He is a controversial "iron-blooded great man" in the East and the West, with an infinite and profound desire for power; He practiced an almost bloody dictatorship, and behind the brutal killings was a complex humanity.
Why did Stalin, one of the founders of the Soviet regime and Lenin's close comrade-in-arms, suddenly fall ill and die mysteriously? Is it overwork, or is it a rebellion by political enemies? What are the secrets behind a mixed-ranking life?
Who is the suspect
In the early morning of March 6, 1953, beautiful Moscow had just woken up from its slumber.
At 6 o'clock came suddenly from the radio station the slow and muffled voice of the famous announcer Levitan: "Joseph Vissarioovich, Lenin's comrade-in-arms, the genius successor of Lenin's cause, the wise leader of the Communist Party and the Soviet people, Stalin's heart has stopped beating." ”
This astonishing news immediately spread throughout the Soviet Union, and on the same day Pravda published a portrait of Stalin on the front page of Pravda, along with a letter of warning to the Soviet people.
Eastern Europe, China and other countries with close ties to the Soviet Union expressed shock and held various mourning activities. Many Western countries quickly convened government-level meetings to discuss the changes in the situation after Stalin's death in order to take timely countermeasures.
At the same time, the cause of Stalin's death began to become the focus of debate, and a national leader with the best doctors and medical conditions in the world, a commander-in-chief who thought that "the kingdom would never end", really "died of cerebral hemorrhage", as the government said?
An even more puzzling scenario ensues.
Before Stalin's death, his son Vasily heard the news, his mood was almost out of control, and while the doctor was still rescuing him, he burst out in the hall and shouted: "Bastard! Father was killed!"
In Stalin's next room, he drank for three days in a row, muttering, "They killed my father, they..."
Who are "them"? How dare he murder the First Commander in broad daylight? Many of the rumors about Stalin's death spread, from Stalin's Guards to service personnel, all the way to Stalin's native Georgia.
At that time, Stalin had a supreme position in the Soviet Union, and his words could determine a person's life and death, and a look would make the people around him fidget.
In his later years, Stalin's paranoia had developed to an unbelievable degree, and some people said that he had already suffered from mania. During the meal, every dish must be tasted by others before he eats; When he went out, his convoy often circled the streets of Moscow, because the route could only be controlled by Stalin alone.
The most incomprehensible thing is that Stalin did not trust doctors, and only when he went on vacation to the seashore did he reluctantly bring a very trusted dentist. In his eyes, every doctor is a hidden enemy and a terrorist.
So, no one really understood Stalin's health. Stalin was so unusually wary that it was impossible for ordinary people to approach him. Who, then, was suspected of killing Stalin?
Beria's conspiracy?
In 1976, Aftorkhanov, a Soviet scholar in exile in the West and known as a "Kremlinian", published the book "The Mystery of Stalin's Death" in Germany, proposing that "Stalin did not die naturally, but was murdered".
He pointed out more sharply that Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Bulganin, the four highest-ranking officials of the Soviet Union at that time, were the murderers, of which Stalin's illness, treatment, and death were carefully planned by Beria, and Khrushchev and other three were accomplices in hastening Stalin's death.
This terrible argument caused a strong reaction at the time, was it really so? Where is the basis for this claim?
In the memoirs of Stalin's guard chief Rebin, the last five days of Stalin's life are recorded in detail.
After the death of Stalin's wife, Nadezhda, in 1932, villa Conzevo became his perennial residence, surrounded by a five-meter-high wall, and later a second wall with a surveillance hole was added, which was enough to reassure Stalin in terms of security.
There were many rooms in the villa, and Stalin usually slept on the sofa in one of them, and he usually got up after 12 noon and worked for 12 to 15 hours.
On February 28, 1953, Stalin invited Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov, and Beria to dinner, and as usual, they discussed many issues.
Stalin was a talkative man who emphasized his views while criticizing Khrushchev and others on certain issues.
Dinner lasted until 4 a.m., and Stalin, seeing that it was not too early, interrupted his speech, nodded to everyone, and went back to his room.
At noon on March 1, Stalin's wake-up time had passed, but there was no sound in the room. The servicemen began to be uneasy, but, according to the system, no one could enter his room without Stalin's summons.
At 6:30 p.m., the lights in Stalin's office came on. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and waited for the summons to ring the bell.
However, they didn't hear anything. Stalin did not ask for meals as usual, nor did he have the custom of having the servicemen bring in some new editions of books and newspapers. What's going on today?
The hour hand was already pointing to 11 o'clock in the evening, and stalin would usually ask someone to send some refreshments at this time, but today there was none. The duty officer could not sit still any longer and decided to venture to visit. He took the papers and walked through several rooms to Stalin's bedroom.
When he turned on the light, the sight in front of him frightened him. The tall Stalin, dressed in pajamas and shirt, lay on his back on the floor with a copy of Pravda thrown next to him, and on the table was an open "Borjomi" mineral water.
When he saw the coming, Stalin reluctantly raised his hand, but he could not say a word, and his eyes were very panicked. The duty officer hurriedly called for other service personnel to carry Stalin to the sofa together.
Seeing this, Rebin, who was the chief of the guards, and the staff immediately thought of finding a doctor. However, this had to be approved by Beria, because the regulations stipulated that no doctor was allowed to approach Stalin without his permission. At the crucial moment, Beria was gone.
It was not until 3 a.m. on March 2 that Beria, a drunken man, and another Politburo member, Malenkov, rushed to the villa of Konzevo and looked at Stalin, who was already in a coma, and Beria still did not call the doctor, he shouted at the people present: "Panic! Didn't you see Comrade Stalin asleep? Give me back and don't disturb our leaders to rest! Otherwise, I'm going to settle accounts with you!"
When the seven best doctors who specialized in caring for the head of state arrived, it was already 9 a.m. on March 2, more than a decade after Stalin was unconscious. According to Dr. Chesnokova, an expert in brain surgery, Stalin was lying upright on the bed, his pupils dilated, his breathing weak, and his face pale.
Myasnikov and Dr. Konovav made a preliminary diagnosis of Stalin and found that an arterial vessel ruptured on the left half of his brain, that cerebral hemorrhage had spread to the brain, that the right side of the body was paralyzed, that there was a disorder of breathing, aphasia, and myocardial infarction.
Subsequently, new symptoms appeared, Stalin's pulse beats an astonishing number, renal dysfunction, increased levels of urea in the blood, and occasional absence of breathing.
"There's no hope." The doctors shook their heads secretly.
At this time, Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev and other Politburo members came to Stalin's residence, and everyone realized the gravity of the matter. During the day of March 3, Stalin briefly regained consciousness.
He raised his left hand, not knowing whether to point upwards or say something to those present, and the officials tensed up, but he finally lowered his hand and said nothing. Then he began to shake hands with the people around him one by one, as if to make a final farewell.
According to Rebben, Beria's mood was particularly abnormal at the time, and she had been rudely reprimanding the doctors and scolding them for not being useful. When Stalin was slightly conscious, he knelt on the ground like an actor and grabbed Stalin's hand and kissed it.
But when Stalin was unconscious again, Beria immediately stood up and spat on the ground. All this was seen by everyone, and everyone dared to be angry, because at the time of Stalin's death, there was no one in the whole Soviet Union who had more power than Beria.
Even Khrushchev admitted in his later memoirs: "As soon as Stalin died, Beria was radiant." Beria did think his long-awaited moment had finally arrived. Now there is no power on earth that can control him, and nothing can block his way, he can do whatever he wants. ”
The doctors are still making a last-ditch effort, and they don't want their leader to just leave.
After 58 hours of continuous rescue, Stalin finally regained consciousness on the night of March 5, when a female medical woman tried to feed him a sip of water with a spoon, and after Stalin's lips moved slightly, his face suddenly turned black, he was out of breath, and his heart stopped beating.
Chesnova and her companions immediately began artificial respiration of Stalin, changing it every 15 minutes, almost for an hour. At this time, Beria, who was beside him, became impatient, and he shouted, "Enough, it's over!" Subsequently, two medical personnel who were rescuing them were pushed away.
At 21:50 on March 5, Stalin, a great man of a generation, stopped breathing.
Kills all over the place
Although Rybin and Khrushchev differ in their descriptions of the scenes, the timing basically coincides, and it seems to prove the truth of the development of the matter.
In 1997, the famous Russian historian Radzinsky consulted the memoirs of relevant witnesses, interviewed Ozgachev, a guard who had been on duty on the day of Stalin's illness, and published a book called "Stalin's Secret Story", which revived the claim that Stalin was murdered.
In 1999, the famous biographer Volkogornov made a similar point in his book The Seven Leaders of the SOVIET Union.
In 2003, Professor Brent of Yale University in the United States and the official Russian historian Professor Vladimir Nomov published "The Bizarre Events of Stalin's Later Years", which directly pointed out that Stalin may have died of chronic poison.
Did Stalin really die at the hands of Beria? What was the grudge between him and Stalin?
It turned out that in Stalin's later years, there was no conclusion about his heir. He accused Molotov of "surrendering to US imperialism", he hated Zhdanov's excessive drunkenness, he considered Khrushchev a "cropper-like leader who could not afford to pick up the girder", and he considered Malenkov "spineless, lacking courage".
As for Beria, he was even more wary. This annoyed Beria, who was bent on taking over the Soviet Union, so he planned this difficult and highly skilled super murder.
However, this is only a speculation. So far, no one has been able to produce any strong and convincing factual evidence.
Since Beria had been removed from the post of Minister of State Security from 1946, Stalin's security guard work was no longer under his jurisdiction, which meant that Beria had little access to Stalin, and therefore it was even more difficult to carry out the murder plan.
Stalin was not killed by murder
After Stalin's death, the doctors wrote "March 2-5, 1953, Jovi Stalin's Medical History", which recounted the overall situation of the doctor from the time he arrived at Villa Concevo on March 2 and until Stalin's death three days later.
The report was written for more than four months and was not finalized until July 1953. From the archives of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs declassified in the past two years, the report has been revised at least twice, and the two drafts are different on many major issues.
Subsequently, the medical history was stamped with a "top secret" seal and submitted to the Central Committee of the CPSU. The two revised drafts are still well preserved, not publicly available, and no one has read them.
What unknown secrets are recorded in the medical history, could it be that the murderer is someone else?
A few days ago, in a documentary "Who Killed Stalin", BBC Radio 2 in which it was interviewed by interviewing the descendants of many parties involved, it was inferred that Stalin was likely to die at the hands of his children.
According to the British historian and Stalin biographer Simon Sibag Montefiori, Stalin's medical records before his death have been declassified by the Russian government, and Stalin's medical records show that he vomited blood at least twice before his death.
This meant that he not only had cerebral hemorrhage, but also stomach bleeding, and Stalin's symptoms of stomach bleeding were very close to taking a highly toxic rat poison by mistake.
Montefiori believed that Stalin's daughter Svetlana was probably the poisoner.
That's because in 1932, her mother, Nadezhda, committed suicide at home, leaving Svetlana with nightmarish memories.
Growing up, she always believed that her mother's death was caused by her father, especially seeing so many relatives being arrested or exiled by Stalin, her heart was full of resentment.
What Svetlana could not forgive was that in 1943, at the age of 16, she met the Jewish film director Kapler and soon fell in love, not wanting Stalin to arrest Kapler and exile him to a salt mine in Siberia after discovering their love affair, where kapler died soon after.
Not only that, but Stalin's son Vasily also had a motive for committing the crime, because he was very afraid of his father all his life. Although he was later promoted to general of the Air Force, this did not prevent him from opposing his father.
In the mid-1940s, Vasily often deliberately drank alcohol to provoke trouble, embarrassing Stalin. This led directly to his father's demotion to the rank and at the same time to be sent to the front. Montefiore said: "Vasily has no good feelings for his father all his life, will he think that his chaotic life is caused by his father?"
Destroyed medical records
Of course, this is just some bold speculation, and no one can come up with conclusive evidence. In the face of all the doubts, Stalin's daughter Svetlana was very calm, and she obviously did not want to get involved in this endless right and wrong.
In Svetlana's memoirs, she insisted that her father had indeed died a normal death, because he had been overworked for many years of state work.
It is said that when Stalin was 48 years old, he often complained of muscle pain in his limbs. In the autumn of 1926, he treated his body with the Matsesta Vulcanization Spa, and the effect was obvious at the time, but the following year, muscle pain began to plague him again.
In December 1936, Stalin suffered from pharyngitis, and in February 1940, he developed a high fever from a throat infection, and the Soviet Union and Finland were at war, and he had to work with the disease. Soon, Stalin developed symptoms such as high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis.
During the Great Patriotic War, Stalin had to work 13 to 15 hours a day in the Kremlin and the villa of Conzevo, sleeping little and having no holidays, which greatly damaged his body.
On October 10, 1945, Stalin suffered a stroke. During his illness, even Svetlana was not allowed to visit her father, or even call him.
On this experience, Svetlana said: "My father was sick, and he was sick for a long time, very sick. She didn't say a word about her specific condition.
Why should Stalin's illness be kept secret from the outside world?
As a commander-in-chief, Stalin certainly knew the importance of health, but if he was not in good health, in order to maintain his image and the stability of his regime, he would of course block the news, avoid causing panic among the people, and at the same time give the enemy an opportunity.
This was also an important reason why Stalin did not like doctors.
On December 21, 1952, Stalin celebrated his last birthday. In her memoirs, Svetlana describes her father's changes: "Usually, his face was always pale, and then his face was red. ”
"That day, he didn't look very good. It seems that he felt signs of illness, perhaps of high blood pressure, because he had unexpectedly quit smoking and was quite proud that he had smoked for probably no less than 50 years. ”
At the Moscow Kremlin Hospital, there was a real "Stalin medical record" that recorded years of information about Stalin's health. In 1952, at Stalin's own instructions, the medical record was completely destroyed. Could it be that he had any premonitions that he would soon die?
The fate of great men
The 73-year-old Stalin thus completed the final journey of his life. He probably wouldn't have imagined that death would come so quickly, and he hadn't even prepared the party and state leadership for it.
Perhaps in the depths of his mind, there was no idea of finding a successor at all. Because no one could match him, the young men were too immature to be supreme commanders.
After 1945, Stalin was very fond of visiting the forest park next to Villa Conzevo, where people built some pavilions with small tables for Stalin, where Stalin liked to read newspapers, walk, drink tea...
It can be seen that he longs for a long life, and he is not willing to withdraw from the stage of history like this. However, fate cannot be rewritten, and death finally arrives as scheduled, taking away his life while leaving a mystery that can never be solved.