the old Politburo's size. However, an informal Bureau of the Presidium, comparable to the old Politburo, was established in order to make decision-making more manageable. This bureau consisted of Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, Maksim Saburov, and Mikhail Pervukhin, with future decision-making limited in practice to the first four or five of these. After Stalin Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, unleashed a new struggle for succession to the leadership of the party and the country. Molotov had been widely thought to be Stalin's obvious successor but he had fallen into disfavour during Stalin's final years and had been removed from the Politburo in 1952 (though he was reinstated after Stalin's death). The struggle for succession became a contest between Lavrentiy Beria (the feared leader of the NKVD), Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev. At the meeting of the Presidium's inner bureau held immediately after Stalin's death, Beria proposed Malenkov as Chairman of the Council of Ministers (or Premier). The size of the Presidium was also cut in half in order to remove the influence of the new members that had been appointed in 1952 – the new Presidium had exactly the same membership as the old bureau of the Presidium except that Molotov and Mikoyan were reinstated. Malenkov also became First Secretary of the Party (as the position of General Secretary was now known) but had to relinquish that position and leave the party Secretariat on March 14, 1953, in the name of collective leadership due to the dissatisfaction of others in the leadership with Malenkov's assumption of both leadership roles. Despite Beria's history as Stalin's most ruthless subordinates, he was at the forefront of destalinization and liberalisation after Stalin's death, possibly as a means of winning support for his campaign to become leader. Beria not only publicly denounced the Doctors' plot as a "fraud" but he instigated the release of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners from the gulags (prisoners he had had a hand in arresting in the first place), brought in a liberal policy towards non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union thus reversing decades of Russification and persuaded the Presidium and the Council of Ministers to urge the Socialist Unity Party regime of Walter Ulbricht in East Germany to slow down the "construction of socialism" and institute liberal economic and political reforms. The surviving party leadership feared Beria and