Beria was shot half an hour after his verdict in 1953; his son lived as Sergo Gegechkori and died five months after Russia's Supreme Court refused to clear his father

Lavrentiy Beria ran Stalin's secret police. After Stalin died in March 1953, Beria was arrested. He was convicted of anti-Soviet terrorism, state treason and counter-revolutionary activity, and accused of being a British spy. The trial lasted two days. On 23 December 1953 he and six associates were shot; Beria was shot half an hour after the verdict. His son Sergo lived under the name Sergo Gegechkori. Under a law meant to pardon victims of political persecution, Beria's relatives asked the courts to rehabilitate him, arguing that he too had suffered under the Soviet system. In May 2000 the Military Collegium of Russia's Supreme Court refused. Its judgment said Beria "was the organizer of repression against his own people" and could not be a victim, and called him and his associates "organizers of terror" who harmed thousands of innocent people. Sergo maintained that the charges against his father had been fabricated. He died of a heart attack in his Kyiv apartment in October 2000, aged 75. Rem Merkulov, son of the executed security chief Vsevolod Merkulov, had also petitioned, and said his family had never been allowed to read the case files. In 2014 the Supreme Court refused to rehabilitate three of Beria's associates in the same words.