At 6.30 p.m. a light was switched on in the dacha. The patrolling guards were relieved at this sign of life, surmising that all must be well with the Leader. They assumed that, after getting up late, he was tending to his mass of duties. Yet Stalin failed to emerge from his room. He neither called for food nor gave commands for anything to be done. No one caught a glimpse of him. The guards therefore remained perplexed about what they should do next. At around 10 p.m. a package arrived for Stalin from the Central Committee offices in Moscow. This forced the security group to make a decision. After an exchange of opinions it was resolved that Pavel Lozgachëv should take the package to Stalin. Nervously entering the room, he came upon a shocking scene. Stalin was slumped on the floor. Although he had not quite lost consciousness, he could not speak and had wet himself. Evidently he had had a stroke. Stalin’s wristwatch lay on the floor next to him showing the time at half-past six. The guards reasonably guessed that Stalin had fallen over at that earlier moment in the evening when he had put on the light.12
No one dared do the most obvious thing and call a doctor. Needing an instruction from higher authority, the guards phoned Minister of State Security Sergei Ignatev in Moscow. Even Ignatev felt out of his depth and phoned Malenkov and Beria. Everyone at the dacha frantically wished to receive orders. All they did on their own initiative was to lift Stalin from the floor and move him on to his divan and place a blanket over him.13
Receiving Ignatev’s news from Malenkov, Presidium members wondered whether Stalin’s final demise was at hand. But exactly how they acted is still an unsolved riddle. Not only Stalin’s fellow politicians but also his guards kept their mouths shut for many years about the episode — and memories deteriorated with the passage of time. The vicissitudes of the struggle for the political succession also had a distorting effect on the records. The victor was Khrushchëv. Beria was executed in December 1953 and Malenkov, on losing to Khrushchëv, was not inclined to record his testimony. Khrushchëv and Svetlana Allilueva were left as the only witnesses who could freely give their accounts before old age dimmed their memories. Unfortunately neither Khrushchëv nor Allilueva was averse to fantasising to exaggerate their knowledge and virtue. It was a paradoxical situation. Stalin himself had rigidly regulated the issuance of details about his life; their scantiness and unreliability were extreme. Yet the provision of those details became even less dependable from the day he lost that control. Dates, procedures, personalities and events are as clear as a barrel of tar for the period from 28 February to 5 March 1953.
The fullest account came from Khrushchëv. According to him, several of them went out to the dacha in the early hours of 2 March. Supposedly these included Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin and Khrushchëv. It is not certain whether or not they — or some of them — made a second visit before deciding to call for medical assistance.14 For whatever reason, it was hours before doctors were summoned to care for Stalin. The precise time of their advent is in dispute. Svetlana, who had been summoned from a French language class,15 put it at 10 a.m. in her memoir; but the more plausible account by the guard A. I. Rybin, who was there at the time, put it at 7 a.m.16 In any case it is clear that Presidium members were not quick to arrange for such assistance. This gave rise to the suspicion that they deliberately let Stalin’s condition deteriorate. It is a possibility since all of them were potential purge victims. But perhaps his political subordinates were simply too scared to intervene any earlier. If he recovered, they would pay a heavy price for acting as if they were in charge of the country. This is a credible hypothesis. Yet they were surely dilatory to a culpable extent — and perhaps they were already more aware of the chronic nature of his ill health than they let on.
The doctors found Stalin drenched in his urine. They undressed and wiped him clean with a vinegar-based solution. At some point he vomited blood; Cheynes-Stokes respiration ensued with its characteristic gasping and irregularity. The seriousness of his condition was obvious. The medical experts themselves were functioning under the stress of knowing what happened to doctors who failed to satisfy Soviet politicians. They quickly found out the worst. Stalin’s right extremities were totally paralysed. Although they did what they could, his prospects were poor. Before midday they administered enemas, even though no one seriously anticipated a positive effect.17
The problem for the Presidium was that, if Stalin recovered, they could be damned if they had failed to assist his recovery and damned if they had intervened without his permission. Caution was vital. It was clearly essential to discover more about his condition. Unfortunately, after the Doctors’ Plot arrests, the finest medical expertise in Moscow was to be found in the cells of the Lubyanka. What followed was a tragicomedy. The incarcerated professors (who allegedly were among the most evil traitors) were approached and asked the likely consequences for a patient diagnosed as having Cheynes–Stokes respiration. After weeks of torture they were bewildered by the unusual turn taken by their interrogators. Yakov Rappoport answered concisely that this was a very ‘grave symptom’, implying that death was the likeliest result.18 Whether medical steps were taken on the basis of such information is not known. But Presidium members had at least gained the assurance that they were free to plan for the political succession. The evidence of their eyes was anyway pretty conclusive: Stalin was in a ghastly condition and the doctors attending him were clearly pessimistic. Now the country’s most distinguished physicians, held in the Lubyanka, had independently confirmed their impression.
On 4 March they started to make their arrangements. There was no procedural tradition and no rules; Stalin had studiously kept the matter off the agenda. The main leaders sensed that legitimacy would accrue to them only if they could pretend to continuity, and they convoked an emergency session of the Party Central Committee. This enabled the Presidium veterans to bypass the threat from the members promoted since the Nineteenth Congress in October 1952. Some veterans were better placed than others. Molotov could not claim supreme power after Stalin’s attack on him in October 1952. Malenkov and Beria took the initiative. Flanked by the Presidium veterans (with the exception of Bulganin, who was on duty by Stalin’s bedside), Malenkov opened the session by announcing that Stalin was seriously ill and that the prognosis was poor even were he to survive the current medical crisis. The Central Committee listened silently and anxiously. Then the lectern was ceded to Beria, who proposed that Malenkov should take over Stalin’s post as Chairman of the Council of Ministers with immediate effect. This was agreed and the short session was declared closed.19