tributed to these failures and to his downfall.
Stalin, who grew increasingly suspicious, even paranoid, in his declining years, made no provision for the succession of power after his death. He died of a stroke on March 5, 1953. A triumvirate of Georgi Malenkov, the new Prime Minister, Lavrenti Beria who was in charge of the secret police, and Khrushchev from his base as Moscow party boss and eventually First Secretary uneasily ruled collectively with the support of the party, the bureaucracy and the military. Still suffering from the devastating after effects (30 percent of capital stock destroyed and 27 million deaths) of the Nazi invasion and late stage Stalinism, the Soviet Union in 1953, according to Suny (1998), "was isolated and dramatically impoverished, with a stagnating economy and a weary population" (pp. 333 & 391).
During the years 1953-1955, Khrushchev generally supported measures proposed by other members of the troika, such as Malenkov's proposed 50 percent tax cut on the peasants, to ease the burden on the hard-pressed peasantry, pushed small steps to improve relations with the West (over the opposition of Foreign Minister Vlacheslav Molotov), such as the Austrian treaty which led to a Soviet troop withdrawal, and endorsed Beria's efforts to begin the process of releasing political prisoners from the Gulag. Khrushchev and his other colleagues, however, feared Beria's power and conspired to have him arrested in June 1953. They later tried and executed him. It took Khrushchev about 16 months to emerge from the power struggle among Stalin's original heirs as primus inter pares, first among equals. According to Taubman (2003), "he identified his case with that of the Communist apparatus, manipulated the party machine against his rivals, wielded domestic and foreign policy for political purposes, and made and betrayed allies" (p. 241). He and his colleagues arranged for those who lost out in these bitter interneci...