The Last Days Of Stalin

CHAPTER ONETHE DEATH OF STALINon Wednesday morning, March 4, 1953, well before dawn, the SovietE arlygovernment issued a startling announcement over Radio Moscow, alerting itspeople and the world at large that Joseph Stalin had suffered a devastating stroke onSunday night, March 1. According to official statements, Stalin had been stricken inhis Kremlin apartment by a cerebral hemorrhage causing loss of speech andconsciousness. He was paralyzed on his right side and both his heart and lungs wereno longer functioning properly. The regime assured the Soviet people that Stalinwas receiving suitable medical treatment “under the constant supervision of theCentral Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the SovietGovernment.” Nonetheless, everyone must “realize the full significance of the factthat the grave illness of Comrade Stalin will involve his more or less prolongednon-participation in leading activity.” This would mean the “temporary withdrawalof Comrade Stalin” from affairs of state.A medical bulletin provided more specific diagnostic detail, includingmeasurements of his labored breathing, an elevated pulse and clinically worrisomehigh blood pressure together with arrhythmia of the heart. Despite Stalin’s “gravestate of health,” the doctors were applying “a series of therapeutic measures . . .toward restoration of the vitally important functions of the organism.”1 The bulletinwas issued over the names of eleven prestigious doctors, including the minister ofpublic health and the chief doctor of the Kremlin. The regime was making clear thatit was providing the most effective care possible in response to a devastatingmedical event; that party leaders were monitoring the work of the minister of publichealth, while the minister was supervising ten other doctors; and that, as their namesindicated, none of them were Jewish. This was crucially important because onlyseven weeks earlier, on January 13, the regime had announced the exposure of asinister conspiracy involving a group of physicians, most of whom were Jews, whowere said to be in league with imperialist and Zionist organizations to carry out themurder of leading Soviet officials by maliciously applying their medical skills.

This was the notorious Doctors’ Plot. Now Stalin had fallen ill. His successors andmembers of his inner circle—Georgy Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, Nikolai Bulganinand Nikita Khrushchev—waited at least forty-eight hours to announce the news,wanting to be sure they agreed on how to divide party and government authority,both to calm the population and, not least, to protect themselves. They had beenliving in fear for their own lives, wondering if and when Stalin would target one,two, or all of them as he had dispatched so many other once-powerful men. Theirshared interest in survival ensured their cooperation at this delicate moment. Theyalso needed to be absolutely confident that Stalin was about to die. Suddenly, hisruthless, personal dictatorship was over. Their fear of him was evaporating.Stalin’s health had long been a question of deep speculation. Who did not dreamabout his dying? Or perhaps people were simply looking for hints of mortalityknowing that except for death itself, nothing demonstrates a common humanitymore vividly than aging and illness. But for some even that was too much of aprohibited instinct. Listening to the medical communiqués, the writer KonstantinSimonov thought it was “senseless to consider what the pulse, the blood pressure,the temperature and all the other details in the bulletins could mean, what theysignified about the medical condition of a seventy-three-year-old man. I did notwant to think about it and did not want to talk about it with others because it did notseem right to talk about Stalin simply as an old man who suddenly took sick.”2 Asthe writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in his memoirs, “We had long lost sight of the factthat Stalin was mortal. He had become an all-powerful and remote deity.”3 But Stalindid not share this illusion. There were countless rumors that he was supportingscientific research into extending human life, even that he spared the famous doctorLina Shtern after her conviction for treason and espionage in 1952 because hethought her work could extend his own life span.4Based on the reports of doctors who had treated Stalin and on other sources ofinformation, it is possible to piece together at least a partial medical history. Stalinsuffered from several disfiguring features. The toes of his left foot were webbed.His face was pockmarked from a bout of smallpox as a child. His left arm appearedto be withered, with an elbow that could not properly bend; there are differentexplanations for this injury, either that an accident as a young boy was not properlytreated or that his left arm was injured during a difficult birth, leaving him with acondition called Erb’s palsy. As he approached the age of fifty, he began to seektreatment for dull pains in the muscles and nerve endings of his arms and legs, acondition that doctors urged him to treat with cures at medicinal baths in southernRussia and the Caucasus. He also suffered from headaches and painful conditions inhis throat. By 1936, his doctors noted problems with his ability to walk and stand,and they began treating him for the initial symptoms of arteriosclerosis.

Following the war, it is believed that Stalin suffered either a heart attack or smallstrokes in 1945 and again in 1947. Based on little hard information, there were anumber of articles in the Western press which speculated about his falteringcondition. In October 1945, the Chicago Tribune, the Paris Press, and Newsweek allclaimed that Stalin had suffered two heart attacks at the Potsdam Conference theprevious summer where he met President Truman for the first and only time. OnNovember 11, the French journal Bref reported that Stalin had suffered a heart attackon September 13 and that he had retired to the Black Sea in order to write hispolitical “testimony.”5 It remains difficult to clarify exactly what was going on.Stalin welcomed US Ambassador Averell Harriman to Sochi on October 24 and 25,and it was Harriman who reassured the press that “Generalissimus Stalin is in goodhealth and rumors of his ill health have no foundation whatsoever.”6His medical condition, nonetheless, continued to deteriorate in the post-waryears. A foreign diplomat who saw him in June 1947 was struck by how much hehad aged since the conclusion of the war; Stalin was now “an old, very tired oldman.”7 According to the Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin fainted at leastthree times in his office, twice in the presence of Poskrebyshev and once in front ofmembers of the Politburo. Volkogonov described these attacks as sudden spasms inhis blood vessels.8 At Stalin’s last appointment with his personal physician, thecardiologist Vladimir Vinogradov on January 19, 1952, his doctor urged him toconsider retirement. Such advice angered Stalin and he dismissed it as a sign ofdisrespect. It was out of the question. (Vinogradov was later arrested in the fall of1952 as part of the Doctors’ Plot.)But Stalin was not entirely oblivious to the need to take care of his health.Beginning in 1945 (following the war), he would leave Moscow for an increasingnumber of months—initially three months a year, then almost five months in 1950,and finally a full seven months from August 1951 to February 1952—finding itmore restful to live and work at one of his southern dachas where the warm weatherand familiar climate of the Caucasus revived him.9 From there he could read reportsand telegrams, all along never letting the country know that he was not working inthe Kremlin. Rarely though did he take Vinogradov’s advice. As a chain smokerwho kept his pipe filled with tobacco, Stalin exacerbated his hypertension and didnot stop smoking until early in 1952. By then, he had also stopped taking steambaths; sitting in a banya only increased his blood pressure. To treat hishypertension, he liked to drink boiled water with a few drops of iodine beforedinner, a useless exercise in self-medication.By 1950, interest in Stalin’s health was widespread in the West, generatingconvoluted rumors of serious illness, even his death. In March, after Stalin failed todeliver an election speech, the US embassy in Moscow reported to Washington that

he might be suffering from throat cancer. Two years later, in January 1952, the USembassy in Warsaw reported that Stalin was ill, leaving “Beria, Malenkov, andMolotov or Shvernik” to act in his place.10 Three weeks later, the US embassy inAnkara reported that the Turkish prime minister, Adnan Menderes, had advised theAmerican ambassador about an intercepted message out of the Polish embassy thatStalin was “seriously ill.”11 Two days after that, the US embassy in Moscow citednewspaper reports out of Amsterdam that Stalin’s health was failing after a heartoperation on December 19, 1951. There was also the claim that Soviet embassyofficers in Amsterdam had been alerted by the foreign office in Moscow that Stalinwas “no longer [a] young man” and that they should “not be alarmed to hear he hadundergone [a] successful heart operation and might expect similar news in future inview his age.”12 Nonetheless, American diplomats added in the very same cable thatStalin had attended the annual Lenin anniversary ceremony at the Bolshoi Theateron January 21 where, the New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury laternoted, Stalin appeared “in obvious good health and spirits.”13 The outgoing USambassador to Moscow, Admiral Alan Kirk, visited President Truman on February4. When they discussed Stalin, the ambassador confirmed that he could not offer“concrete evidence of [Stalin’s] failing health.”14 The Americans were grasping atstraws.Salisbury was following all of these rumors. On February 27, 1952, he sent aletter to his editors in New York—presumably the letter was taken out of the countryin a secure manner to evade Soviet controls—about how he would alert them with acoded message should he learn of Stalin’s death before an official statement cameout. “Frankly,” he added, “I think it is a thousand to one shot that anything will beknown in advance of the official announcement, which almost certainly will bereleased for publication abroad as soon as it is made here.” He also urged hiscolleagues to “query [him] before putting into print any rumors about [Stalin’shealth] such as the very silly item from Amsterdam which AP [Associated Press]carried.”15Western diplomats remained alert to any possible changes in Stalin’s health. ThatJune, US Ambassador George Kennan passed along rumors to Washington thatVyacheslav Molotov and Andrei Vyshinsky were about to replace Stalin, and thatinstructions were being quietly circulated to remove Stalin’s ubiquitous picturesfrom public display. Such talk prompted Kennan to speculate that Stalin waswithdrawing from at least some of his duties, that “his participation in public affairsis sporadic and relatively superficial as compared with [the] period before andduring the war.” Kennan, who was always among the most philosophical ofAmerican diplomats, could not help but comment on the unexpected longevity ofStalin’s “comrades-in-arms.” “Whims and vicissitudes of nature seem to me to have

spared this body of men for abnormally long time. It is time nature began to playher usual tricks, and their effects may well be quite different from anything any ofus have anticipated.”16 Nature did intervene, but not for another seven months.That summer, American military attachés who attended a parade in Red Squarereported to Kennan that the Stalin who stood atop the Mausoleum was probably adummy; “the other members of the Politburo . . . seemed to pay no attention to himand talked unceremoniously past his face.”17 Kennan knew enough to dismiss such areport, although it was widely assumed that Stalin sometimes employed a double.Kennan remained eager to hear from the new French ambassador, Louis Joxe, whohad just seen Stalin in the Kremlin that August. Joxe and his colleagues found Stalin“showing his age very markedly. They said his hair was noticeably thin compared tohis pictures, his face shrunken, his stature much smaller than they had expected.They had the impression that he moved his left arm only with considerabledifficulty and that his bodily movements were in general labored and jerky.” Theyleft the meeting with the distinct feeling that they had been “confronted with an oldman.”18Nonetheless, there are conflicting reports about Stalin’s appearance and his levelof energy in the final weeks of his life. Svetlana Alliluyeva visited her father for thefinal time on his birthday, December 21, 1952. She came away “worried over howbadly he looked.”19 The last foreigners to visit with him were the newly appointedambassador from Argentina, Louis Bravo, and the Indian ambassador K. P. S.Menon, who accompanied the Indian peace activist Dr. Saifuddin Kitchlew to theKremlin. Bravo saw Stalin for nearly an hour on the evening of February 7, 1953,and reported him to be in “excellent physical and mental condition,” belying hisadvanced age.20 Stalin then welcomed Menon and Kitchlew on February 17,spending a half hour with Menon and then more than an hour with Kitchlew, whohad just been awarded a Stalin Peace Prize.21 Here again both men came awayimpressed by Stalin’s “excellent health, mind, and spirits.”22 It is hard to know whatto believe. Perhaps these men, progressives with a degree of sympathy toward theregime, were indulging in wishful thinking and were not going to reveal howStalin’s health was faltering. The reality would soon come to the attention of theworld.23On Saturday evening, February 28, 1953, Stalin entertained his inner circle at theKremlin and then at the Nearby Dacha in the Moscow suburb of Kuntsevo. By thefinal years of his life, Stalin was spending virtually all of his free time there. Thegrounds of the Nearby Dacha included a rose garden, lemon and apple trees arounda small pond, even a watermelon patch which Stalin liked to cultivate. Once inside, avestibule welcomed visitors, with two cloakrooms on either side. To the left, a door

led to Stalin’s study equipped with a large desk that once accommodated militarymaps during the war; Stalin often liked to sleep on a sofa in the study. To the right,another door led to a long, rather narrow corridor with two bedrooms on the righthand side. The same corridor led to a long, open veranda where Stalin wouldsometimes sit in the winter, enveloped in a fur hat and a sheepskin coat withtraditional, Russian felt boots on his feet. The middle door off the front hall led to alarge, rectangular banquet hall where a long, polished table dominated the space. Itwas here that Stalin held ceremonial banquets or welcomed the Politburo formeetings and late-night dinners. Modestly appointed, with standard chandeliers androse-colored carpets, its only wall decorations were two large portraits—one ofLenin, the other of the writer Maxim Gorky. Stalin’s bedroom stood on the otherside of the dining room through a door that was almost invisibly placed in the wall;it contained a bed, two small dressers, and a sink. There was a large kitchen off toanother side where a sizable oven for baking bread stood behind a wooden partition.When attacks of radiculitis (nerve inflammation) made Stalin particularlyuncomfortable, he liked to undress and stretch out on a board above the oven,hoping the heat would relieve his symptoms.The second floor, which could be reached by an elevator, was built toaccommodate his daughter and her family, but she hardly stayed there and Stalinhimself rarely went up there; the two rooms remained mostly empty and dark.The dacha was designed as a place where Stalin could relax, distract himselfwith walks among the trees and rose bushes, or feed the birds. He could receivegovernment officials and the occasional foreign guest, like Mao Zedong in the late1940s, or Winston Churchill who stayed at the dacha during his first visit toMoscow during the war, in August 1942; he gave Stalin a radio which remainedthere. When Svetlana Alliluyeva last saw her father, the ordinary decorations on thewalls “seemed strange” to her: “those awful portraits of writers . . ., the ‘Reply of theZaporozhe Cossacks’ painting, those children’s photographs taken frommagazines.” Stalin had the habit of cutting out pictures and illustrations frommagazines, then hanging them on the walls of the dacha. “Another thing that seemedodd,” his daughter wrote, “was the fact that a man who wanted something to put onthe walls should never have considered hanging even one of the thousands ofpictures he’d been given.” She left unhappy after seeing her father; he looked unwelland the dacha depressed her.24Stalin disliked being alone. As Khrushchev wrote of him, “The main thing wasto occupy Stalin’s time so that he wouldn’t suffer from loneliness. He was depressedby loneliness and he feared it.”25 But he could always summon his inner circle forcompany. As often happened, Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin, and Khrushchev watched amovie with Stalin at the Kremlin on that fateful Saturday night. Two other longtime

associates were not invited; neither Vyacheslav Molotov nor Anastas Mikoyan wasthere. They were living under a cloud.Following the movie, the four “comrades-in-arms” drove out to Kuntsevo tojoin Stalin for dinner. They stayed until the early morning. This was not unusualbecause Stalin liked to keep them unbearably long hours and then sleep late into thenext day. Again, according to Khrushchev, Stalin “was pretty drunk after dinner andin very high spirits.” He walked them to the door, joking, friendly, jabbingKhrushchev “playfully in the stomach with his finger and calling [him] ‘Mikita’ witha Ukrainian accent. This was Stalin’s habit when he was in a good mood. They allreturned home happy”—Beria and Malenkov in one car and Khrushchev andBulganin in another—“because nothing had gone wrong at dinner.”26 It was five orsix o’clock in the morning.But the next day, a Sunday, did not unfold as expected. According to Stalin’sroutine, the guards and household staff would expect to hear from him by 1

disoriented grief. “Stalin was inside everyone, like the hammer alongside the sickle in every mind,” as the writer Andrei Sinyavsky wrote.1 The regime feared that his death would lead to panic and disorder, which in tur