Following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, he was chosen to personally execute Lavrentiy Beria, the former head of the NKVD.

From September 1939 to December 1940, he was in China as Chief of Staff of Soviet military advisers at the headquarters of Chiang Kai-shek.

Upon returning to the Soviet Union, he was made Chief of Staff of the 11th Motorized Machine Gun Artillery Brigade at Kaunas in the Baltic Special Military District.

After World War II he was Chief of the General Staff and Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Forces (1950–1953).

In December 1953, he was chosen personally to execute Lavrentiy Beria as part of a plot led by Nikita Khrushchev[1][2] and assisted by the military forces of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov (Batitsky was Colonel-General and First Deputy Commander of the Moscow Military District at the time).