Evidence That Stalin Was Murdered Selections & Comments by Peter Myers, September 6, 2001; update December 26, 2011.
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Edvard Radzinsky, STALIN: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives, Translated from the Russian By H.T. Willetts, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1996.
{p. ix} I have been thinking about this book all my life. My father dreamt of it till the day of his death. It is to him that I dedicate it.
I can still see that antediluvian day in March 1953 when the improbable happened: the event which it would have been a crime even to think of in our country.
I can see the unbearably bright March sunshine and the endless line of those eager to make their farewells to him. I see myself in the crowd of mourners. How lonely I felt among all those grief-crazed people. Because I myself hated him.
I had suffered a revulsion of feeling toward Stalin in the upper classes at school: a transition from mindless adoration to a no less ardent hatred, such as only the very young experience and only after mindless love.
... My father came from a well-to-do Jewish family. He was a rising young lawyer, twenty-eight years old, when the February Revolution brought down the monarchy. He enthusiastically welcomed the bourgeois Provisional Government. This was his revolution. This was his government.
But the few months of freedom were soon at an end, and the Bolsheviks came to power.
Why did he - a highly educated man fluent in English, German, and French - not go abroad? It is the old, old story: he was always devoted to that great and tragic country.
{p. 534} At the beginning of the fifties the Boss had authorized Abakumov, the Minister of State Security, to arrest a large number of Georgians from Beria's native province, Mingrelia, people whom Beria had planted in important posts. When he began the operation the Boss had told Abakumov in so many words to 'look for the big Mingrel in the plot.' But progress was slow. Abakumov was obviously afraid to collect evidence against his overlord. The Boss saw how frightened he was, and Abakumov was doomed.
Abakumov was working at the time on the 'case of the Kremlin doctors.' Back in 1948 Lidia Timashuk, senior electrocardiographer at the Kremlin Clinic, had reported that Zhdanov was not receiving the appropriate treatment. The Author of the 1936-1937 thriller had remembered her letter, and now saw how it could help his story line. Professor Vovsi, for instance, one of the Kremlin doctors, was related to Mikhoels. This prompted the idea of a proliferating Jewish conspiracy utilizing the world's most humane profession. Stalin had vivid memories of the anti-Semitic tracts devoured by the mob in his youth - Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the outpourings of the Union of the Russian People. With his mind always on the Great Dream he knew that there were two emotions which could unite society: fear, and hatred of the Jews.
{p. 535} He had, then, composed his last thriller. The country would shortly learn ts contents.
The storyline Stalin concocted went as follows: the sinister Jewish organization Joint was bent on destroying the Russian people. It had probably begun operations in the days of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Later, its agents, Mikhoels and other loyal instruments of Amencan imperialism, had infiltrated everywhere. ...
{Stalin may also have been pre-occupied about the Baruch Plan for World Government, authored by Baruch and Lilienthal, both American Jews, put to him in 1946 on behalf of the American Government. For an introduction to it, see opensoc.html; for detail, see baruch-plan.html.
Pavel Sudoplatov also explains that the Jewish AntiFascist Committee (JAC) had alarmed Stalin by proposing a separate Jewish Republic be carved out of the USSR, in the Crimea ... backed by American Jewish capitalists. Stalin saw this as a threat to the unity of the USSR: sudoplat.html }
Zionists had infiltrated even the highest levels of the political elite. This was where Zhemchuzina came in. He had spared her, as he had once spared Zinoviev and Kamenev, for use in a public trial. She was the intermediary through whom Molotov had been recruited as an enemy agent. The Boss could go on from there to write group after group of conspirators into his story. In the early stages they would be destroyed by the Great Mingrel. ...
In Czechoslovakia Slansky, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, was put on trial, and several other senior officials were tried with him. They had one thing in common: all of them were Jews. Slansky was shot as an agent of international Zionism.
Meanwhile the Boss was completing the recruitment of those who were to implement his terrorist scheme. Abakumov's hesitancy in dealing with Beria called for a decision. Abakumov, the cruel torturer who looked like a gallant guardsman, was consigned to oblivion. Bobkov, the Vice-Chairman of the KGB (the Committee of State Security, which superseded the Ministry in 1953), later remembered 'members of the staff wandering round the corridors stunned. They had heard news of Abakumov's arrest and pored over the Central Committee's edict.' The Boss, with his unfailing sense of humor, had removed the ruthless executioner for being insuffciently ruthless. The
{p. 536} decree stated that 'Chekists have lost their vigilance, they are working in white gloves.' That was enough. In the drive against the 'white-gloved' bngade, many heads of departments and branches in the Ministry of the Interior were arrested. Abakumov's, and so also Beria's, proteges were routed. Ministry of State Security personnel were urged to 'apply ruthless pressure to those under arrest.' Everyone finally realized that this was indeed 1937 all over again. The Boss appointed Ignatiev, a Party official unconnected with Beria, to the Ministry of State Security.
By then a large group of eminent Jewish doctors - Kogan, Feldman, Ettinger, Vovsi, Grinstein, Ginzburg, and others - had been arrested in readiness for the coming trial. Stalin's story line, however, demanded that the conspiracy should be against himself. There was only one thing to do: he generously added his own doctor, Professor V. Vinogradov, to the list. ...
The Molotovs, husband and wife, survived only because of the Leader's death. Yet they both went on praising him for the rest of their days. According to Molotov, his wife 'not only never spoke ill of Stalin, she couldn't bear to hear anyone else speak ill of him.'
After parting with his doctor, Stalin dispatched another old favorite of his to jail - Vlasik. Semiliterate Vlasik had succeeded the semiliterate Pauker as commander of the Boss's bodyguard, and had inherited his inordinate influence. ...
{p. 537} VLASIK'S TRIAL
He was tried on February 17,1955, when Stalin and Beria were both dead.
{p. 538} Stalin's death saved Vlasik. In 1955, Vlasik wrote a petition for a pardon, which contains something extremely interesting. Vlasik tells us that he was originally interrogated by Beria in person. He was astonished to find that Beria knew details of private conversations between himself and the 'head of government' (Stalin) which he could have obtained only by 'eavesdropping.' 'Beria,' Vlasik wrote, 'must have known about the head of government's expressions of dissatisfaction with Beria after the war.'
{p. 540} ONE STEP NEARER APOCALYPSE
... That terrible year, 1952, was, as Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the first year in which he did not go away on holiday. He had no time for holi- days, or for children. The world was on the threshold of the Great Dream. He no longer invited Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and others under sentence of death. Only four Politburo members were now entertained at the dacha: Malenkov, Beria, and two recent additions to the
{p. 541} inner leadership - Khrushchev and Bulganin. This quartet would be required to act first against the disgraced elders, then against each other, after which they would be replaced by new robots. The Party jail was now quite ready for its new inmates.
The intended victims, like Roman senators in the days of Nero, meekly awaited their fate. Fear, total fear, had paralyzed them. The atmosphere was growing hotter. Women in shops abused and threatened Jewish women standing in line. From one day to the next people expected something terrible to happen.
An ominous signal was given in February.
A PUBLISHED CONFESSION
Endless accusations of anti-Semitism were heard in the West, and the Cultural Committee's propagandists counterattacked with a collective letter from representatives of the Jewish community, persons eminent in science and the arts. They angrily condemned the 'murderers in white gowns,' and declared that anti-Semitism did not and could not exist in the USSR, the land of workers and peasants, but that well-deserved punishment awaited a miserable handful of bourgeois nationalists, agents of international Zionism.
There were, subsequently, all sorts of rumors about those who had signed this letter and those who had refused to do so. One of the signatories (I will not mention his name; he punished himself to the end of his days for signing) told me: 'Yes, we signed that grotesque letter out of animal fear - for ourselves and our children. At the same time I told myself that the doctors could not be saved, and that we had to save all the others. To put a stop to the anti-Semitic campaign we had to distance ourselves, to separate other Jews from the unfortunate doomed doctors.'
The letter was supposed to appear at the very beginning of February, but something unexpected happened. On February 2 bewilderment reigned in the editorial offices of Pravda: the newspaper was forbidden to print the painstakingly prepared letter. Everybody realized that only the Boss could have suppressed a letter drafted on instructions from the Secretariat of the Central Committee. The well-known writer and literary critic A. Borshchagovsky, one of the main targets of the anti-Semitic campaign of 1949-1953, wrote in his book Blood Condemned that 'the peremptory veto came right from the very top. Stalin did not want to divide the Jews into good and bad. He did not want the Jews to purchase imn1unity by sacrificing a handful of bourgeois nationalists.'
Those who knew about this affair were terrified. They knew that if he
{p. 542} refused to accept the 'handful of bourgeois nationalists' as ransom for the rest, he probably intended to punish all Jews. On February 8 Pravda stepped up the campaign against the Jews by substituting for the letter from the Jewish penitents an angry anti-Semitic article entitled 'Simpletons and Scoundrels.' The article listed the Jewish names of the many 'swindlers,' 'saboteurs,' and 'scoundrels' to whom the 'simpletons' - Russians who had relaxed their vigilance - had given employment.
A new wave of anti-Semitic hysteria followed. Jews were sacked, Jews were beaten up in the streets. At the end of February rumors went around Moscow that the Jews were to be deported to Siberia. People knew that any rumor of which the Boss disapproved was quickly silenced - and those who disseminated it promptly jailed. But this rumor was more insistent, more widely believed, and more alarrning from day to day. As in the days of Nazism many Jews tried to reassure themselves. The man in the next apartment to ours asked my father whether he realized how many freight cars would be needed and said, 'No, he simply can't do it!'
They were lying to themselves. They knew very well that he could do it. Just as he had been able even at the height of the war to transfer hundreds of thousands of people from the Caucasus to Siberia.
I still remember my mother coming home from work one day and telling my father in a whisper (so that I wouldn't hear) that 'the house management committees are drawing up lists of Jews. They know the date already.' My father feebly replied, 'It's just rumors.'
After Stalin's death the whole world would hear of the deportation planned by Stalin. Professor B. Goldberg noted in his book The Jewish Problem in the Soviet Union that 'Stalin's plan to send the Jews to Siberia reached the West after his death.' And in The Jews of the Soviet Union Benjamin Pinkus, professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University, wrote that 'Stalin saw in the trial [of the doctors] a way to prepare the ground for exiling the Jewish population from the center of the Soviet Union.' Only Stalin's death saved the Jews from this fate.' {sic.} (The Little Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, 'Anti-Semitism'.) In Siberia and Kazakhstan people still point out the remains of the flimsy wooden huts, without heating, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were meant to live, or rather to die.
THE APOCALYPSE INTERRUPTED What did it all mean? What was the purpose of the anti-Semitic campaign, the planned deportation of the Jews, the impending purge ofthe leadership, and the rising tide of terror?
{p. 543} It is simplistic to explain this (or for that matter the Terror of 1937) by Stalin's paranoia or his brutish anti-Semitism.
The Boss was a cold pragmatist who, throughout the twenty-five years in which he held absolute power, always had precise reasons for his monstrous actions.
My father often repeated a remark made by someone else about Stalin: 'Woe betide the victim of such slow jaws.'
Stalin, of course, disliked Jews, but he never acted simply to gratify his likes and dislikes. Some of his most trusted associates were Jews, amongst them Kaganovich, third man in the state, and Mekhlis, who had been his secretary and during the war was put in charge of the Political Administration of the Soviet army.
What then was the point of it all?
Could someone as cunning as Stalin fail to understand that his official anti-Semitism would create a wave of revulsion against the USSR in the West, and above all in the United States? That the deportation of Jews could exacerbate American hostility to a dangerous degree?
A strange question. The fact is that for some reason he wanted this confrontation, wanted to fall out with the West once and for all! ...
It was the same in the fifties - the Boss needed the terror which he planned in order to ...
Yes, in order to begin the Great War. War with the West. The last war, which would finally destroy capitalism. A holy war, whose battle-cries would be those so dear to the hearts of his deluded people: crush the universal evil of capitalism, crush its agent, international Jewry!
{p. 544} In the course of the meeting, Vyshinsky (who had ceased to be public prosecutor in 1940 and had served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1940 to 1949 and as Minister from 1949 to 1953) told Stalin about the
{p. 545} 'enormous' reaction in the West to the impending trial of the doctors. Vyshinsky was openly supported by some members of the Presidium. In reply Stalin savaged Vyshinsky, describing his statement as 'Menshevik,' and berated his comrades-in-arms, calling them 'blind kittens.' He concluded with this ominous sentence: 'We are afraid of no one, and if the imperialist gentlemen feel like going to war there is no more favorable moment for us than the present.' After which Stalin went off to his dacha, never again to leave it alive.
{p. 546} CAESAR! BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH!
March was drawing near.
According to rumor March 5 was the day on which the Jews would be loaded onto trucks. And Beria, needless to say, would realize that on March 5, the war which the Boss had in mind would almost be upon them. The second part of the program devised by the Boss would follow at once: the Terror, the great purge, in preparation for war. And that would be the end for all of them.
{p. 547} If Beria wanted to save himself he would have to hurry.
February was drawing to an end, and a sunny March was promised, like that March long ago when the Revolution had just begun, and he had stepped out onto the platform in Petrograd, full of hope ... a sunny March. But he would not see it.
March 5 was the day on which he intended to lead the world into the Apocalypse, and to destroy the chosen people. But March 5 was the day on which he would close his eyes forever. It was his turn at last to discover that God does exist.
'And I will deliver my people out of your hands, and you shall know that I am the Lord.'
{Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin's spymaster and a supporter of Beria (Beria was Jewish, and Sudoplatov had a Jewish wife), disputes the validity of those rumours:
"It is rumored now that a plan existed for deportation of Jews from Moscow on the eve of Stalin's death. I never heard of it; if such a plan existed it could be easily traced in the archives of state security and of the Moscow party committee, because it would have required large-scale preparations." (Special Tasks, p. 308): sudoplat.html )}
{p. 549} THE LAST SECRET
I still remember that day in March. I remember the voice of Levitan, Moscow Radio's chief announcer, a menacing voice which people had come to associate with the Boss himself, reading the official bulletin on his illness. The country listened, numb with horror, to news of his white bloodcell count. ... There is no end to the legends about his death. ...
The first testimony from genuine witnesses of Stalin's death was published in 1989, in D. Volkogonov's book. On the strength of a conversation with A. Rybin, one of Stalin's guards, Volkogonov confirrns that Stalin died at the nearer dacha. Another member of his bodyguard, Starostin, found Stalin lying on the floor after a stroke.
{p. 550} I knew even then, however, that Volkogonov was wrong about Starostin. I had read Rybin's unpublished memoirs in the Museum of the Revolution. His manuscript contains some startling pages.
THE BOSS'S INCREDIBLE ORDER
Rybin himself had not served in Stalin's guard since 1935, but on March 5, 1977, the anniversary of Stalin's death, he organized a little gathering. Those present included several members of the guard who had been at the nearer dacha around the time when Stalin died. He wrote down whatever these 'officers for special missions attached to Stalin' (to give the watchdogs their official title) could tell him about the event. He first recorded matters on which they all agreed:
On the night of February 28 - March 1, members of the Politburo watched a film at the Kremlin. After this they were driven to the nearer dacha. Those who joined Stalin there were Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Bulganin, all of whom remained there until 4 00 A.M. The duty officers on guard that day were M. Starostin and his assistant Tukov. Orlov, the commandant of the dacha, was offduty, and his assistant, Peter Lozgachev, was deputizing for him.
M. Butusova, who looked after the Boss's linen, was also in the dacha. After the guests had left, Stalin went to bed. He never left his rooms again.
After this introductory note Rybin recorded separately the testimony of Starostin, Tukov, and Lozgachev. Starostin's statement was the briefest. 'At 19:00 the silence in Stalin's suite began to alarm us. We (Starostin and Tukov) were both afraid to go in without being called.' So they got Lozgachev to go in, and it was he who found Stalin lying on the floor near the table. But it was the recorded statements of Tukov and Lozgachev themselves that startled me. Starostin, it appeared, had omitted a surprising detail. Before going to bed Stalin had given his guards an incredible order. In Tukov's words: 'When the guests left, Stalin told the servants and the commandants "I'm going to bed, I shan't be wanting you, you can go to bed too." ... Stalin had never given an order like that before.'
So then the Boss, with his obsessive concern for his own security, suddenly for the first time orders his guards to go to bed. In effect, leaving his own suite unguarded. And that very night he suffers a stroke.
The main witness, Lozgachev, who was the first to see him lying on the floor after his stroke, bears out Tukov's statement. 'Stalin said, "I'm going to bed, you go to bed as well.". . . I don't remember Stalin ever giving such an order - "everybody go to bed" before.'
I made up my mind to interview Peter Vasilievich Lozgachev.
{p. 551} THE MAIN WITNESS
He proved elusive. I rang him dozens of times. He kept changing his mind and putting offour meeting. He was afraid - they will all be afraid as long as they live. The 'secret object' to which they were 'attached' (they called themselves 'the attached') had not lost its power over them. But my persistence was rewarded. Lozgachev finally agreed.
At his suggestion we met at a Metro station. Lozgachev was a short, broad-shouldered man, still robust in spite of his age. We sat on a bench with passengers bustling around us. I repeated what I had told him so often before: that his testimony was of great histoncal importance, that all his colleagues were now dead.... He listened attentively to the familiar words, thought a while, heaved a sigh, and then took me to a small apartment in a new building. I wrote down his statement in the tiny kitchen.
After typing up my text I visited him again and asked him to sign it. This time he was remarkably ready to oblige, put on his thick-lensed glasses, spent a long time reading the text, then signed at the bottom of the pages with a trembling hand.
Before getting around to that last day, Lozgachev told me a great deal about life at the nearer dacha. One episode seemed to me particularly interesting:
Shortly before he died the Boss asked me: 'What do you think - will America attack us or not?' I said, 'I think they'd be afraid to.' He flared up and said, 'Clear out - what are you doing here anyway, I didn't call you.' The guys said to me afterward: 'What did you do to make him so angry today?' . . . Suddenly there was a call: go to the house. I went over, and his tone had changed completely: 'Forget that I shouted at you,' he said 'but just remember this: they will attack us, they're imperialists, and they certainly will attack us. If we let them. That's the answer you should give.'
He was getting ready for the Apocalypse. Lozgachev finally got around to that last night.
I was on duty at the dacha. Orlov, the commandant, had just returned from leave, and was off duty. Those on duty in Stalin's quarters were the senior 'special attachment,' Starostin, his assistant Tukov, I myself, and Matryona Butusova. 'The guests,' as the Boss called members of the Politburo, were expected. As usual on such occasions we helped the Boss work out the menu. That night it included three bottles, I think it was, of Madzhan that's a young Georgian wine, but the Boss called it 'the juice' because of its low alcoholic content.... In the night the Boss called me in and said, 'Give us another two bottles of the juice each.' . . . You ask who was there
{p. 552} that night? His usual guests - Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and the other one with the beard, Bulganin. Some time later he called me in again: 'Bring some more juice.' We took it in and served it. Everything was quiet. There were no complaints. Then at 4 00 A.M.... or a bit later - we brought the guests' cars around. When the Boss saw his guests off, an 'attachment' always saw them off with him, and closed the doors behind them. The 'attachment' Khrustalev, when Ivan Vasilievich was closing the doors, saw the Boss, and the Boss said, 'Go to bed, all of you, I don't need anything. I'm going to bed myself. I shan't need you today.' Khrustalev came and told us, happily: 'Well, guys, here's an order we've never been given before,' and he repeated the Boss's words. It was true, in all the time I worked there that was the only occasion when Stalin said 'go to bed.' He usually said, 'Want to go to bed?' and looked daggers at you. As if we'd dare! So of course, we were very glad when we got this order, and went off to bed without thinking twice.
'Wait a bit,' I said. 'Where does Khrustalev come into it? You didn't say that this Khrustalev was also at the dacha.' Lozgachev replied, "Attachment" Khrustalev was at the dacha only till 10:00 A.M., then he went home to rest. He was relieved by Starostin, Mikhail Gavrilovich.' We see now why Starostin did not tell Rybin about the Boss's strange order: he simply didn't know about it.
So then - that night at the nearer dacha only light wine was drunk, no cognac, no particularly strong drink likely to make him ill. The Boss, according to Lozgachev, was 'amiable,' whereas, Lozgachev also tells us, when he felt ill 'his mood would change, and it was best not to go near him.' But none of that matters much. The important thing is the surprising sentence that Lozgachev heard from the Boss for the first time ever - 'go to bed, all of you.' To be precise, he heard it not from the Boss but from the attachment Khrustalev. It was Khrustalev who passed on the order, and left the dacha next morning. The order came as a surprise to Lozgachev and the other guard, Tukov, because the Boss insisted on strict observance of standing regulations. Those alleged words of his were a breach of his sacrosanct routine: they authorized the attachments not to guard his rooms. And not to keep an eye on each other. Lozgachev said, 'Next day was Sunday. At 10:00 A.M. we were all in the kitchen as usual, planning the day's work.' Lozgachev, then, obeyed the order, and conscientiously slept through to 1O:OO A.M. He obviously could not know what his comrades were doing during the night. What, for instance, was Khrustalev doing, between trans-
{p. 553} mitting the Boss's improbable order and leaving for home next morning? Lozgachev continued his account:
At 10:00 A.M. there was 'no movement' in his rooms - that was the expression we always used when he was sleeping. 11:00 A.M. came, 12:00 still no movement. It began to seem strange. He usually got up between 11 and 12, but he was sometimes awake as early as 10.
1:OO P.M. came, and there was still no movement. We began to be alarmed. 3:00 P.M., 4:00 P.M. - no movement. People may have been trying to nng him, but when he wanted to sleep his calls were usually put through to other rooms. I was sitting there with Starostin, and he said: there's something wrong, what shall we do? We wondered whether to go in there. But he had given the strictest possible orders that if there was 'no movement' no one should enter his rooms. He would punish severely anyone who did. So we sat there in our staff quarters - which were connected with his rooms by a corridor twenty-five yards long, entered through a separate door - for six hours, wondering what to do. Suddenly there was a ring from the sentry out in the street. 'I see the light's gone on in the little dining room.' Thank God, we thought, everything's all nght. We were all at our posts, all ready for action . . . and still nothing happened! 8:00 P.M. - still nothing. We didn't know what to do. 9:00 P.M. 'no movement.' 10:00 P.M. - still none. I said to Starostin - 'You go, you're in charge of the guard, you ought to be getting worried.' He said 'I'm afraid.' I said 'You're afraid - what do you think I am, a hero?' About then they brought the mail - a packet from the Central Committee. It was usually our job to take the mail straight to him. Or rather mine, the mail was my responsibility. Oh well, I said, I'll go, if anything happens, guys, don't let me down. I had to go. As a rule we were careful not to creep up on him, in fact you sometimes knocked on the door specially loudly, so that he'd hear you coming. He reacted very badly if you went into his rooms quietly. You had to walk with a firm step. You didn't have to look embarrassed, and you didn't have to stand at attention. If you did he'd say, 'Why are you standing at attention like the good soldier Schweik?' Well then, I opened the door, and walked noisily along the corridor, and there's a room where we put the documents, just before you get to the little dining room, and I went into that room, and looked through the open door to the little dining room, and there was the Boss lying on the floor holding up his nght hand like this [here Lozgachev showed me - crooking his arm and raising it slightly]. I was petrified. My hands and legs wouldn't obey me. He had probably not yet lost consciousness but he couldn't speak. He had good hearing, he'd obviously heard me coming, and probably raised his hand slightly to call me in to help him. I hurried up to him and said 'Comrade Stalin, what's wrong?' He'd - you know - wet himself while he was lying there, and was trying to straighten something with his left hand. I said, 'Shall I call the doctor, maybe?' He made some incoherent noise - like 'Dz - dz ... ,' all he could
{p. 554} do was keep on 'dz'- ing. His pocketwatch and a copy of Pravda were lying on the floor. When I picked the watch up the time it showed was 6:30, so 6:30 was when it must have happened to him. I remember there was a bottle of Narzan mineral water on the table, he'd obviously been going to get it when the light in his room went on. While I was questioning him, maybe for two or three minutes, he suddenly gave a little snore, like a man snoring in his sleep. I raised the receiver of the house phone. I was trembling, I broke into a sweat, I rang Starostin: 'Come over quick, I'm in the house.' Staroshn came, he was dumbstruck, too. The Boss was unconscious. I said, 'Let's put him on the sofa, it's uncomfortable for him on the floor.' Tukov and Motya Butusova arrived after Starostin. We all helped to lift him onto the sofa. I said to Starostin: 'Go and ring them all up - without exception.' He went to ring. I didn't leave the Boss's side. He was lying motionless, just snoring. Starostin rang Ignatiev at the Ministry of State Security first, but Ignatiev was frightened and referred him to Beria and Malenkov. While he was ringing, we talked it over and decided to move him onto the large sofa in the big dining room.... We moved him because there was more air in there. We all helped put him on the sofa, and covered him with a rug, we could see he'd got very cold, lying there since 7:00 P.M. Butusova rolled his shirtsleeves down - he must have felt cold like that. In the meantime Starostin had put in a call through to Malenkov. Roughly half an hour later Malenkov rang us and said 'I haven't found Beria yet.' Another half an hour went by, and Beria rang to say: 'Don't tell anybody about Comrade Stalin's illness.'
So an hour had passed, and still no one was hurrying to the dying (former) Boss. Only the attachments sat at his bedside, waiting.
KHRUSHCHEV'S VERSION
Only one of Stalin's comrades-in-arms has described that nocturnal tragedy - Nikita Khrushchev. And a very strange story he tells.
I suddenly got a call from Malenkov. 'The Chekists' (he mentioned a name) 'have rung from Stalin's place. They're very worried, they say something's happened to Stalin. We'd better get out there. I've already phoned Beria and Bulganin. Go straight out to Stalin's place, I'll be on my way, and so will the others.' I called for a car immediately.... We agreed not to go straight up to the dacha, but to call at the duty room first.
So, according to Khrushchev, all four of last night's guests set off immediately.
We looked in at the duty room and asked, 'What's wrong?' They explained
{p. 555} that Stalin always rang at about 11 in the evening, and asked for tea.... This time he hadn't. The Chekists said they'd sent Matryona Petrovna [Butusova] to reconnoiter - she waited at table, a person of very limited intelligence, but honest and devoted to Stalin. She came back and said that Comrade Stalin was lyulg on the floor, and that the floor under him was wet, he'd wet himself. The Chekists had picked Stalin up and put him on the couch in the little dining room. When they told us what had happened, and that he was now asleep, we thought that it would be rather embarrassing if we turned up there while he was in such an unseemly state. So we went back home.
According to Khrushchev, then, they went out there immediately, but tactfully withdrew, all four of them, when they were told about the Boss's 'unseemly state.'
Lozgachev told me otherwise: 'At 3:00 A.M. I heard a car dnve up.' Nearly four hours had passed since that first telephone call. Lozgachev recounted:
Beria and Malenkov had arrived. [And there was no Khrushchev!] Malenkov's shoes creaked, and I remember him taking them off and tucking them under his arrn. They came in: 'What's wrong with the Boss?' He was just Iling there, snoring.... Bena swore at me, and said, 'What d'you mean by it, starting a panic? The Boss is obviously sleeping peacefully. Let's go, Malenkov.' I told them the whole story, how he was lying on the floor, and I asked him a question, and he could only make inarticulate noises. Bena said to me: 'Don't cause a panic, don't bother us. And don't disturb Comrade Stalin.' Then they left.
So, then - after declaring that a seventy-four-year-old man, who had been lying for four hours or possibly longer in a pool of his own urine, was 'sleeping peacefully,' his comrades-in-arms drove off, leaving the Boss still without help.
'I TOOK HIM OUT'
Lozgachev: 'I was on my own again, I thought I'd better call Starostin and tell him to get them all up again. I said, "Otherwise he'll die, and it'll be curtains for you and me. Ring and tell them to come." '
N. Khrushchev: 'After a short time there was another ring. Malenkov was on the line. He said, 'The boys have rung again from Comrade Stalin's place. They say there really is something wrong with Comrade Stalin. Matryona Petrovna did say, when we sent her in, that he was sleeping peacefully, but
{p. 556} it isn't an ordinary sleep.' We shall have to go again. We agreed that the doctors would have to be called in.'
Lozgachev: 'Around 8:00 A.M. Khrushchev put in an appearance. [This then was his first appearance.] Khrushchev said, "How's the Boss?" I said, 'Very poor, something's happened to him,' and told him the whole story. Khrushchev said, 'The doctors will be here right away.' I thought, 'Thank God!' The doctors arrived between 8:30 and 9:00 A.M.
He had been lying there, without help, for thirteen hours.
We will never know for sure what happened that night in the Boss's locked rooms. But there are only two possible versions. Either the Boss suddenly lost his mind, ordered everybody to bed, and then had a stroke in the night, or Khrustalev was ordered by somebody to send his subordinates to bed so that he, or someone unknown to us, could be alone with the Boss.
After Vlasik's arrest, Beria had of course recruited support for himself among Stalin's guard, which was no longer under proper supervision. The Boss had always thought he could count on Beria because he was a man of straw. He had miscalculated. Beria had seized his last chance of survival. Was it Khrustalev himself who ventured into the Boss's room? Or someone else? Perhaps they gave the Boss, who was fast asleep after his Madzhari, an injection? Perhaps the injection caused his stroke? Perhaps the Boss managed to wake up when he felt ill and tried to save himself? But the injection took effect before he got any farther than the table? If that is how it all happened we can easily understand why his henchmen so bravely refrained from rushing to his aid. It looks as though they knew exactly what had happened, and that the Boss was no longer dangerous.
Even if we prefer the first variant, the four of them calmly and deliberately denied Stalin help and left him to die.
In either case, then, they killed him. Killed him like the cowards they had always been. Beria had every right to say to Molotov - as Molotov later told Chuyev - 'I took him out.'
TIMETABLE OF A DEATH
Lozgachev explained: 'Well, the doctors were all terrified.... They kept looking at him.... They were all trembling, like us. They had to examine him, but their hands were shaking. A dentist came to take out his false teeth, and they slipped out of his hands, he was so frightened. Then professor Lukomsky said: "We'll have to take his shirt off, to measure his blood pressure." I ripped open the shirt. They started measunng. Then they all took a good look and asked us who was there when he fell. We thought, This is it then, they'll put us in a car and it's goodbye - we're done for! But the
{p. 557} doctors, thank God, came to the conclusion that he'd had a hemorrhage. Then a lot of people started arriving, and from that moment we were really out of it all. I stood in the doorway. There were crowds of people behind me, people who'd just come. I remember that Ignatiev, the minister, was afraid for some time to come in. I said, "Come on in, there's no need to be shy." '
On March 2 Svetlana was brought in, as she recalled: 'They called Vasily in as well, but he was drunk and hurried off looking for the guards. I heard him out there in the staff quarters shouting that they'd killed Father.... Then he went off home. They applied leeches, and x-rayed his lungs. The whole Academy of Medical Sciences met to try and decide what else they could try. An artificial respirator was brought in. The clumsy machine stood there unused, while the young technicians looked goggle-eyed at what was going on around them.'
He died in the atmosphere he had created, surrounded by fear and false pretenses.
His comrades-in-arms left him dying and drove to Moscow. Straight to his office.
The Boss's off1ce had continued to function while he was dying. On March 2 at 10:40 A.M., according to an entry in Stalin's visitors' book, the trio who returned from the dacha - Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev - assembled there. The four who had fallen out of favor - Molotov, Mikoyan, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich - together with the other members of the Presidium, office holders of the second rank, joined them. They began dividing his power among themselves, there in his offfice. After which Beria and Malenkov, together with the newly confident Voroshilov and Mikoyan, set out again for the dacha to keep an eye on the dying man.
At 8:30 P.M., according to the visitors' book, they reassembled in Stalin's off1ce and continued discussing the division of power.
The following morning they returned to the dacha.
That was now their daily routine.
The eminent physician A.L. Myasnikov was one of the experts assembled to determine the cause of Stalin's death. He recalled that 'Stalin lay there in a heap. He turned out to be short and rather fat. His face was contorted.... The diagnosis seemed clear - a hemorrhage in the left cerebral hemisphere resulting from hypertonia and sclerosis.... The consultants had to answer Malenkov's question: What is the prognosis? There could be only one answer: "Death is inevitable." '
He was helpless, scarcely breathing, close to death, but they still had need of him. Myasnikov recalled: 'Malenkov gave us to understand that he hoped
{p. 558} that medical measures would succeed in prolonging the patient's life "for a sufficient penod." We all realized that he had in mind the time necessary for the organization of the new government and the preparation of public opinion. Stalin groaned from time to time. For just one short minute he seemed to be looking at those around him and recognizing them. Voroshilov said: "Comrade Stalin, we are here your loyal friends and comrades. How do you feel, dear friend?" But by then there was no expression on his face. On March 5 we spent the whole day giving injections and writing bulletins. Members of the Politburo approached the dying man's bedside. Those of lower rank looked in through the door. I remember that Khrushchev also kept to the doorway. The order of precedence was strictly observed. Malenkov and Beria were in front Then came Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Bulganin, and Mikoyan. Molotov was unwell, but looked in briefly two or three times.'
Molotov recollected: 'I was called to the dacha. His eyes were closed, and whenever he opened them and tried to speak Beria rushed over and kissed his hand. After the funeral Beria said, "The Coryphaeus of Sciences, eh?" and roared with laughter.'
MARCH FIFTH
Svetlana descnbed his last moments: 'Father's death was slow and difficult. . . . His face was discolored and different . . . his features were becoming unrecognizable.... The death agony was terrible. It choked him slowly as we watched. 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 he raised his left hand and seemed either to be pointing upward somewhere or threatening us all . . . then, the next moment, his spirit after one last effort tore itself from his body.'
Each of those present had a different interpretation of that last gesture. The resuscitator G. Chesnokova said that, 'the rhythm of his breathing changed abruptly, and signs of agitation appeared. His left hand rose as if in greeting. That was the death agony. Breathing ceased.'
Lozgachev told me, 'They say that when he died he raised his hand, as he had that other time, by the table, begging for help.... But who could help him!'
Myasnikov noted, 'Death took place at 21:50.'
COMRADE STALIN CONTINUES TO FIGHT AGAINST DEATH
Svetlana wrote, 'Beria was the first to rush out into the corridor, and in the quiet of the room where we were standing in silence we heard him say in
{p. 559} a loud, undisguisedly triumphant voice: "Khrustalev - the car!" . . . Valechka Istomina, with her round face and snub nose, rested her head on the deceased's breast and wept out loud.' This note of Svetlana's has preserved for us Beria's triumphant voice - and the fact that he addressed himself to Khrustalev! Of all the attachments he singled out Khrustalev.
Beria was in a hurry. But the other comrades-in-arms stayed behind. To Beria, Stalin was just the Boss. To some of the others - Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov - he meant their youth, the friends they had betrayed for him, their hopes, their very lives.
But they stayed only a little while before dashing to the Kremlin after Beria, to assume power. The Central Committee of the Party, the Council of Ministers, and the Supreme Soviet held a joint meeting in the Kremlin to legalize what they had already agreed on.
The writer Konstantin Simonov, although he was a member of the Supreme Soviet, believed, like the rest of the country, that Stalin was still alive:
I arrived in the hall forty minutes early, but everybody was already there. We all believed that Stalin was lying somewhere nearby in the Kremlin, unable to recover consciousness. We all sat in complete silence.... I would never have believed that three hundred people sitting so closely together could remain so silent for forty whole minutes. I shall never forget that silence. They emerged from a door at the rear of the hall - the Bureau of the Presidium of the Central Committee, plus Molotov and Mikoyan. Malenkov made the introductory speech. The gist of it was that Stalin continued to struggle against death, but that even if he won the fight his condition would be so grave that.... The country could not be left without leadership. It was therefore necessary to form a new government.
They did as they were told. There was then no point in prolonging the farce. After the meeting Simonov went off to the Pravda offices. The editor's phone rang, and as he hung up he told Simonov that Stalin was dead. Lozgachev recalled: 'They told us that they'd be taking him to the hospital right away to embalm him. Nobody called us in to say goodbye to the dead man, we went in without being asked. Svetlana was there briefly. Vasya was there too. I wouldn't say he was drunk, but he was overexcited.... Then a car came with a stretcher, they put him on it and carried him out, with me watching. And that was it.... There was nobody else there - only ourselves standing and watching.' I asked Lozgachev whether it was correct that, as some people said, there was a bruise on the Boss's body, as if someone had pushed him. He said 'There was no bruise,
{p. 560} and there could be no bruise.... Nobody pushed him. Khrustalev was there when they embalmed him, and told us they'd found something like a cinder in his lungs. Maybe something had got in when they were piping oxygen in. Otherwise there was nothing.' What, I asked, became of the attachments afterward? 'Afterward they were all sent to different places.... One or another would be called in and sent out of Moscow - "leave the city immediately and take your family with you." ' But Starostin, Orlov, and Tukov decided to go and see Beria and ask him not to send them away. When they got to him he said: 'If you don't want to be there - you'll be there (pointing at the ground).' So off they went.
What about Khrustalev? I asked Lozgachev. He replied, 'Khrustalev fell ill and died soon after. {possibly like Lee Harvey Osward, or Jack Ruby?} Orlov and Starostin were posted to Vladimir, and I remained at the "object" - the "object" was vacant, and I was in charge of it. It was handed over to the Ministry of Health.... That was the end of the nearer dacha.... Valechka Istomina ... was thirty-eight at the time, she used to look after him, see to his shirts and socks and linen, I don't know what else there may have been between them. She was a clever one, talkative, a chatterbox, I've seen her a few times since, she was sent away somewhere at first. Now she's in Moscow, married, with grandchildren.'
Stalin lay in state in the Hall of Columns, and thousands of mourners took to the streets. Trainloads of people arrived from every town, to say goodbye to the God. His fellow citizens, who idolized him, and of whom he had destroyed more than all Russia's wars put together, trampled each other in the struggle to catch one last glimpse of him, to say farewell.
I remember that sunny day, I remember the girl standing in front of me. The crowd was crushing us. The militia were hemming us in, and we were suffocating. I remembered that girl's fear-crazed eyes. Suddenly something gave, and people began falling down. I found myself carried away, pinned between two sets of shoulders, stumbling over bodies, right out of the crowd, where I was flung onto the roadway. The skirt of my overcoat was torn, but I was alive. Thousands were carried off to mortuaries that day. He had refused to depart without a blood sacrifice.... The crushed mourners joined the millions he had destroyed in his lifetime.
On the day of Stalin's death, March 5, 1953, another death passed quite unnoticed - that of Sergei Prokofiev. His widow tned to get flowers, flowers of any sort, for his coffn. But everything was closed, nothing was being sold. Her neighbor took cuttings from all the indoor plants so that there would be something at least to lay on the great composer's coffin. Prokofiev's favourite pianist, Svyatoslav Richter, was flying from Tiflis at the time, to play beside the Leader's coffin in the Hall of Columns. It was a
{p. 561} special plane, and it was cramrned full of flowers. Richter was almost suffcated by their scent.
The Burial Commission was in permanent session, doing its utmost to immortalize the Leader: 'The Commission deems it expedient to carry out the long-terrn embalmment of Comrade Stalin's body in the special laboratory of the Lenin Mausoleum. Comrade Stalin's body must be laid in the coffin in military uniform, with the medals of Hero of the Soviet Union and Hero of Socialist Labor, and also ribbons of his other decorations and medals, attached to his tunic.... A decree on the construction of a Pantheon should be drafted.' Instructions to the embalmers specified that his shoulder boards, the buttons on his uniform, and his 'hero's stars' must be of gold.
The sarcophagus containing the mummy of the second Bolshevik God stood outside the Mausoleum. On the Mausoleum stood the loyal comrades-in-arms who had killed him: Malenkov in a cap with ear flaps, Khrushchev in a squashed fur hat, Beria in a felt hat with the broad brim pulled down over his pince-nez, looking like a Hollywood mafioso. They joined in glorifying the murdered God.
After the funeral the Boss's comrades arranged for his son's apartment to be permanently bugged. The records of his conversations are in the President's Archive. We have Vasily talking to his chauffeur, Fevralev, about the funeral: 'All those people crushed - it's terrible! I had a row with Khrushchev about it.... Something terrible happened in the House of the Unions. An old woman with a walking stick came in, Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov were standing in the guard of honor ... and suddenly the old woman says, "You killed him, you swine, now you can be happy! May you be damned!"' Three weeks after his father's death Lieutenant General of Aviation Vasily Stalin was discharged from the Soviet regular army without the right to wear military uniform. A month after that he was arrested. The once too-powerful general finally came out of prison only in the spring of 1961. He was banished to Kazan, where he died on March 19, 1962. Perhaps, following the tradition established by his father, someone helped him to die?
Beria, who had jailed Vasily, shortly followed him inside. A description of his execution has survived. 'They tied his hands behind his back and attached him to a hook driven into a wooden board. Beria said, "Permit me to say ..."' but the Procurator General said, 'Gag his mouth with a towel.' One protruding eye glared at them wildly over the blindfold. The officer pulled the trigger and the bullet struck him in the middle of the forehead.' Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich - they all fell in turn. And last of all, Khrushchev.
{p. 562} While his henchmen were destroying each other, people in dirty padded jackets drifted over the expanses of Stalin's empire. The great deliverance from the camps was under way. Alexei Kapler, whom his daughter once loved, was one of those freed. Many years later he told me about it. 'I went into a little park and stared stupidly at the children playing. One little boy ran past me, laughing - I saw his skinny, defenseless childish legs. And something happened to me. I burst into tears. I sobbed and sobbed shamelessly - enjoying it, like I used to in my childhood. I wept and wept . . . forgiving them ... forgiving everybody.'
Stalin himself, even after Khrushchev's denunciation, still lay in the Mausoleum. I remember when I first saw him: beside Lenin's doll-like head, his face was that of a living person. Stubble had grown on his cheeks.
Eight years went by before they could bring themselves to remove him. F. Konyev, Commander of the Kremlin Regiment, remembered the occasion.
October 31, 1961. Militia squads cleared Red Square and closed off all the entrances. When it was completely dark they finally got around to digging a grave by the Kremlin wall. ... They transferred Stalin's body from the sarcophagus to a coffin lined with red cloth. He looked as if he was alive; the Mausoleum staff wept as they switched off the installation. They replaced the golden buttons with brass ones, and also removed his golden shoulder boards. Then they covered the body with a dark veil, leaving only his lifelike face uncovered. At 22:00 the Reburial Commission arrived. No relatives were present. ... After a minute's silence we lowered him into the grave. We had orders to cover him with two concrete slabs [as if they feared that he might return from the grave]. But we just shoveled earth onto him.
END OF AN AGE
Perestroika arrived, Gorbachev came to power, people began reviewing what they had lived through. I received a letter:
My name is Yun Nikolaevich Pepelyaev. I have long been curious about my family. Can you possibly give me detailed inforrnation about my relatives, and in particular:
- Pepelyaev, N. M. Major General in the tsar's army, killed 1916, in the First World War.
- Pepelyaev, V. N. President of the Council of Ministers in Kolchak's government, shot in 1920 at Irkutsk.
- Pepelyaev, A. N. Lieurenant General, commanded Kolchak's First Sibenan Army, then fought in the Far East, was forced to surrender. Sentenced to death and shot in 1938.
{p. 563} - Pepelyaev, L.N. White officer, killed during the Civil War.
- Pepelyaev M. N. Staff Captain in the tsar's arrny, convicted in 1933, died in prison camp.
- Pepelyaev, A. I. Surgeon in Kolchak's arrny, tried and convicted 1942, died in Siblag [a prison camp] in 1946.
- Pepelyaev, A. N. Member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, shot by the Cheka at Perm in 1918.
- Pepelyaev, M. E. My grandfather, resident at Blisk, tried and convicted in the thirties.
- Pepelyaev, M. I. Resident at Blisk, killed in the great Patriotic War [World War II].
Pepelyaev's letter is a concise history of Russia in the twentieth century.
Two of the Boss's faithful comrades-in-arms, Molotov and Kaganovich, lived on {Kaganovich was Jewish, and Molotov had a Jewish wife, showing that although many Jews had deserted the USSR, not all had}. They walked about the streets like ghosts. In his last years Molotov began to forget things. At times he imagined that he was Chairman of the Council of Ministers again, called for his suit and a tie, and sat waiting for Gorbachev's ministers to report to him. Not until 1986 did this man who had been born under Alexander III, lived under Nicholas II, worked with Lenin and Stalin, finally seek rest in the traditional Bolshevik red-lined coffin.
Kaganovich dragged on into the nineties. A relative of his told me: 'He died in July 1991. The television was broadcasting the latest news of perestroika, showing Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The maid heard him say, "It's a catastrophe." When she looked around he was sitting in front of the television set dead.'
Three weeks later, in August 1991, the crowd smashed statues of the God Lenin and broke windows in the sacred building of his Party's Central Committee. The USSR, the greatest of empires, built by the Boss to endure through the ages, was crumbling with bewildering rapidity.
The Tower of Babel and the Great Dream were no more.
{p. 565} AFTERWORD
I thought that my book was complete, but something needs to be added.
In 1995 the new Russia celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its victory over Germany. There was a victory parade, as in the past. But this time the man standing on the Lenin Mausoleum, where once the Boss had stood, was President Yeltsin. And a little green curtain hid the inscription 'Lenin' on the Mausoleum. Western leaders, among them President Clinton and Prime Minister Major, stood in a group at the base of the Mausoleum. Standing there beside the Sacred Body they watched the veterans march past - the remnants of the great army which had defeated fascism, and which had, in its creator's mind, been destined to conquer the whole world.
Another procession coincided with the victory parade: a demonstration fifty thousand strong. Loudly singing songs from the Stalin era, they proceeded from the Belorussian Station, through the main streets of Moscow, to Mayakovsky Square.
For the first time since his death, dozens of portraits of Stalin loated by, held aloft over the heads of the demonstrators.
Yelling raucous slogans, Communists, monarchists, and Russian fascists marched side by side, at one in their devotion to the Boss.
And rightly so. Was he not a greater national-socialist than Hitler? Had he not created the greatest of monarchist cults and enlarged the empire of the Romanovs? And had he not served the Great Dream - a world in which Bolshevism reigned supreme?
Stalin had bided his time underground for over forty years. While those of his victims who had survived the horrors of his reign of terror died off one by one, and while their children grew old.... But now that the Great Amnesia had come upon the land, the Boss had risen from the grave.
People streamed past, with pictures of the Boss bobbing overhead, some of them bearing such eloquent inscnptions as 'Jews Beware! Stalin Will Soon Return!'
The Russian religious philosopher Georgi Fedotov, writing at the end of the twenties, foretold with dread a time when 'the obsessive malice at
{p. 566} present concentrated on the construction of a godless Leninist International is directed instead to the creation of a nationalist and Orthodox Russia. ... And the hand which today kills kulaks and the bourgeois will kill Jews and non-Russians. And man's black soul will remain as it was, or rather it will become blacker.'
Those walking in the procession included priests in cassocks - also under portraits of Stalin.
Was Holy Russia preparing to rise again under a portrait of the Devil?
Fedotov's article, however, has an epigraph: 'And Satan exults and mocks you, because you were called Christ's.'
Yes, they are ready now to restore his empire, the bloody Babylon of yesterday. Surely it cannot happen again! The suffering and the bloodshed! Surely this unhappy land will have to learn yet again the truth of those words: 'Woe, woe unto thee, thou mighty city Babylon, thou strong city!'
'I am the First and the Last, and besides me there is no other God.'
{end of selections}
Key dates:
January 13, 1953: Tass announced the discovery of a terrorist group of poisoning doctors (Radzinsky, p. 539).
February 8, 1953: Pravda published the names of Jewish saboteurs etc.
February 11, 1953: the USSR severed diplomatic relations with Israel (Yosef Govrin, Israeli-Soviet Relations 1953-1967, pp. 3-4).
End of February, 1953: rumors went around Moscow that the Jews were to be deported to Siberia (Radzinsky, p. 542), with March 5 rumoured to be the date when this would happen (p. 546}. Radzinsky claims that Stalin was inviting war with America, the home of Zionism and world finance, over this issue, because America was dominated by Zionist financiers (p. 543).
March 5, 1953: Stalin declared dead.
Lazar Kaganovich's account of the Murder of Stalin: kaganovich.html.
Radzinsky is taking a common Jewish line on Stalin. And he is increasingly being used as an authority, while other information, such as the following, is ignored.
The Death of Stalin, by Georges Bertoli, and The Death of Stalin: An Investigation by "Monitor" (this book shows that Stalin was overthrown by a coup d'etat): death-of-stalin.html.
It seems to me that the Doctors Plot was quite real. The fact that Stalin was murdered within 2 months of the announcement of the Doctors Plot in the media, suggests that it was true.
So does the fact that after Stalin's death, his name was quickly dropped from the media.
Does Radzinsky admit that the USSR was set up by Jews? NO.
What Stalin was about, was taking that control back from them. But Radzinsky can't tell you that, because he can't admit that Jews had that control before Stalin. I accuse him of a cover-up.
Bertrand Russell says Bolsheviks were Americanized Jews: russell.html
The Jewish identities of Lenin & Trotsky: lenin-trotsky.html
Joseph Nedava, Trotsky and the Jews: nedava.html
Arthur Koestler was Trotskyist AND Zionist: koestler.html
Abolition of Marriage in early USSR: sex-soviet.html
Solzhenitsyn on changing position of Jews in USSR: stalin.html
Sudoplatov on the "California in the Crimea" Plan: sudoplat.html
The 1946 Baruch Plan for Nuclear Disarmament & World Government (if
benevolent, why isn't this information in history textbooks?): baruch-plan.html
Beria, Gorbachev and "Western" Marxism: beria.html
Max Shpak on how the USSR changed when Jews lost control:
cia-infiltrating-left.html
Write to me at contact.html.