That afternoon, Stalin may have taken a steam bath. As he got older the heat eased the arthritis in his stiff arm, but Professor Vinogradov had banned banyas as bad for high blood pressure. Beria had told him he did not have to believe doctors. Now he threw caution to the winds. In the evening, he was driven into the Kremlin where he met his perennial companions, Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin, in the cinema. Voroshilov joined them for the movie, noting Stalin was “sprightly and cheerful.” Before he left, he arranged the menu with Deputy Commandant Lozgachev and ordered some bottles of weak Georgian wine.
At 11 p.m., Stalin and the Four drove out to the dacha for dinner. The Georgian buffet was served by Lozgachev and Matrena Butuzova (Valechka being off duty that night). Bulganin reported on the stalemate in Korea and Stalin decided to advise the Chinese and North Koreans to negotiate. Stalin called for more “juice.” They talked about the doctors’ interrogations. Beria is supposed to have said that Vinogradov had a “long tongue,” gossiping about Stalin’s fainting spells.
“Right, what do you propose to do now?” said Stalin. “Have the doctors confessed? Tell Ignatiev if he doesn’t get full confessions out of them, we’ll shorten him by a head.”
“They’ll confess,” replied Beria. “With the help of other patriots like Timashuk, we’ll complete the investigation and come to you for permission to arrange a public trial.”
“Arrange it,” said Stalin. This is Khrushchev’s account: he and Malenkov later blamed Beria for all Stalin’s crimes but their own parts in the Doctors’ Plot remain murky. It is unlikely that Beria was the only one encouraging Stalin.
The guests were longing to go home. Stalin was pleased with the suave Bulganin but growled that there were those in the leadership who thought they could get by on past merits.
“They are mistaken,” he said. In one account, he then stalked out of the room, leaving his guests alone. Perhaps he returned. The accounts seem contradictory—but then, so was his behaviour. At about 4 a.m., on the morning of Sunday, 1 March, Stalin finally saw them out. He was “pretty drunk . . . in very high spirits,” boisterously jabbing Khrushchev in the stomach, crooning “Nichik” in a Ukrainian accent.
The relieved Four asked the “attachment,” Colonel Khrustalev, for their limousines: Beria as usual shared his ZiS with Malenkov, Khrushchev with Bulganin. Stalin and the guard escorted them to their cars. Indoors, Stalin lay down on a pink-lined divan in the little dining room, with its pale wooden panelling, which was where this old itinerant conspirator had chosen to sleep that night—not helpless, not mad, but a brutal organizer of Terror at the awesome peak of his power.
“I’m going to sleep,” he cheerfully told Khrustalev. “You can take a nap too. I won’t be calling you.” The “attachments” were pleased: Stalin had never given them a night off before. They closed the doors.
At midday that Sunday morning, the guards waited for the Boss to get up, sitting in their guardhouse that was linked to his rooms by a covered passageway twenty-five yards long. But there was “no movement” all afternoon. The guards became anxious. Finally, at 6 p.m., Stalin switched on the light in the small dining room. He was obviously up at last. “Thank God, we thought,” said Lozgachev, “everything’s all right.” He would call for them soon. But he did not.
One, three, four hours passed but Stalin did not appear. Something was wrong. Colonel Starostin, the senior “attachment,” tried to persuade Lozgachev to go in to check on the old man. “I replied, ‘You’re senior, you go in!’” recalled Lozgachev.
“I’m afraid,” said Starostin.
“What do you think I am? A hero?” retorted Lozgachev. They were not the only ones waiting: Khrushchev and the others expected the call to dinner. But the call did not come.
58
“I Did Him In!”: The Patient and His Trembling Doctors
At around 10 p.m., the CC mail arrived. The short, burly Lozgachev, gripping the papers, stepped nervously into the house, going from room to room. He was especially noisy because “we were careful not to creep up on him . . . so he’d hear you coming.” He “saw a terrible picture” in the small dining room. Stalin lay on the carpet in pyjama bottoms and undershirt, leaning on one hand “in a very awkward way.” He was conscious but helpless. When he heard Lozgachev’s steps, he called him by “weakly lifting his hand.” The guard ran to his side: “What’s wrong, Comrade Stalin?”
Stalin muttered something, “Dzhh,” but he could not speak. He was cold. There was a watch and a copy of Pravda on the floor beside him, a bottle of Narzan mineral water on the table. He had wet himself.
“Shall I call the doctor maybe?” asked Lozgachev.
“Dzhhh,” buzzed Stalin. “Dzhhh.” Lozgachev picked up the watch: it had stopped at 6:30 when the stroke had hit him. Stalin gave a snore and seemed to fall asleep. Lozgachev dashed to the phone and called Starostin and Butuzova.
“Let’s put him on the sofa, it’s uncomfortable . . . on the floor,” he told them and the three lifted him onto the sofa. Lozgachev kept vigil—“I didn’t leave the Boss’s side”—while Starostin telephoned MGB boss Ignatiev, in charge of Stalin’s personal security since Vlasik’s dismissal in May 1952. He was too frightened to decide anything. He had the power to call doctors himself but he had to act carefully. He ordered Starostin to call Beria and Malenkov. He probably also warned his friend Khrushchev because he needed protection against Beria who blamed him for the Doctors’ Plot and the Mingrelian Case, and wanted his head. Beria was probably the last to find out.
Meanwhile the “attachments” moved Stalin onto the sofa in the main dining room where the famous dinners took place, because it was airier there. He was very cold. They covered him with a blanket and Butuzova rolled his sleeves down. Starostin could not find Beria, probably entangled with his mistress somewhere, but contacted Malenkov who said he would search for him. Half an hour later, he called back: “I haven’t found Beria yet,” he admitted.
After another half-hour, Beria called: “Don’t tell anybody about Comrade Stalin’s illness,” he ordered, “and don’t call.” Lozgachev sat anxiously beside Stalin. He said his hair went grey that night.
Malenkov had also called Khrushchev and Bulganin: “The Chekists have rung from Stalin’s place. They’re very worried, they say something’s happened to Stalin. We’d better get out there . . .” Yet Khrushchev claimed that when they arrived at the guardhouse, they “agreed” not to enter but to leave this sensitive matter to the guards. Stalin was now sleeping and would not want to be seen “in such an unseemly state. So we went home.” The guards do not remember this visit. It seems more likely that Khrushchev, Bulganin, and probably Ignatiev, after frantic consultations, sent in Beria and Malenkov to find out if anything was really wrong. Somehow, during the night, the anti-Semitic campaign in Pravda was halted by someone— or was it Stalin’s deliberate pause?310
At 3 a.m. the morning of Monday 2 March, this little delegation arrived at Kuntsevo, over four hours after Starostin’s first call to Malenkov. Both men acted in character: Beria was the dynamic, keyed-up (possibly drunk) adventurer, Malenkov, Stalin’s measured, nervous clerk. While Beria marched into the hall, Malenkov noticed to his horror that his shoes were creaking and slipped them off. “Malanya” tucked his shoes under his arm and tiptoed forward in his socks with the grace of a flabby dancer.
“What’s wrong with the Boss?” They looked at the sleeping Generalissimo, snoring under his blanket, and then Beria turned on the “attachments.”
“What do you mean . . . starting a panic?” he swore at Lozgachev. “The Boss is obviously sleeping peacefully. Let’s go, Malenkov.”
“Malanya” tiptoed out in his socks while Lozgachev tried to explain that “Comrade Stalin was sick and needed medical attention.”
“Don’t bother us, don’t cause a panic and don’t disturb Comrade Stalin!” The worried guards persisted but Beria swore: “Who attached you fools to Comrade Stalin?”
The limousine d
rove away to meet the waiting Khrushchev and Bulganin. The bargaining for power surely started that night. Lozgachev returned to his vigil while Starostin and Butuzova went to sleep in the guardhouse.
Dawn broke over the firs and birches of Kuntsevo. It was now twelve hours since Stalin’s stroke and he was still snoring on the sofa, wet from his own urine. The magnates surely discussed whether to call doctors. It was extraordinary that they had not called a doctor for twelve hours but it was an extraordinary situation. This is usually used as evidence that the magnates deliberately left Stalin without medical help in order to kill him. But in their fragile situation, at a court already bristling with spy-mania against the killer-doctors, it was not just hyperbole to fear causing panic. Stalin’s own doctor was being tortured merely for saying he should rest. If Stalin awoke feeling groggy, he would have regarded the very act of calling doctors as an attempt to seize power. Furthermore, they were so accustomed to his minute control that they could barely function on their own.
But the Four had those hours to divide power. The decision to do nothing suited everyone. Beria and Malenkov, Stalin’s first deputies, in the government and Party respectively, were legally in charge until a full meeting of the Politburo and then of the Central Committee. If Stalin was dying, they needed time to tie up power. Possibly for the same reasons, it was in the interests of Khrushchev and Bulganin to delay medical help until they had protected their position. They seem to have promised to protect Ignatiev and promote him to the CC Secretariat.
Beria, the only one of the Four fearing for his life at that time, had every reason to hope the hated Stalin would die. (Molotov and Mikoyan did not yet know Stalin was ill.) Yet Beria was never alone with Stalin—he took care that Malenkov was with him. He was not in control of the MGB, nor the Doctors’ Plot, nor the bodyguards, hence his comment, “Who attached you fools to Comrade Stalin?” Even though Beria has always been blamed for the delay, Khrushchev and Ignatiev may actually have been the cause of it.
Whatever their motives, the Four delayed calling a doctor until morning. We will never know if this was medically decisive or not. There was the possibility of an operation to clear the blood clot but doctors agree that it had to take place within hours of the stroke and who would have dared to authorize it? In the fifties, there was a remote chance of such an operation being successful: it was more likely to kill the patient. Melodramatic accounts of Stalin’s death, of which there are no shortage, claim that Stalin was murdered. It is most likely that the denial of medical care made not the slightest difference. But Beria clearly thought it had: “I did him in!” he later boasted to Molotov and Kaganovich. “I saved you all!”
Recent research has suggested that he could have spiked Stalin’s wine with a blood-thinning drug such as warfarin, which, over several days, might cause a stroke. Perhaps Khrushchev and the others were accomplices, hence the cover-up suited them all—but there is no such evidence.
The Four now returned home to sleep, saying nothing to their families. At the imperial bedside, Lozgachev was desperate. He awoke Starostin and told him to call the Politburo—“otherwise he’ll die and it’ll be curtains for you and me.” The terror that prevented the leaders calling the doctors now made the guards demand them. They phoned Malenkov who told them to send in Butuzova to take another look. She announced it was “no ordinary sleep.” Malenkov called Beria.
“The boys have rung again from Stalin’s place,” Malenkov told Khrushchev. “They say there really is something wrong with Comrade Stalin. We’ll have to go back again. We agreed the doctors would have to be called.” Beria and Malenkov were making all the decisions but which doctors to call? So they asked Tretyakov, Minister of Health, to select some Russian (not Jewish) doctors. Khrushchev arrived at Kuntsevo to tell the relieved “attachments” the doctors were on their way. Colonel Tukov called Molotov, Mikoyan and Voroshilov, another sign that the Four had never approved of their exclusion.
“Call the Politburo. I’m on my way,” Molotov replied. When the phone rang in Voroshilov’s home, the old Marshal was transformed: “He became strong and organized,” wrote his wife in her unpublished diary, “as I saw him in dangerous situations in the Civil and Great Patriotic Wars . . . I understood unhappiness was coming. In great fear through running tears, I asked him, ‘What happened?’ He embraced me. ‘Don’t be afraid!’”
Voroshilov joined Kaganovich, Molotov and Mikoyan at the bedside. Molotov noticed “Beria was in charge.” Stalin opened his eyes when Kaganovich arrived and looked at his lieutenants one by one—and then closed his eyes again. Unlike the overbearing Beria, Molotov and Kaganovich were deeply moved. Tears ran down their cheeks. Voroshilov reverently addressed the patient: “Comrade Stalin, we’re here, your loyal friends and comrades. How do you feel dear friend?”
Stalin’s face was “contorted.” He stirred but never fully regained consciousness. Khrushchev was “very upset, I was very sorry we were losing Stalin.” He rushed home to wash and hurried back to Kuntsevo with no one in his family asking any questions. According to his son, Beria called home and told his wife about Stalin’s illness: Nina burst into tears. Like most of the Politburo wives, even those about to be killed, she was inconsolable.
At 7 a.m., the doctors, led by Professor Lukomsky, finally arrived but they were a new team who had never worked with Stalin before. They were brought to the patient in the big dining room which must have reeked of stale urine. With their colleagues under torture, they were awestruck by the sanctity of Stalin and petrified by Beria’s Mephistophelian presence lurking behind them. Their examination of the powerless, once omnipotent patient was a comedy of errors. “They were all trembling like us,” observed Lozgachev. First, a dentist arrived to take out Stalin’s false teeth but “he was so frightened, they slipped out of his hands” and fell onto the floor. Then Lukomsky tried to take Stalin’s shirt off in order to take his blood pressure. “Their hands were trembling so much,” noticed Lozgachev, “that they could not even get his shirt off.” Lukomsky was “terrified to touch Stalin” and could not even get a grip on his pulse.
“Hold his hand properly!” Beria snapped at Lukomsky.
The clothes had to be cut away with scissors. “I ripped open the shirt,” recalled Lozgachev. They began to examine the patient “lying on a divan on his back, his head turned to the left, eyes closed, with moderate hyperaemia of the face . . . There had been involuntary urination, [his clothes were soaked in urine.]” His pulse was 78; heartbeat “faint”; blood pressure 190 over 110. His right side was paralysed while his left limbs quivered sometimes. His forehead was cooled. He was given a glass of 10 percent magnesium sulphate. A neuropathologist, therapist and nurse stood vigil. The doctors asked the guards who had seen what. The guards now feared for their lives too: “We thought, this is it then, they’ll put us in a car and it’s goodbye, we’re done for!”
Stalin had suffered a cerebral catastrophe or, in their words, “middle-left cerebral arterial haemorrhaging . . . The patient’s condition is extremely serious.” It was official at last. Stalin would not be able to work again.
The bodyguards stepped back and faded into the furniture. There was little the doctors could actually do. They recommended: “Absolute quiet, leave the patient on the divan; leeches behind the ears (eight now in place); cold compress on the head . . . No food today.” When he was fed, it was to be with a teaspoon “to give liquid when there is no choking.” Oxygen cylinders were wheeled in. The doctors injected Stalin with camphor. They took a urine sample. The patient stirred. “Stalin tried to cover himself.”
Svetlana, who had celebrated her birthday the night before, was called out of a French class and told, “Malenkov wants you to come” to Kuntsevo. Khrushchev and Bulganin, both in tears, waved her car to a stop and hugged her.
“Beria and Malenkov will tell you everything.” It was again clear who was in charge. The bustle and noise astonished her: Kuntsevo had always been so quiet. She noticed that the doctors were strang
ers. When she came to the bedside, she kissed Stalin, realizing “I loved my father more tenderly than I ever had before.”
When he was summoned, Vasily was so scared of his father that he thought he would have to present his work and pitifully arrived with his air-force maps. He was soon drunk. Throughout the next two days, he lurched in and out of the quiet sickroom, shouting: “You swine haven’t saved my father!” Svetlana was embarrassed to hear him.
The leaders wondered whether to remove this loose cannon but Voroshilov took Vasily aside, soothing him: “We’re doing all we can to save your father’s life.”
Once it was proved that he was incapacitated, Beria “spewed forth his hatred of Stalin” but whenever his eyelids flickered or his eyes opened, Beria, terrified that he would recover, “knelt and kissed his hand” like an Oriental vizier at a Sultan’s bedside. When Stalin sank again into sleep, Beria virtually spat at him, revealing his reckless ambition, and lack of tact and prudence. The other magnates observed him silently but they were weeping for Stalin, their old but flawed friend, longtime leader, historical titan, and the supreme pontiff of their international creed, even as they sighed with relief that he was dying. Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers.
At about ten, the entire old Politburo, from Beria and Khrushchev to Molotov, Voroshilov and Mikoyan, headed to the Kremlin where they met at 10:40 a.m. in the Little Corner to agree on a plan. Stalin’s seat stood empty. They had restored themselves to power. For ten minutes, Dr. Kuperin, the new Kremlevka chief, and Professor Tkachev nervously presented the report quoted above to the confused, upset and pent-up magnates. Afterwards, no one spoke, which made Kuperin even more nervous. It was perhaps too early to discuss what would happen next.
Finally, Beria, who had already emerged as the most active leader, dismissed the doctors with this ominous order: “You’re responsible for Comrade Stalin’s life. Do you understand? You must do everything possible and impossible to save Comrade Stalin!” Kuperin flinched, then withdrew. Malenkov, with whom Beria seemed to be coordinating everything, read out a decree for twenty-four-hour vigils by the leaders in pairs. Then Beria and Malenkov sped back to Kuntsevo to watch over the patient. Molotov and Mikoyan were not asked to keep vigil: Beria ordered Mikoyan to stay in the Kremlin and run the country.
Stalin Page 74