Oddly enough, Beria in 1953 and Malenkov in 1954 took a more "liberal," less "Stalinist" line in both domestic and foreign questions than Khrushchev did at the time.
Beria's attacks on Russification and on the anti-Semitism of the "Doctors' Plot" in the USSR, his opposition to the "forced construction of socialism" in the GDR, and his support of the reformist "New Course" in eastern Europe in 1953 are well-known. But even after the East German uprising and the downfall of Beria, the "New Course" in countries like Hungary continued--until after Malenkov lost power in 1955. Moreover, not only did Malenkov tell East German parliamentarians in 1953 that "Germany will be a bourgeois-democratic republic" but as late as early 1955, Malenkov was apparently taking a "softer" line on German unification than Khrushchev: "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." Robert Conquest, *Power and Policy in the USSR: The Struggle for Stalin's Succession 1945-1960,* p. 261. See my post on Malenkov and German unification at
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/Z-eAjLyqJZg/XRJrrtbDsUwJ
"Also, it should be remembered that it was Malenkov who first proposed devoting more resources to consumer goods instead of concentrating on heavy industry--a position that Khrushchev denounced as a "right deviation." And when Malenkov said that a third world war would lead to the "end of world civilization" Khrushchev objected that this kind of talk was "theoretically mistaken and politically harmful." (I am not saying this to portray Khrushchev as a Stalinist fiend. On both the consumer goods issue and the nuclear war issue Khrushchev very likely agreed with Malenkov, and was simply denouncing the latter's "heresies" to win the support of unreconstructed Stalinists like Molotov for his own ascent to power. I am merely saying that at least for a while Malenkov did seem *less* Stalinist than Khrushchev.)"
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/qgdNtrB8IGs/iVOEg-16qfkJ
What I think people like Malenkov and Beria wanted (unlike such unreconstructed Stalinists as Molotov and Kaganovich on the one hand and anti-Stalinists like Mikoyan on the other) was to downgrade Stalin (and end some of most irrational policies) without explicitly denouncing him. I had a post some months ago on how this was done in 1953-4:
***
How to downgrade Stalin without explicitly denouncing him was illustrated in 1953. Starting with the repudiation of the Doctors' Plot in April, there was a greater abstention from excessive praise of Stalin during 1953 than there would be until 1956. (This was especially true of the months before Beria's fall, but even after it, there was not much of a revival of Stalin-praise until 1954-5--when it may be related to Khrushchev's wanting to get Molotov and Kaganovich behind him to oust Malenkov.) As Robert Conquest summarizes it in *Power and Policy in the USSR* (p. 275-6):
"Bulganin's speech of May 1, 1953, made no mention of Stalin. Nor did his order for V.E. Day anniversary on May 9. *Pravda* of June 28 — that is, immediately after the fall of Beria — carried an article 'The People — Creator of History', by F. Konstantinov, which was an attack on the idea of the role of 'eminent personalities' in social history. The Communist Party was referred to as 'the leader'. An editorial in Pravda of July 13, 1953, strongly in favour of collective leadership, said : 'Decisions taken by individuals are always or almost always one-sided.' [Incidentally, Stalin himself had said that, [1] so this is an example of using something Stalin said to implicitly criticize Stalin--DT]
"The cult of personality and collective leadership issues were raised at the July 1953 plenum, as we know from Aristov's report to the XXth Congress : 'As is known, the July 1953 plenary session of the Central Committee revealed very blatant violations of this most important principle of Party leadership engendered by the cult of the individual, and demanded the constant implementation of Lenin's instructions regarding collectivity in Party leadership...'
"At a joint session of certain sections of the Academy of Sciences on October 19, 1953, several speakers, including Pospelov and F. Konstantinov, attacked the cult of personality. (Pospelov advanced the argument that Stalin himself was opposed to such a thing.) *Voprosy Filosofii* (No. 4 of 1953, which went to press in August) had an article on the fiftieth anniversary of the Party, in which Stalin is downgraded not to the 1956 level, but to very much the position he was to occupy in 1957-59. Lenin is frequently referred to, the Party and the Central Committee are given boundless praise, but Stalin appears only twice — once in a quotation from Malenkov's XIXth Congress Speech, and once as leader of the Central Committee in the struggle with the Trotskyites and other deviationists. The 1936 Constitution, hitherto almost always called the Stalin Constitution, is now referred to simply as the New Constitution. Victory in World War II is attributed no longer to Stalin, but to the Party. The edition of the *Philosophical Dictionary* published in November 1953 had a number of changes, entirely omissions, from that published in 1952, on the role of Stalin. Although it was a longer edition, its biography of Stalin was considerably shorter and it omitted a number of the strongest adulations and the most absurd of the falsifications — e.g. the claim made in the earlier edition that Stalin created the Constitution and wrote the *Short Course History of the Communist Party*.
"Stalin's birthday on December 21, 1953, was passed over in silence. But in December 1954 *Pravda* published a long article with a photograph of Stalin, writing, among other things, 'It was he who mercilessly exposed the enemies of the people. Under the leadership of its Central Committee and of Stalin the Communist Party destroyed the traitors and defeatists.' *Izvestia*, still under Malenkov's influence, devoted no more than a short note to the birthday...."
What made it difficult in 1956 to avoid direct mention of Stalin were the "rehabilitations" (posthumous and otherwise) that had been going on. Yet even that could theoretically be accomplished by blaming all unjust condemnations on Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria. But there was an obvious problem in doing this, as Khrushchev noted in the Secret Speech: "Could Yezhov have arrested Kosior, for instance, without Stalin’s knowledge?...Could Yezhov have decided such important matters as the fate of such eminent Party figures? No, it would be a display of naiveté to consider this the work of Yezhov alone. It is clear that these matters were decided by Stalin, and that without his orders and his sanction Yezhov could not have done this."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...nt-manner-by-khrushchev.429693/#post-15953859
[1] "No, single persons cannot decide. The decisions of single persons are always, or nearly always, one-sided decisions."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/dec/13a.htm
