Beria was made a scapegoat by his rivals for the succession to Stalin, Malenkov and Khruschev, and executed in 1953. Stalinization under Khruschev after 1956 was a blow to Georgian pride if only because he cast aspersions on the Georgians themselves. After 1962 when monuments to Stalin were dismantled in the rest of the USSR, some remained in the country of his birth. The impact of Sovietization on Georgian culture and the environment was severe. Savage purges inculcated a tendency to conformism with the Soviet Communist Party among the survivors.
Few today suggest that people joined the party for reasons other than careerism or opportunism.
In fact by the l970s the Georgian Communist Party had become so notoriously corrupt that even the Brezhnev r gime felt obliged to intervene and promote a new First Secretary to clean up its activities. After Shevardnadze departed to Moscow to take up his post as Soviet Foreign Minister, his protog , Jumber Patiashvili, took charge of the Georgian Communist Party. The all-Union policy of glasnost after 1985 meant that previously dormant nationalist aspirations among the Georgian people began to make themselves heard. There had been dissidents in Georgia before 1985, but Shevardnadze's efficient and heavy-handed methods had disrupted any effective opposition to Soviet power until Gorbachev's reforms. By 1987, several groups which presented themselves as cultural but which had a strongly nationalist programme had appeared.