It's hard to say, but he certainly did make liberal reforms in the aftermath of Stalin's death: for one, he abolished torture in the NKVD. Something which was to benefit him personally after he was arrested at the behest of Khrushchev. He also seem to genuinely want to give some of the SSRs real autonomy instead of being part of a fake federation. After Stalin died: he started phoning some of the NKVD branches in the Republics and basically told them "fire all the Russians and replace them with Republic's own ethnicity" and even when some of the regional NKVD chiefs responded that they didn't have enough qualified/vetted people to replace the Russians, Beria just said go do it anyway.

According to...I can't remember now off the top of my head but it was either Mikoyan or Khrushchev, there was one meeting after Stalin's death in which they were going to welcome a delegation from East Germany. And all the party leadership were excited because they were finally realizing Marx's dream of a "proletarian republic" in Germany. And Beria got annoyed and told them to "shut up about Socialist Germany already" and told them that Socialism only exist in Germany at the point of a red army bayonet and that "we need a peaceful Germany more than a socialist Germany".

Of course, this could all just be slander and justification by the other members of Stalin's inner circle who turned on him and executed him, and it's impossible to know what was going on in Beria's head. But he seemed to be on of the people most cognizant about the sham that Stalinism was. His downfall came much for the same reason as Khrushchev's in 1964: namely that he was seeing as violating the norms of collective leadership and towards seizing power for himself more than it was his personal crimes or policies.

Source: On Stalin's team by Sheila Fitzpatrick

It is really hard to say definitively. Amy Knight wrote (what I believe is) the only English-language biography of Beria, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (which was first released in 1993, and I wouldn't be surprised if the editorial you mention is related to this), and suggested he was trying to implement some reforms.

Of course this must also be seen in the context that there was a power struggle going on in the Kremlin, and these reforms were also a means for Beria to consolidate his own position, as his reforms would be able to reduce the influence other major figures had, while increasing his own.

As he was only really in power for a matter of weeks, it is really impossible to say with any certainty what his ultimate plans were. But looking at his history and career trajectory, I would say he was probably more pragmatic in terms of his own survival and advancement before that of the USSR as a whole; if the country benefited from his own success, then that would be a bonus. But again, it is really hard to make any solid judgment, or at least I would not be comfortable doing so on the limited information there is (though I highly recommend Knight's book; she writes really well and is quite clear and accessible).