Historians can debate whether calculation or mania played the greater role in Stalin’s final campaigns. In either case, his actions attest to a relentless striving to hold onto power until he reached the ultimate impediment: death. The final leg of the journey toward this impediment began on Saturday evening, 28 February 1953, when he invited his four currently closest comrades—Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, and Bulganin—to his dacha for the last dinner gathering of his life. The following day his bodyguards found him paralyzed, and the agonizing over whether or not to summon members of the highly suspect medical profession began.
THE DICTATORSHIP COLLAPSES
A conference in the Kremlin, 2–5 March 1953, and the death of Stalin.
The arrival of the doctors on the morning of 2 March 1953 fundamentally changed the situation. The very fact that they had been summoned to Stalin’s dacha meant that the seriousness of his condition was officially recognized. The doctors confirmed the worst: a stroke had brought the vozhd to death’s door. For the first time in many decades, and completely unexpectedly, the USSR was faced with a transfer of power at the highest level.
Like Lenin, Stalin had not anointed a successor or created a legal mechanism for the orderly transfer of power. Instead he did everything he could to hinder the emergence of a successor and to instill a sense of political unworthiness in his associates. By concentrating high-level decision making in his own hands, he ensured that the other members of the Politburo were poorly informed and had little authority even over those areas for which they were immediately responsible. Driven by a thirst for power, political self-centeredness, and senile emotional instability, the Soviet dictator seemed to display an “Après moi le déluge” attitude toward the post-Stalinist future.
Thus one can only marvel at the ease with which Stalin’s heirs got through the critical period of the interregnum. There were a number of reasons why they could do so. One was that even during Stalin’s lifetime his comrades had developed a certain independence and the ability to work with one another. Each oversaw a particular component of the party-state apparat. It was not unusual for them to meet without Stalin to work on specific practical matters of government. One set of administrative entities that met quite regularly were the various executive and administrative bodies that came under the Council of Ministers. Officially, Stalin headed these bodies, but he never took part in their day-to-day work. Furthermore, during his lengthy southern vacations the Politburo grew accustomed to deliberating without him. Also, the members of the leadership were united by their common terror of the dictator. Although there was competition to get closer to him, Stalin’s comrades were careful not to provoke his fury, and they worked to maintain equilibrium within the leadership group. The Leningrad Affair had shown that no one was safe. There was an elaborate interplay among the instinct for self-preservation, institutional interests, and the need to fend off threats against the system. Dealing as they did with the day-to-day challenge of keeping the country afloat, Stalin’s colleagues were keenly aware of the urgent need for change to which he seemed willfully blind. This awareness led to an informal effort to conceive solutions, whose realization was blocked only by Stalin. Gradually and inexorably, under the shadow of dictatorship, the oligarchic system took embryonic form. It was only a matter of days from the first news of Stalin’s fatal illness that the oligarchy emerged as a force.
At 10:40 on the morning of 2 March, an official meeting of the Central Committee Presidium Bureau was convened. It was the first time in many years that a meeting took place in Stalin’s Kremlin office without him. In addition to all the members of the Bureau (except for Stalin), the attendees were Molotov, Mikoyan, Nikolai Shvernik (the chairman of the Supreme Soviet), Matvei Shkiriatov (chairman of the Party Control Commission), I. I. Kuperin (head of the Kremlin’s health administration), and the neuropathologist R. A. Tkachev. For twenty minutes the group considered one matter: “The finding of the council of physicians concerning the cerebral hemorrhage of Comrade I. V. Stalin that took place on 2 March and the resulting severe state of his health.”1 The Bureau approved the doctors’ diagnosis and established a schedule for members of the leadership to keep watch by the vozhd’s bedside. The presence of Molotov and Mikoyan, despite their being out of favor with Stalin and formally expelled from the Bureau, is of central importance. Their inclusion was an act of defiance against the vozhd and an effort to restore the old collective leadership, as well as a natural and sensible step aimed at maintaining unity in a time of crisis. The Soviet leaders, certain that Stalin would not recover, were undertaking to change the system of supreme power that he had established.
At 8:25 that evening, the same assemblage of newly fledged oligarchs again convened in Stalin’s office to consider an official medical update: “On the state of health of Comrade I. V. Stalin as of the evening of 2 March.”2 With every passing hour it became clearer: Stalin had not long to live. The doctor Aleksandr Miasnikov later recalled: “On the morning of the third the council of physicians had to submit an answer to Malenkov’s question about the prognosis. The only answer we could give was a negative one: death was inevitable. Malenkov gave us to understand that he expected such a finding, but then stated that he hoped that medical measures could extend his life for a sufficient time, even if they could not save it. We understood that he was referring to the need to allow time to organize a new government and, at the same time, prepare public opinion.”3
Records indicate that on the morning of 3 March the Soviet leaders were already assuming that Stalin would not recover and planning accordingly. At noon another meeting was held, this time without any doctors, at which a resolution was adopted to report Stalin’s illness in the press and to convene a Central Committee plenum.4 The decision to convene a plenum signaled preparations to transfer power, even while the exact configuration of the new leadership remained an open question. Malenkov and Beria took upon themselves the task of formulating specific proposals. They had plenty of time to do so. The members of the Presidium kept vigil at Stalin’s dacha, two at a time. Malenkov and Beria were teamed for this duty, as were Khrushchev and Bulganin. The shifts lasted many hours, and there was time for far-ranging discussion.
The fourth of March marked a turning point. That day’s newspapers contained the first official announcement of Stalin’s illness. With no hope for a recovery, the only option was to accustom the country and world to the news. The same day, Beria and Malenkov prepared proposals for reorganizing the upper echelons of power that were later discussed by the leadership group, including Molotov and Mikoyan. The 4 March document containing these proposals was confiscated from the safe of Malenkov’s assistant in 1956.5 For now we do not know what the initial draft contained, but we do know that it outlined the main decisions that were officially adopted the following day.6