also ordered him to replace the MVD Guard with the guard of the Moscow Military District. Finally, Khrushchev suggested expelling Beria from the Communist Party and bringing him before a military court. Moskalenko's special forces obeyed. Zhukov was a member of the military tribunal during the Beria trial, which was headed by Marshal Ivan Konev. On 18 December 1953, the Military Court sentenced Beria to death. During the burial of Beria, Konev commented: "The day this man was born deserves to be damned!" Then Zhukov said: "I considered it as my duty to contribute my little part in this matter." Minister of Defence When Bulganin became premier in 1955, he appointed Zhukov as Defence Minister. Zhukov participated in many political activities. He successfully opposed the re-establishment of the Commissar system, because the Party and political leaders were not professional military, and thus the highest power should fall to the army commanders. Until 1955, Zhukov had both sent and received letters from Eisenhower. Both leaders agreed that the two superpowers should coexist peacefully. In July 1955, Zhukov—together with Khrushchev, Bulganin, Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei Gromyko—participated in a Summit Conference at Geneva after the USSR signed the Austrian State Treaty and withdrew its army from the country. Zhukov followed orders from the then Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov and Communist Party leader Khrushchev during the invasion of Hungary following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Along with the majority of members of the Presidium, he urged Khrushchev to send troops to support the Hungarian authorities and to secure the Austrian border. Zhukov and most of the Presidium were not, however, eager to see a full-scale intervention in Hungary. Zhukov even recommended the withdrawal of Soviet troops when it seemed that they might have to take extreme measures to suppress the revolution. The mood in the Presidium changed again when Hungary's new Prime Minister, Imre Nagy, began to talk about Hungarian withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. That led the Soviets to attack the revolutionaries and to replace Nagy with János Kádár. In the same years, when the UK, France, and Israel invaded Egypt during the Suez crisis, Zhukov expressed support for Egypt's right of self-defence. In October 1957, Zhukov visited Yugoslavia and Albania aboard the Kuibyshev, attempting to repair the Tito–Stalin split of 1948. During the voyage, Kuibyshev encountered units of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and "passing honours" in the form of full salvos were