It was at 2150 local time, in his "near dacha" on 5 March 1953 that Joseph Stalin, the man who was perhaps the most brutal butcher in modern history, died. Like much of Stalin's life, his death is couched in secrecy and mystery.
In November of 2011 Surgical Neurology International published a fascinating and revealing article on the event and the circumstances surrounding it.
Nevertheless, we do know that the guests had become a captive audience that evening and could not leave the Blizhnyaya, his nearer dacha in Kuntsevo, without Stalin's permission. They simply had to wait until Stalin dismissed them. But Stalin was not finished. He was still complaining that the leadership, which included many of his guests that night, were basking on past glories — but "they were mistaken." The implied threat to his inner circle was ominous. When Stalin finally got up and left, his shaken guests seized their opportunity and left the dacha. Georgy Malenkov and Lavrenti Beria, two of Stalin’s henchmen whom he allowed to commingle socially, left together in the same volga. The others left separately.
Stalin did not leave his chamber that morning and by noon his staff became worried. To make matters even more difficult, no one was authorized to enter his private chambers unless they were summoned. All through the afternoon the domestic staff and his personal guards worried and waited for Stalin to come out. They were finally reassured when an outside sentry reported that a light from his dining room had come on about 6:30 p.m. Volkogonov writes: "Everyone sighed with relief and waited for the bell to ring. Stalin had not eaten, or looked at the mail or papers. It was most irregular." As late evening came, the domestic staff and guards began to worry anew. They debated what to do until sheer panic forced them to act. It was now 11:00 p.m., the evening of March 1, 1953.
I had only a vague idea that Stalin had fallen ill likely as early as 1 March, and had been essentially left without any medical care for extended periods, out of sheer terror and also because of the machinations of KGB Director Lavrenti Beria, who feared his boss was readying another purge of his inner circle, a purge that might well have included Beria himself.
"Well, I opened the door, walked loudly down the corridor. The room where we put documents was right next to the small dining room. I went into that room and looked through the open door into the small dining room and saw the Boss lying on the floor, his right hand out-stretched...like this [here Lozgachev stretched out his half-bent arm]. I froze. My arms and legs refused to obey me. He had not yet lost consciousness, but he couldn't speak. He had good hearing, he'd obviously heard my footsteps and seemed to be trying to summon me to help him. I hurried to him and asked: 'Comrade Stalin, what's wrong?' He'd wet himself and he wanted to pull something up with his left hand. I said to him: 'Should I call a doctor?' He made some incoherent noise — like 'Dz...Dz...'
"I picked up the receiver of the house phone. I was trembling and sweat beading on my forehead, and phoned Starostin: 'Come to the house, quick.' Starostin came in, and stood dumbstruck. The Boss had lost consciousness. I said: 'Let's lay him on the sofa, he's not comfortable on the floor.' Tukov and Motia Butusova came in behind Starostin. Together, we put him on the sofa. I said to Starostin: 'Go and phone everybody, and I mean everybody.' He went off to phone, but I did not leave the Master. He lay motionless, except for snoring. Starostin phoned Ignatiev at the KGB, but he panicked and told Starostin to try Beria and Malenkov. While he was phoning, we got an idea — to move him to the big sofa in the large dining room. There was more air there. Together, we lifted him and laid him down on the sofa, then covered him with a blanket — he was shivering from the cold. Butusova unrolled his sleeves.
"At that point Starostin got through to Malenkov. About half an hour had gone by when Malenkov phoned us back and said: 'I can't find Beria.' Another half hour passed, Beria phoned: 'Don't tell anybody about Comrade Stalin's illness'. At 3 o'clock in the morning, I heard a car approaching."
At this point, Radzinsky notes that it had now been four hours since the first phone call and many more hours since Stalin had been struck down by the sudden illness, and he had been lying there without medical assistance all that time. Malenkov and Beria finally arrived without Khrushchev.
Beria, of course, is suspected in either furthering along the death of Stalin or outright engineering it. He had said afterward, according to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign Minister, “I did him in, I saved all of you!"
Anyway, worth the read in its entirety. Including the presumptive clinical diagnosis of what, in the end, killed the man who had killed millions.
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