Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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.

  Back at Kuntsevo, when Malenkov was on vigil with Beria, they requested the doctor’s prognosis. Kuperin displayed a chart of the blood circulation: “You see the clotted blood vessel,” he lectured the Politburo as if to medical students. “It’s the size of a five-kopeck piece. Comrade Stalin would remain alive if the vessel had been cleared in time.”

  “Who guarantees the life of Comrade Stalin?” Beria challenged the doctors to operate if they dared.

  “No one dared,” said Lozgachev. Malenkov asked for the prognosis:

  “Death is inevitable,” replied the doctors. But Malenkov did not want Stalin to die yet: there could be no interregnum.

  At 8:30 p.m., the leaders, chaired now by Beria, met again for an hour at the Little Corner. Kuperin’s official report did not present Stalin’s condition as hopeless but the patient had deteriorated. His blood pressure was now 210 over 120, breathing and heartbeat irregular. Six to eight leeches were applied around his ears. Stalin received enemas of magnesium sulphate, and spoonfuls of sweet tea.

  That evening, Lukomsky was joined by four more doctors including the eminent Professor Myasnikov: the Politburo knew the top doctors were all in prison.

  At Kuntsevo, Dr. Myasnikov found “a short and fat” Stalin lying there “in a heap . . . His face was contorted . . . The diagnosis seemed clear— a haemorrhage in the left cerebral hemisphere resulting from hypertension and sclerosis.” The doctors kept their detailed log, taking notes every twenty minutes. The magnates sat blearily in armchairs, stretching their legs, standing by the bedside, watching the doctors. These endless nights gave them the chance to plan the transfer of power.

  “Malenkov gave us to understand,” wrote Myasnikov, “he hoped that medical measures would succeed in prolonging the patient’s life ‘for a sufficient period.’ We all realized he had in mind the time necessary for the organization of the new government.”

  There were no more official meetings in the Kremlin until 5 March. While Beria and Malenkov whispered about the distribution of offices, Khrushchev and Bulganin wondered how to prevent Beria grabbing control of the secret police. Beria’s plans had been laid long before, probably with Malenkov: since no Georgian could rule Russia again, Malenkov planned to head the government while remaining Secretary. Beria would seize his old fiefdom, the MGB/MVD.

  Late at night, Mikoyan looked in on the dying man. Molotov was ill but he appeared from time to time, thinking of his Polina whom he hoped was alive in exile. He did not know she was being interrogated in the Lubianka. But that evening, on Beria’s orders, her interrogations abruptly stopped. The interrogations of the doctors continued, however. The factotum of the Doctors’ Plot, Ignatiev, was noticed nervously peering at the prone Stalin from the doorway. He was still terrified of him.

  “Come in—don’t be shy!” said Lozgachev. The next morning Khrushchev popped home to sleep and told his family that Stalin was ill.

  There were moments when Stalin seemed to regain consciousness: they were feeding him with soup from a teaspoon, when he pointed up at one of the mawkish photographs on the wall of a girl feeding a lamb and then “pointed at himself.” “He sort of smiled,” thought Khrushchev. The magnates smiled back. Molotov thought it was an example of Stalin’s self-deprecating wit. Beria fell to his knees and kissed Stalin’s hand fervently. Stalin closed his eyes, “never to open them again.” At 10:15 that morning, the doctors reported that Stalin had worsened.

  “The bastards have killed Father,” Vasily lurched in again. Khrushchev put his arm round this tiny terrified man, guiding him into the next room.

  Beria, who went home for some lunch, was open about his relief. “It will be better for him to die,” he told his family. “If he survives it will be as a vegetable.” Nina was still weeping about Stalin’s death: “You’re a funny one, Nina. His death has saved your life.” Nina visited Svetlana daily to comfort her.

  Late on the 4th, Stalin started to deteriorate, his breathing becoming shorter and shallower, the Cheyne-Stokes breathing pattern of a patient losing strength. Beria and Malenkov checked up on their Second Eleven of doctors. That night, three surprised prisoners, tortured daily in the Doctors’ Plot, were led off for another session. But this time, their torturer was not interested in the Zionist conspiracy but politely asked their medical advice.

  “My uncle is very sick,” said the interrogator, and is experiencing “this Cheyne-Stokes breathing. What do you think this means?”

  “If you’re expecting to inherit from your uncle,” replied the professor, who had not lost his Jewish wit, “consider it’s in your pocket.” Another distinguished professor, Yakov Rapoport, was asked to name the specialists who should treat this “sick uncle.” Rapoport named Vinogradov and the other doctors under arrest. But the interrogator asked if Doctors Kuperin and Lukomsky were good too. He was shocked when Rapoport replied, “Only one of the four [doctors treating Stalin] is a competent physician but on a much lower level than the men in prison.” The interrogations continued but the investigators had lost interest. Sometimes they fell asleep during the sessions. The prisoners knew nothing.

  At 11:30 p.m. Stalin retched. There were long pauses between ragged breaths. Kuperin told the assembled grandees, who watched in awed silence, that the situation was critical.

  “Take all measures to save Comrade Stalin!” ordered the excited Beria. So the doctors continued to struggle to keep the dying Generalissimo alive. An artificial respirator was wheeled in and never used but it was accompanied by young technicians who stared “goggle-eyed” at the surreal things happening all around them.

  On the 5th, Stalin suddenly paled and his breathing became shallower with longer intervals. The pulse was fast and faint. He started to wiggle his head. There were spasms in his left arm and leg. At midday, Stalin vomited blood. The latest research has uncovered a first draft of the doctors’ medical notes, which reveal that his stomach was haemorrhaging, a detail deleted from the final report. Perhaps it was cut because it might suggest poisoning. Warfarin might well have caused such bleeding, which does indeed look suspicious, but it may just have marked the collapse of a sick old body.

  “Come quickly, Stalin’s had a setback!” Malenkov told Khrushchev. The magnates rushed back. Stalin’s pulse slowed. At 3:35 p.m., his breathing stopped for five seconds every two or three minutes. He was sinking fast. Beria, Khrushchev and Malenkov had received the Politburo’s permission to ensure that Stalin’s “documents and papers, both current and archival, are put in proper order.” Now, leaving the other two at the bedside, Beria sped into the Kremlin to begin the process of searching Stalin’s safe and files for incriminating documents. First there may have been a will: Lenin had left a testament and Stalin had talked of recording his thoughts. If so, Beria now destroyed it. The files were filled with denunciations and evidence against all the leaders. There would have been evidence of Beria’s dubious role in Baku during the Civi
l War and there would also have been the missing documents that revealed the bloody role of Malenkov and Khrushchev in the Great Terror, the Leningrad Case and the Doctors’ Plot. That afternoon, these three began the destruction of documents. This successfully protected the historical reputation of Khrushchev and Malenkov, even if Beria’s was already beyond repair.311

  Beria returned. The doctors reported on the latest decline. An official meeting of the whole regime, three hundred senior officials, was set for that evening. Now the magnates gathered informally in one of the other rooms to form the new government. Beria and his “billygoat” Malenkov had prearranged the “collective leadership,” taking turns proposing the appointments. Molotov and Mikoyan returned to the Presidium, shrunk to its previous size. Molotov returned as Foreign Minister, Mikoyan as Minister of Internal and External Trade. Khrushchev remained one of the senior Secretaries but he was excluded from the government. Beria was dominant, reuniting the MVD and MGB while remaining First Deputy Premier. Malenkov succeeded to both Stalin’s posts of Premier and Secretary. Yet the military were also strengthened: Defence Minister Bulganin’s new deputies were the old paladins, Zhukov and Vasilevsky. Voroshilov became President. No wonder Beria was exultant.

  The illegitimate Mingrelian, trained as an architect but seasoned in the police, was already dreaming of ruling the Imperium, one of the nuclear superpowers, and becoming an international statesman, not just a secret policeman anymore. He had survived against all the odds; he was free of fear. He could unleash his loathing of Stalin: “That scoundrel! That filth! Thank God we’re free of him!” He could expose that phoney Generalissimo: “He didn’t win the war!” he was soon telling his confidants. “We won the war!” Furthermore, “We would have avoided the war!” He harnessed the phrase “the cult of personality” to denounce Stalin. He would free the nationalities, open the economy, liberate East Germany, empty the labour camps with a beneficent amnesty and expose the Doctors’ Plot. He did not doubt for a moment that his superior intelligence and fresh anti-Bolshevik ideas would triumph. Even Molotov realized “he was a man of the future.”

  If his policies seemed to prefigure Gorbachev’s reforms, Beria always remained “just a policeman,” in Stalin’s words, for he was itching to avenge himself on those, such as Vlasik, who had betrayed him. He was not the successor, merely the strongman in a “collective leadership.” But many of the new potentates feared him, his brutality and his bid for popularity by de-Bolshevizing the regime. Beria underestimated Khrushchev and the marshals. Nonetheless, it was a remarkable achievement.

  Afterwards, the magnates gathered beside the wheezing patient. Beria approached the bedside and announced melodramatically like a Crown Prince in a movie: “Comrade Stalin, all the members of the Politburo are here. Speak to us!” There was no reaction.

  Voroshilov pulled Beria back: “Let the bodyguards and staff come to the bedside—he knows them intimately.” Colonel Khrustalev stood by the bed and spoke to him. Stalin did not open his eyes. The leaders queued to bid goodbye, forming up in pairs like a crocodile of schoolchildren in order of importance, with Beria and Malenkov first, then Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan, followed by the younger leaders. They shook his hand ritually. Malenkov claimed that Stalin squeezed his fingers, passing him the succession.

  Leaving just Bulganin at the bedside, the potentates then rushed to the Kremlin where the Presidium, Council of Ministers and Supreme Soviet Presidium gathered to rubber-stamp the new government: they removed Stalin as Premier but strangely left him as a Presidium member. The three hundred or so officials confirmed the prearranged deal. There was a sense of “relief” among the magnates.312

  They expected a call from Bulganin to announce Stalin’s death but none came. Stalin was still holding out and they headed back to Kuntsevo. After 9 p.m., he started to sweat. His pulse was weak, his lips turned blue. The Politburo, Svetlana Stalin, Valechka, and the guards gathered round the sofa. The junior leaders crowded outside, watching from the doorway.

  At 9:30 p.m., Stalin’s breaths were forty-eight a minute. His heartbeat grew fainter. At 9:40 p.m. with everyone watching, the doctors gave Stalin oxygen. His pulse virtually disappeared. The doctors proposed an injection of camphor and adrenalin to stimulate his heart. It should have been Vasily and Svetlana’s decision but they just watched. Beria gave the order. Stalin gave a shiver after the injection and became increasingly breathless. He slowly began to drown in his own fluids.

  “Take Svetlana away,” commanded Beria to prevent her seeing this dread vision—but no one moved.

  “His face was discoloured,” wrote Svetlana, “his features becoming unrecognisable . . . He literally choked to death as we watched. The death agony was terrible . . . At the last minute, he opened his eyes. It was a terrible look, either mad or angry and full of the fear of death.” Suddenly the rhythm of his breathing changed. His left hand rose. A nurse thought it was “like a greeting.” He “seemed either to be pointing upwards somewhere or threatening us all . . .” observed Svetlana. It was more likely that he was simply clawing the air for oxygen. “Then the next moment, his spirit after one last effort tore itself from his body.” A woman doctor burst into tears and threw her arms around the devastated Svetlana.

  The struggle was not over yet. A Brobdingnagian doctor fell on the corpse and started artificial respiration, athletically massaging the chest.

  It was so painful to watch that Khrushchev felt sorry for Stalin: “Stop it please! Can’t you see the man’s dead? What do you want? You won’t bring him back to life. He’s already dead,” Khrushchev called out, showing his impulsive authority in the first order not given by Beria or Malenkov. Stalin’s features became “pale . . . serene, beautiful, imperturbable,” wrote Svetlana. “We all stood frozen and silent.”

  Once again they formed up in that uneasy crocodile: Beria darted forward and ritually kissed the warm body first, the equivalent of wrenching a dead king’s ring off his finger. The others queued up to kiss him. Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Bulganin, Khrushchev and Malenkov were sobbing with Svetlana. Molotov cried, mourning Stalin despite his own imminent liquidation and that of his wife. Mikoyan hid his feelings but “it may be said I was lucky.” Beria was not crying: indeed he was “radiant” and “regenerated”—a bulging but effervescent grey toad, glistening with ill-concealed relish. He strode through the weeping potentates into the hall.

  The sepulchral silence around the deathbed was suddenly “shattered by the sound of his loud voice, the ring of triumph unconcealed,” in Svetlana’s words: “Khrustalev, the car!” he bellowed, heading for the Kremlin.

  “He’s off to take power,” Mikoyan said to Khrushchev. Svetlana noticed “they were all terrified of him.” They looked after him—and then with frenzied haste, “the members of the government rushed for the door . . .” Mikoyan and Bulganin remained a little longer but then they too called for their limousines. The Instantsiya had left the building. The colossus had vanished, leaving only the husk of an old man on a sofa in an ugly suburban house.

  Just the servants and family remained: “cooks, chauffeurs and watchmen, gardeners and women who waited at table” now emerged out of the background “to say goodbye.” Many were sobbing, with rough bodyguards wiping their eyes with their sleeves “like children.” A weeping old nurse gave them valerian drops. Svetlana watched numbly. Some servants started to turn off the lights and tidy up.

  Then Stalin’s closest companion, the comfort of the cruel loneliness of this unparalleled monster, Valechka, who was now aged thirty-eight and had worked with Stalin since she was twenty, pushed through the crying maids, “dropped heavily to her knees” and threw herself onto the corpse with all the uninhibited grief of the ordinary people. This cheerful but utterly discreet woman, who had seen so much, was convinced to her dying day that “no better man ever walked the earth.” Laying her head squarely on his chest, Valechka, with tears pouring down the cheeks of “her round face,” “wailed at the top of her voice
as the women in the villages do. She went on for a long time and nobody tried to stop her.”1

  Postscript

  Stalin was embalmed. On 9 March 1953, Molotov, Beria and Khrushchev spoke at his funeral, after which he was laid in the Mausoleum beside Lenin. Polina Molotova was still in the Lubianka. The next day, Beria invited Molotov to his office there. When Molotov arrived, Beria rushed ahead to greet Polina: “A heroine!” he declared. Her first question was “How’s Stalin?” She fainted when she learned he was dead. Molotov took her home.

  Beria moved to liberalize the regime and arrested those responsible for the Doctors’ Plot but his proposal to free East Germany provoked an uprising that alarmed the other magnates. Khrushchev began to plan Beria’s destruction. He won over Premier Malenkov and Defence Minister Bulganin. Molotov still admired Beria but agreed to support Khrushchev because of the German crisis. Surprisingly, President Voroshilov supported Beria. When he was consulted, Mikoyan said he distrusted Khrushchev because he was so close to Beria and Malenkov. Khrushchev did not tell Mikoyan the whole story, but he agreed that Beria should be demoted to Petroleum Minister. Kaganovich typically sat on the fence. But Marshal Zhukov and his generals provided the muscle.

  On 25 June, Beria was swinging gaily on his hammock at his dacha, singing Georgian songs. He had been called to a special meeting of the Presidium. Nina warned him to be careful but he was not worried because he explained that Molotov supported him. At about 1 p.m. next day, Khrushchev stood up at the meeting and attacked Beria. Bulganin joined in but Mikoyan was surprised to hear that Beria was to be arrested.

  “What’s going on, Nikita?” Beria asked. “Why are you searching for fleas in my trousers?” When it was Malenkov’s turn to support the coup, he lost his nerve and gave a secret signal to the generals waiting outside. Marshal Zhukov burst in and seized Beria.