As head of the NKVD and the agencies that followed, Beria was a Georgian with a macabre taste for violence. That's all been well documented. What I've always found intriguing is how Beria is portrayed after Stalin died in March 1953, right on time for Purim. Various accounts say the intelligence chief was a reformer, practically a Gorbachovian.

A New Republic review of a book by Beria's son, Sergo, "Beria, My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin," says this:

The son details his father's frequent blackmailing of colleagues, showing that Beria was no "liberal" reformer, contrary to Knight. Yet Sergo's book (along with some choice declassified Politburo documents) indicates--and here Knight was on to something--that Beria represented a counterpoint to Stalin as well as to Khrushchev. Beria was a statist, dismissive of the party. He detested Communist agitprop and its accompanying censorship, and he proposed eliminating entirely the party's role in managing the economy and instead relying exclusively on the state apparatus, which was his power base. He did not advocate the market or political pluralism, nor did he want to dismantle the Soviet Union; but he did seek to curtail Russification, preferring to augment the autonomy and the loyalty of the non-Russian elites, his other power base. In the aftermath of the war Beria looked askance at establishing Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, but not because he was anti-empire.

Raul Castro and his military could get behind some of those economic ideas. The problem was, Beria knew too much and threatened Stalin's other henchman. He made enemies, lots and lots of enemies with an eagerness to turn the tables on Beria. A CNN report on the Cold War says this:

"The military hated Beria," says Zubok. "They viewed him as part of the machine that had murdered so many able officers in the 1930s and '40s."

On June 26, at a Presidium meeting, Beria was arrested.

Malenkov -- keeping with Khrushchev's plan -- started to raise the question of Beria at the meeting. But Malenkov, says Zubok, "stammered and seemed to be paralyzed by fear." According to Khrushchev, he seized the initiative and denounced Beria as a traitor. Malenkov pushed a button, and troops entered and seized Beria -- who held in his trembling hand a piece of paper with one word on it: "Alarm."

Other accounts of the incident say Khrushchev was carrying a gun in his pocket in case Beria resisted.

Beria's arrest "was a big act of deception by Khrushchev," says Zubok, "and later, Khrushchev was quite proud of it."

Beria was executed in December 1953.

I'm not saying Raul Castro has this fate in store. But after serving as the Defense Minister since 1959, he is a man with enemies, and true believers in La Revolucion may not look kindly on a program of economic reform.