria didn't kill Stalin, right? he had no popularity either in the party or among the ordinary people who would shit their pants upon hearing his name, he was connsidered in the party as Stalin's executioner, a dog that survived for too long and nothing more than that

He potentially could have done well under Malenkov, but he lost

He may have killed Stalin in an effort to save his skin; Stalin had already laid the ground work for Beria being purged.

so he had no ambition more than remaining the security chief until retirement? I thought the struggle between him and Malenkov/Khrushchev was inevitable. It just came too fast that he didn't see it coming

He had the ambition of not dying quite frankly, when Stalin died it probably gave him a few more months alive

>After Stalin's stroke, Beria claimed to have killed him. This aborted a final purge of Old Bolsheviks Mikoyan and Molotov, for which Stalin had been laying the groundwork in the year prior to his death. Shortly after Stalin's death, Beria announced triumphantly to the Politburo that he had "done [Stalin] in" and "saved [us] all", according to Molotov's memoirs. Notably, Beria never explicitly stated whether he had initiated Stalin's stroke or had merely delayed his treatment in the hope he would die (as argued by Sebag-Montefiore and consistent with evidence).[32] Support for the assertion that Stalin was poisoned with warfarin[33] by Beria's associates has been presented from several sources, including Edvard Radzinsky in his biography Stalin and a recent study by Miguel A. Faria in the journal Surgical Neurology International[citation needed]. Warfarin (4-Hydroxycoumarins) is cited[citation needed] as the likely agent; it would have produced the symptoms reported, and administering it into Stalin's food or drink was well within the operational abilities of Beria's NKVD.[34][35][36] Sebag-Montefiore does not dispute the possibility of an assassination by poison masterminded by Beria, whose hatred for Stalin was palpable by this point, but also notes that Beria never made mention of poison or confessed to using it, even during his later interrogations, and was never alone with Stalin during the period prior to his stroke (he always went with Malenkov to defer suspicion).[31]

Stalin had his plans to purge Beria, Malenkov, Molotov, Mikoyan and Kaganovich

It seems that he wanted his successor to be from the younger and cleaner generation, there is one he virtually named his successor but I can't remember the name currently

>there is one he virtually named his successor but I can't remember the name currently
That was Malenkov, he liked him again once he said Zhukov was a faggot asshole meanyhead

no, someone younger, but I can't remember the name now, but Malenkov was the second man by 1953 since Molotov had no power by that time

Mikhail Suslov