The leadership that inherited Stalin's empire had the difficult political choice either to continue the policies of their dead chief complete with domestic terror, or to embark on internal reforms and a more conciliatory foreign policy. A general consensus was shared in the Kremlin that consumer needs had to be met to a greater degree, that the harsh exploitation of the peasantry had to be alleviated, and that a less confrontational posture had to be adopted toward the rest of the world. The new leader of the party, Nikita Sergeivich Khrushchev, convinced other members of the ruling Presidium that the first step was to eliminate the threat of the secret police. Beria was arrested and executed, and the police were once again subordinated to the party. Within months Beria's lieutenants, both in the centre and in Transcaucasia, were removed from their positions.
Although there were significant shifts in Transcaucasia after Beria's fall, the Armenian Communist leadership proved somewhat resistant to purging itself. A cohesive group of Armenian Communists, schooled and promoted during the long period of Arutiounov's rule (1937-1953), made no move to demote their chief. Only Second Secretary Zaven Grigorian was dismissed. Mir Jafar Baghirov, head of the Azerbaijani party, was arrested, and in September 1953 the Georgian party was given a new leadership; but not until November 1953, and only after the Moscow Central Committee pressured the Armenians, was Arutiounov replaced by Suren Tovmasian. The new first secretary had come up through the Arutiounov machine and had been a member of the Central Committee since 1938. Moreover, the chairman of the Council of Ministers, Anton Kochinian, another Arutiounov protégé, retained his position as head of the government. This renewed elite, with deep roots in the Stalinist party, remained in charge of the Armenian republic with relative little change for the next two decades. Though Tovmasian was replaced by a relative outsider, Iakov Zarobian, in 1960, Kochinian held onto his post until he stepped into Zarobian's place in 1966. Notoriously corrupt, Kochinian remained the dominant Armenian politician until his political disgrace in November 1974. Thus, for two decades after Stalin's death and the end of the Beria's satrapy in Transcaucasia, the Armenian party continued to be dominated by the generation of men who had come to power in the late 1930 at the time when the Great Purges carried away the Old Bolsheviks of the revolutionary generation.
Much more significant change in Armenia occurred at the social and cultural level. The Khrushchev period (1953-1964) was the most intensive time of reform that the Soviet Union had experienced since the 1930s. Even before Khrushchev's so-called secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, a period of "thaw" began in culture. Anastas Mikoyan, now a close colleague of Khrushchev, went to Yerevan in March 1954 to reverse the antinational policy of the local Communist Party. The Armenian writers who had been condemned as nationalists were to be published. In 1954 the works of Armenian writers who had survived the prison camps, such as Gurgen Mahari, Vagharshak Norents, and Vahram Alazan, appeared, alongside those of the writers of the 1920s and 1930s who had not survived the purges, most notably Yeghishe Tcharents and Aksel Bakunts, were now praised as good Communists. At the same time political figures, such as Sahak Ter-Gabrielian and Aghasi Khanjian, who had been killed by Beria's police, were rehabilitated. Thousands of political prisoners returned to Yerevan and told of their years of torture and deprivation in the Gulag (prison camp system). Everywhere the "cult of personality", a euphemism for Stalinist dictatorship and terror, was condemned. Young people particularly began to question more seriously the system that had given rise to Stalin, and the seamless fabric of ideological conformity that had marked the 1930s and 1940s began to shred, never to be sewn together again. The campaign against Stalin, launched by Khrushchev and Mikoyan at the Twentieth Party Congress, culminated in the early 1960s with the removal of the largest statue of Stalin in Yerevan. Years later a huge monument to "Mother Armenia" was placed on the empty pedestal on which the "Father of All People" had stood.
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