From We Will Bury You, Jan Sejna, 1982
[ statement in the title attributed to Khrushchev ]

With the death in 1953 of Joseph Stalin and the execution shortly afterwards of the Secret Police chief, Lavrenti Beria, there came an end to the great purges and the bloodiest period in Russian history since Ivan the Terrible. . . .

 

On Stalin�s death the Central Committee appointed Georgiy Malenkov as Party First Secretary and Prime Minister. But whereas Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov all delivered eulogies of Stalin in Red Square and committed themselves to continuing his policies, Khrushchev significantly remained silent. Three months later, in July 1953, Beria was arrested, as is now well known, by officers of the General Staff while on his way to a Politburo meeting ; they took him to a military barracks for trial on charges of spying for the West (patently absurd), plotting against the leadership, the murder of thousands of his fellow citizens (undeniably true), and a host of other crimes. Marshal Konev presided over the court martial and sentenced Beria to death ; the sentence was carried out with appropriate ceremony by a military firing squad.

London : Sedgwick & Jackson, 1982, pages 22 and 78-9.