We have to remember that the "Beria planned to sell out the GDR" line was pushed by his victorious rivals as an ex post facto justification for vilifying him. Mark Kramer in a three-part 1999 article in the *Journal of Cold War Studies* has argued that the Soviet leadership *as a whole* favored reunification of Germany in May-June 1953 and only changed its mind after the uprising of June 17. Beria (whose ouster had already been planned) then became the convenient scapegoat. Certainly there is evidence that Malenkov, at least, supported a unified "bourgeois democratic" Germany
https://soc.history.what-if.narkive...l-be-a-bourgeois-democratic-republic-malenkov and it is arguable that it was Malenkov's ouster in 1955, not Beria's arrest in 1953, which was the real death of the idea. As I noted in that post (quoting Robert Conquest) "A conference held under Communist auspices in Warsaw in February 1955 had proposed simultaneous withdrawal of occupation armies from Germany and of Soviet troops from Poland, the unification of Germany and free elections under the plan put forward by Eden at the Berlin Conference in January 1954 (and then rejected by Molotov), and urged that Germany should not enter any military coalition and her frontiers be guaranteed by the European states and the United States (*Trybuna Ludu*, February 9, 1955). Malenkov fell at this time, and no further mention of this conference's decisions was ever made."
Of course after Malenkov's downfall, he was added to Beria as would-be-betrayer-of-the-GDR by Khrushchev, who later told Walter Ulbricht: "Malenkov and Beria wanted to liquidate the GDR, but we fired one and shot the other..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=2bEYCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA41 But if Kramer is right, *at the time* (i.e., before the Berlin Uprising) Khrushchev and the rest of the Soviet leaders also went along with the idea.
In the same way, we have to ask whether the other features of March-June 1953--the "New Course" in eastern Europe, the condemnation of "Russification" in the Union Republics, the sudden halt to Stalin-worship--were really distinctively *Beria* policies. Here I think Robert Conquest's arguments in *Power and Policy in the USSR* (pp. 220-222) are still interesting:
"If we consider the policies towards minorities of the Soviet Union and the Communist states of Eastern Europe in the period immediately following Stalin's death, it is only too easy to regard them as 'Beria policies'. That this is in a sense a true description seems undeniable. But it requires a certain amount of reservation.
"In the first place, it is inconceivable that policies and acts of policy could have been put through at this point by Beria alone, without the consent of a majority of the Party Praesidium. It may be that the motives for such consent fell short of enthusiastic support: indifference, pressure and even perhaps a desire to see the originator of the policies held to account for their failure, might have played a part in securing that consent. But on the whole it seems that the Praesidium felt the force of the arguments which motivated Beria's policy, even when they were not, perhaps, prepared to draw such radical conclusions as he.
"The removal of Melnikov for Russifying tendencies in the Ukraine cannot have been carried out without the approval of the Party Praesidium. The fact that, though he received minor posts after Beria's fall, he was never restored even to full membership of the Party Central Committee is an indication that the majority was unprepared to revert to the Russian nationalism which marked Stalin's last years, even though they may not have been prepared to go as for as Beria in the other direction....
"Similarly we may conclude that the new course in Hungary in 1953 was acceptable to the whole Praesidium. Imre Nagy states...that Rakosi attempted to bring it to a close on the pretext that it was Beria's policy and was taken to task for this by several members of the Praesidium, who urged a continuance of the new line (This was presumably at the consultation between Soviet and Hungarian leaders which took place in August 1953.) It may indeed be that the Party Praesidium was not as united on the point as it purported to be, and the effective repudiation of the Hungarian 'new course' which took place at the same time as Malenkov's fall may show that Khrushchev himself was among the doubters. Or he may have changed his mind. Or (for all the alternatives should be kept in mind in matters of this sort) it may have been part of a bargain made between him and more 'Stalinist' members of the Praesidium to secure their support against Malenkov.
"In any case, a majority of the Praesidium in July and August 1953 must have taken the position Nagy reports. And yet the fact that Rakosi believed that he could now repudiate the policy on the grounds that it was Beria's presumably indicates that he knew that Beria had in fact been making the running and putting the more extreme relaxation view in the matter, which is also in accord with the other evidence. A similar view can be taken of the East German situation. There the policy of relaxation was not abandoned after the rising of June 17. But the rising could be blamed on excesses in implementing it, and when Ulbricht removed the 'Rightist' elements later in the year the Politburo member in charge of the Security Police, Zaisser, was openly referred to as both a Right deviationist and an associate of Beria. This would tend both to confirm our view of Beria's line and to show that he disposed of a powerful apparatus for pressing it.
"A similar argument could be advanced in the matter of de-Stalinisation'. The absence of reference to Stalin in 1953 is remarkable, and though it seems to have been most complete in the period before the arrest of Beria it did not show much sign of revival for many months thereafter. (And here again it may be argued that the increase in favourable reference to Stalin which took place later was part of a political move by one faction to secure the support of old Stalinists.)..."
In short, I think we should not overstate the uniqueness of Beria's views in 1953. He could not have implemented them without the support of the rest of the Praesidium--even if they may have had more reservations about them than he had. And many of these views continued to be implemented after June 1953, at least until Malenkov's fall in 1955.
