jun 26, 1953 - Lavrentiy Beria is deposed in a coup d'état lead by Khrushchev who would assume power - Beria is killed

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"The new Kremlin leader – Beria – ordered the reluctant Ulbricht to slow down his program – which he only partially did – and in May 1953, Beria put forward a truly radical proposal: that in return for neutralisation, the Soviet Union accept a reunified capitalist German state… riots broke out the following month in Easter Berline and elsewhere. The rioters were chiefly proletarians, the very people whose dictatorship, in theory at least, was supposed to have brought them freedom. It practice, it had denied them freedom, and that posed a dilemma for Stalin’s successors because at least one communist regime was sitting on a powder keg of resentment, fuelled by the failure of Marxism-Leninism to keep its promises. What if there were others?... They arrested Beria himself, charged him with having been an agent of Anglo-American imperialism, put himself on trial, convicted him, and had him shot. Khrushchev, who orchestrated these events, then aligned the Soviet Union closely with Ulbricht’s repressive regime, something Stalin had never done. It was not an auspicious beginning for those who sought to liberate communism from Stalinism – but it would not be last such attempt." (Gaddis 2006, p. 106)

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