MR. BURGESS'S passion for accuracy does not extend to his
quotations either from myself or from Khrushchev. I called his remark about Beria not 'false' but 'ridiculous.' And the sen- tence he gives from Khrushchev should start : 'In organising the various dirty and shameful cases . . .' The sentence pre- cedes and introduces a long section on crimes in which Beria's complicity is clearly stated. It certainly follows accounts of a number of other cases, ending with the Doctors' Plot. There was every possibility and inducement for Khrushchev to have named Beria explicitly in his actual account of the case if he had found it possible to do so. But even the misinformed Com- munists of Russia were evidently thought unable to swallow that one (though Mr. Burgess shows that he could). And in practice Khrushchev describes Stalin as giving direct instruc- tions to the Security Minister later removed by Beria and rehabilitated by Khrushchev himself. The fact that even Khrushchev did not pin the plot on Beria merely fortifies me in the view, held already by virtually every independent student, that Beria was not responsible. His Ministry released the doctors when he resumed it after Stalin's death. He was not accused of the frame-up in any of the attacks made on him after his own fall. When Ryumin was shot for the affair some months after Beria's execution it was not alleged that he was in any way connected with Beria. I hold no brief for Beria : even if he was not the 'agent of a foreign intelligence service' (as Khrushchev dubs him in the part represented by three dots in Mr. Burgess's quotation), he was a revolting thug. And I thought this of him long before Mr. Burgess was allowed to. Of Stalin, too. And of Khrushchev—but Mr. Burgess has not caught up on this one yet.
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