Kremlin Hospital who also worked for the MGB, wrote to Stalin two days before Zhdanov’s death, claiming that his doctors had failed to recognize the gravity of his condition. The letter was ignored and filed away, but three years later it was used by Stalin to accuse the Kremlin doctors of belonging to a ‘Zionist conspiracy’ to murder Zhdanov and the rest of the Soviet leadership. None of the doctors who had treated Zhdanov was Jewish, so Stalin had to find a way to link his death with Zionists. The fabrication of the plot hinged on the confession beaten out of Dr Iakov Etinger, a leading diagnostician, who had been arrested in November 1950 for uttering anti-Soviet thoughts to relatives and friends. Etinger confessed that he was a Jewish nationalist and that he had the protection of Viktor Abakumov, the head of the MGB. After the arrest of Abakumov, in July 1951, hundreds of doctors and MGB officials were arrested and tortured into making confessions, as Stalin concocted a huge international conspiracy that linked Soviet Jews in the medical profession, the Leningrad Party organization, the MGB and the Red Army to Israel and the USA. The country seemed to be returning to the atmosphere of 1937 with the Jews in the role of the ‘enemies of the people’. In December 1952, Stalin told a meeting of the Central Committee that ‘every Jew is a potential spy for the United States’, thus making the entire Jewish people the target of his terror. Thousands of Jews were arrested, expelled from jobs and homes, and deported as ‘rootless parasites’ from the major cities to remote regions of the Soviet Union. Stalin ordered the construction of a vast network of new labour camps in the Far East, where all the Jews would be sent. Throughout the Soviet Union people cursed the Jews. Patients refused to visit Jewish doctors, who were hounded out of practice and, in many cases, forced to work as labourers. Rumours spread of doctors killing babies in their wards. Pregnant mothers stayed away from hospitals. People wrote to the press calling on the Soviet authorities to ‘clear out’ the ‘parasites’, to ‘exile them from the big cities, where there are so many of these swine’.100
And then at the height of this hysteria, Stalin died.
5
Stalin had suffered a stroke and lay unconscious for five days before he died on 5 March 1953. He might have been saved if doctors had been called on the first day, but amidst the panic of the Doctors’ Plot none of Stalin’s inner circle dared take the initiative. Stalin’s own doctor was tortured for saying he should rest. If Stalin awoke from his coma to find doctors by his bed, he might consider the act of calling them a sign of disloyalty.101 It is a fitting irony that Stalin’s death was hastened by his politics.
On the evening Stalin died, Simonov was in the Kremlin for a general meeting of the Soviet leadership: 300 members of the Supreme Soviet and the Central Committee. Everybody was aware of the grave situation, and most of the delegates had turned up early in the Sverdlov Hall. ‘We all knew each other,’ recalls Simonov, ‘we recognized each other and had met many times through our work.’
We sat there, shoulder to shoulder, we looked at each other, but no one said a word. Nobody asked anything of anybody else. It seems to me that no one even felt the need to talk. Until the start [of the session] there was such a silence in the hall that, if I had not sat there for forty minutes myself, I would not believe that it was possible for three hundred people to sit so close to each other without making a sound.
At last the Presidium members arrived* and announced that Stalin was dying. Simonov had the strong impression that, with the exception of Molotov, the other members of this inner circle were relieved by the news: it was visible on their faces and audible in their voices.102
From the Kremlin Simonov went to the
I wrote the first two lines and suddenly, unexpectedly, I burst into tears. I could deny it now, because I don’t like tears, neither mine nor anybody else’s, but only those tears properly conveyed the shock I had experienced. I did not cry out of sorrow, nor out of pity for the deceased: these were not sentimental tears, they were the tears that result from shock. A revolution had happened, and its impact was so enormous that it had to be expressed in something physical, in this case in the convulsive weeping that seized hold of me for several minutes.
Speaking later with his fellow writers, Simonov discovered that they had felt the same. Many followed his example, penning heartfelt eulogies on Stalin’s death. The sense of shock and grief, it seems, affected people who had experienced Stalin’s reign in widely different ways. On the night after Stalin died, Simonov wrote:
There are no words to communicate
All the unbearable pain and sorrow,
There are no words to narrate
How we mourn for you, comrade Stalin!
Tvardovsky, the ‘kulak’ son who had renounced his family in the 1930s, wrote:
In this hour of great sorrow
I cannot find the words,
To express fully All our people’s loss…
Even Olga Berggolts, who spent two years in prison during the Great Terror, wrote a mournful poem to her torturer:
The heart bleeds…
Our own, our dear one!
Holding your head in its arms,
The nation weeps for You.103
Stalin’s death was announced to the public on 6 March. Until the funeral, three days later, his body lay in state in the Hall of Columns near Red Square. Huge crowds came to pay their respects. The centre of the capital was mobbed by mourners, who had travelled to Moscow from all corners of the Soviet Union; hundreds of people were killed in the crush. Simonov was among those chosen to stand guard over Stalin’s body. He had a unique opportunity to observe the reactions of ordinary people as they filed past. He noted in his diary on 16 March:
I do not know how to give an accurate description of the scene – or even how to put it into words.Not every body cried, not every body sobbed, but somehowe very body showed some deep emotion. I could sense a kind of spiritual convulsion inside every person filing past at the very moment they first saw Stalin in his coffin.104
This ‘spiritual convulsion’ was felt across the Soviet Union. Mark Laskin, who had no reason to love Stalin, broke down in tears when he heard the news. Surprised by his own emotional reaction, he thought it might have to do with the overwhelming role Stalin had played in his life:
I had spent my entire adult life in Stalin’s shadow – I was sixteen when Lenin died in 1924 – and all my thoughts had been shaped by the presence of Stalin. I waited on his words. All my questions were addressed to him, and he gave all the answers, laconically, precisely, without room for doubt.105
For people of Laskin’s age, or younger, Stalin was their moral reference-point. Their grief was a natural reaction to the disorientation they were bound to feel upon his death, almost regardless of their experience in Stalin’s reign.
Some victims of the Terror even felt genuine sorrow on Stalin’s death. When Zinaida Bushueva heard the news, she burst into tears, although her husband had been arrested in 1937, and she had spent the best years of her life in the ALZhIR labour camp. Her daughter Angelina recalls her mother coming home that day:
They were all crying, my mother and my sister and my grandmother. My grandmother said that it would have been better if she had died instead of him. She was four years older than Stalin. She loved him. She often wrote to him. She believed that it was Stalin who had allowed her to write to her daughter [in the labour camp] so that she could reunite the family… ‘It would be better if I had died and he had lived,’ my grandmother kept saying. I
