Stalin: A Biography

might increase if they broke the custom. They were mistaken. The visit annoyed Stalin, and the other Presidium members advised Molotov and Mikoyan to keep out of his sight.⁴⁶ Yet still his entire demeanour baffled as well as scared everyone. Plainly he was not the person he once had been. After his death his associates were to remark on a psychological as well as a physical deterioration in him. They noted the onset of an unpredictability which they called ‘capricious’. Previously he had stayed fairly loyal to the group of leaders he had established in the late 1930s; the Leningrad Affair of 1949–50 had been the exception, not the rule, in the post-war years.⁴⁷ But he had come to proffer or withdraw favour with an arbitrariness that terrified them.

So what was the Leader up to? Was there a great plan behind the moves he was making? Would the elimination of several veterans — and the persecution of all Jews — mark the end of any projected purge? Could such a purge be carried through to its end by a man whose physical decline was unmistakable? To his close associates, whether or not they had been denounced by him, there appeared no point in guessing about precise motives. Stalin had been killing fellow politicians for many years. He had not lost the habit with the onset of decrepitude.

54. DEATH AND EMBALMING

As 1952 was drawing to a close, Stalin held a birthday party in the large reception room at his Blizhnyaya dacha on 21 December.¹ The Boss was intent on having a good time and had invited the leading politicians. His daughter Svetlana was also present. Pictures of Soviet children covered the walls. Stalin had also arranged for paintings of scenes from the works of Gorki and Sholokhov to be pinned up.² Much drink was consumed. The gramophone played folk and dance music all night long, and Stalin was in charge of the choice of discs. It was a merry occasion.

Yet two guests looked glum. One was Khrushchev, who hated having to dance and called himself ‘a cow on ice’. Mischievously Stalin called upon him to perform the energetic Ukrainian gopak. Perhaps the Boss, who as a boy failed to master the lekuri,³ derived perverse satisfaction from his embarrassment. The other person who did not enjoy the evening was Svetlana. At the age of twenty-six, already twice married and a mother, she could not stand being told what to do and rejected his request for a dance with her. His shortened arm usually inhibited Stalin from taking to the floor but he had had a glass or two that evening. When Svetlana demurred he flew into a rage. Grabbing her ginger hair, he dragged her forward. Her face turned red and her eyes filled with tears of pain and humiliation. Other guests felt for her but could do nothing. Khrushchev, still smarting from his own embarrassment, never forgot the scene: ‘[Stalin] shuffled around with his arms spread out. It was evident that he had never danced before.’ But he did not judge Stalin harshly. ‘He behaved so brutishly not because he wanted to cause hurt to Svetlana. No, his behaviour toward her was really an expression of affection, but in the perverse, brutish form that was peculiar to him.’⁴

Other revellers worried about something a lot worse than being yanked by the hair on to a dance floor. The probable imminence of a political purge agitated all of them. Pravda on 13 January 1953 published an editorial on ‘Evil Spies and Murderers Masked as Medical Professors’. Stalin had edited the text.⁵ Although he stayed all this time at Blizhnyaya, he was no mere spectator of the complex political drama.⁶ Members of the Party Presidium — as the Politburo had been redesignated — read Pravda with their hearts in their mouths. The tension was reaching breaking point. On 28 February Stalin invited Malenkov, Beria, Khrush-chev and Bulganin to watch a film with him at the dacha. Stalin was as welcoming a host as ever. Food and drink were lavish. Party Presidium members, after a skinful of Georgian wine, tried to avoid saying anything that might annoy the Leader. When dinner was over, Stalin told the servants to open the cinema facility in the ground-floor gallery. The party broke up at four o’clock in the morning of 1 March.⁷ None of the departing grandees recalled that Stalin looked ill. According to Khrushchev, they left him well oiled and on good form.⁸ This was to be expected after a long night of carousing.

As the limousines of his visitors departed into the darkness of the Moscow countryside, Stalin gave a quick instruction to his guards. One of them, Pavel Lozgachev, reported the contents to his chief Ivan Khrustalev. Stalin had announced that he was going to bed and that they could go off duty and sleep; he had also ordered that the guards should not disturb him until such time as he called them into his rooms.⁹

From mid-morning on 1 March disquiet grew among the guards when they came on duty because Stalin failed to beckon them inside. The routine had been in place for years. A group known as the mobile security team patrolled Blizhnyaya dacha. Each guard’s shift alternated between two hours on duty and two hours’ rest so as to maintain alertness. The guards’ positions around the dacha were designated by numbers.¹⁰ Stalin’s unusual ban on disturbing him stayed in force, and yet they all knew that they would get the blame if something untoward had happened. His habit was to ask for a glass of tea with a slice of lemon in the late morning. He was as regular as clockwork. Deputy commander Mikhail Starostin became nervous that no such request had been made.¹¹ There was no higher authority at the dacha to turn to. Poskrebyshev and Vlasik were no longer in post and it was unclear who in the Party Presidium, if anybody, could and would countermand a personal order given by Stalin. This was a situation which had worked to Stalin’s advantage when he was fit. He was about to pay a fatal price for his extraordinary concentration of power.

At 6.30 p.m. a light was switched on in the dacha. The patrolling guards were relieved at this sign of life, surmising that all must be well with the Leader. They assumed that, after getting up late, he was tending to his mass of duties. Yet Stalin failed to emerge from his room. He neither called for food nor gave commands for anything to be done. No one caught a glimpse of him. The guards therefore remained perplexed about what they should do next. At around 10 p.m. a package arrived for Stalin from the Central Committee offices in Moscow. This forced the security group to make a decision. After an exchange of opinions it was resolved that Pavel Lozgachev should take the package to Stalin. Nervously entering the room, he came upon a shocking scene. Stalin was slumped on the floor. Although he had not quite lost consciousness, he could not speak and had wet himself. Evidently he had had a stroke. Stalin’s wristwatch lay on the floor next to him showing the time at half-past six. The guards reasonably guessed that Stalin had fallen over at that earlier moment in the evening when he had put on the light.¹²

No one dared do the most obvious thing and call a doctor. Needing an instruction from higher authority, the guards phoned Minister of State Security Sergei Ignatev in Moscow. Even Ignatev felt out of his depth and phoned Malenkov and Beria. Everyone at the dacha frantically wished to receive orders. All they did on their own initiative was to lift Stalin from the floor and move him on to his divan and place a blanket over him.¹³

Receiving Ignatev’s news from Malenkov, Presidium members wondered whether Stalin’s final demise was at hand. But exactly how they acted is still an unsolved riddle. Not only Stalin’s fellow politicians but also his guards kept their mouths shut for many years about the episode — and memories deteriorated with the passage of time. The vicissitudes of the struggle for the political succession also had a distorting effect on the records. The victor was Khrushchev. Beria was executed in December 1953 and Malenkov, on losing to Khrushchev, was not inclined to record his testimony. Khrushchev and Svetlana Allilueva were left as the only witnesses who could freely give their accounts before old age dimmed their memories. Unfortunately neither Khrushchev nor Allilueva was averse to fantasising to exaggerate their knowledge and virtue. It was a paradoxical situation. Stalin himself had rigidly regulated the issuance of details about his life; their scantiness and unreliability were extreme. Yet the provision of those details became even less dependable from the day he lost that control. Dates, procedures, personalities and events are as clear as a barrel of tar for the period from 28 February to 5 March 1953.

The fullest account came from Khrushchev. According to him, several of them went out to the dacha in the early hours of 2 March. Supposedly these included Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin and Khrushchev. It is not certain whether or not they — or some of them — made a second visit before deciding to call for medical assistance.¹⁴ For whatever reason, it was hours before doctors were summoned to care for Stalin. The precise time of their advent is in dispute. Svetlana, who had been summoned from a French language class,¹⁵ put it at 10 a.m. in her memoir; but the more plausible account by the guard A. I. Rybin, who was there at the time, put it at 7 a.m.¹⁶ In any case it is clear that Presidium members were not quick to arrange for such assistance. This gave rise to the suspicion that they deliberately let Stalin’s condition