“On the morning of March 5th, Stalin suddenly began to vomit blood: this vomiting led to a drop in his pulse, his blood pressure dropped. And this phenomenon puzzled us a little - how to explain it? All the participants of the council crowded around the patient and in the next room in anxiety and guesswork …”(From the memoirs of Professor AL Myasnikov).
Sudden death
Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953 at 21 hours 50 minutes. Almost from the moment of the first "call" until the last hour, Blizhnyaya Dacha was not filled with paramedics and district doctors from the nearest emergency room. and professors - world luminaries of medical science.
The first group of doctors who arrived at the sick Stalin in the morning of March 2, 1953, was headed by the Minister of Health A. F. Tretyakov. This group included Professor P. E. Lukomsky. Chief Physician of the Ministry of Health. Professors-neuropathologists R. A. Tkachev and I. N. Filimonov and therapist V. I. Ivanov-Neznamov. The diagnosis was made quickly and without controversy - massive hemorrhage in the brain, in the left hemisphere, due to hypertension and atherosclerosis of the cerebral arteries.
The doctors demanded Stalin's medical history, but it was not in the Kremlin hospital. There were no medicines or nurses at the dacha itself. And the diagnosis, as subsequent events showed, turned out to be false.
And these people, geniuses in their field, could not correctly define the disease of the "father of nations"? Couldn't or didn't want to? Or did they all understand everything perfectly and simply did not begin to pronounce out loud the treacherous word “poisoning”, which openly smells like a gulag, if not a "tower" without trial and investigation?
It must be stated right away: the official version at that time that “Stalin was seriously ill, especially after the most severe tension during the Second World War”, in no way corresponds to reality. And this is confirmed by extracts from documents scrupulously drawn up when the leader visits sanatoriums, at the slightest ailments and appeals to doctors. Here is an example: January 1952, Stalin has a hard time, with a high fever, suffers the flu, while the pressure of the 73-year-old "father of nations" is 140 to 80. Ask the 60-year-old "oldies" - how are they with the pressure? Measure yours and make sure that Comrade Stalin was healthier for his age than the healthiest … until the night of February 28 to March 1, 1953.
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So what happened on that fateful night? February 28, 1953 Stalin, Khrushchev. Beria, Malenkov and Bulganin dined at the Kuntsevskaya dacha. On March 1, Stalin suffered a stroke, but no one dared to call the sick doctor: they thought he was sleeping. The doctors were allowed to see the patient only a day later. Intensive therapy did not help, Stalin died 4 days later.
Poison from Beria?
The fact that the leader was poisoned, now no one doubts. Recently opened documents - draft records of observations that were conducted at the dacha by the attending physicians from March 2 to 5, unequivocally testify: the death was violent. How it was done is not so important now. It is important - who in the first place needed to remove Stalin?
And here the problem is no longer to find the culprit, but to determine which of the potential killers struck. It is no secret that the leader had many enemies, both external and internal. For example, according to the testimony of Konstantin Simonov, who was then a candidate for membership in the Central Committee of the CPSU, the faces of the members of the presidium of the "posthumous" meeting showed not grief, but rather relief. “There was a feeling that there, in the presidium, people were freed from something that pressed on them, that bound them.”
Of course, the first suspicion falls on Beria. It was Beria, after the death of the "father of nations", according to the testimony of many, "could not hide his triumph." It was Beria who directly told Molotov during the May holidays: "I saved you all from Stalin."
Even his son Sergo does not deny that Lavrenty Pavlovich was preparing for a "war against Stalin". This is how he recalls this, preliminarily claiming that his father knew that Stalin was preparing his arrest. “In 1952,” the son says, “my father already understood that he had nothing to lose… My father was neither a coward, nor a ram, obediently going to the slaughter. I do not exclude that he could have planned something … For this, he always had his own people in the agencies … In addition, he had his own intelligence service, which did not depend on any existing structure!"
Yes, even without the intelligence service, everything was clear. Back when in 1952 the "Mingrelian affair" was promoted in Georgia, Stalin pointedly hinted: "Look for the big Mingrelian".
Beria was also a Mingrelian, that is, a native of Mingrelia, an ethnic region in Western Georgia. So comments are superfluous.
Khrushchev's defense
The second version (or rather the third, if we take natural death as a “version”) is a conspiracy of the “big four”: Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov, Bulganin.
Khrushchev spoke about this directly in his report at the XX Congress: “Let us recall the first plenum of the Central Committee after the XIX Party Congress, when in his speech Stalin, describing Molotov and Mikoyan, expressed the idea that these two old workers of our party were guilty of some completely unproven deeds. It is not excluded that if Stalin had remained at the helm for a few more months, Comrades Molotov and Mikoyan probably could not have made speeches at today's congress. Stalin obviously intended to do away with all the old members of the Politburo. " Among the "old members of the Politburo" with whom it was time to end, among others, undoubtedly included Beria, and Bulganin, and Malenkov, and Khrushchev himself.
It is possible that the same Beria was the inspirer of the conspiracy and its "executor", which is why they dealt with him almost immediately after the death of the "leader of the peoples".
Hand of the West
But we forgot about the external enemies. There is another version of Stalin's assassination - "Western". Despite some absurdity, and even, one might say, a hackneyed cliché (the Russian habit of blaming "decaying capitalism" for everything), this version has a right to exist.
And the essence is as follows. In April 1952, an international economic meeting was held in Moscow, at which the USSR, the countries of Eastern Europe and China proposed creating an alternative trade zone to the dollar. Moreover, Iran, Ethiopia, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Iceland also showed tremendous interest in this plan. At the meeting, Stalin proposed to create his own "common market" with a single currency - the ruble! And if there were some disagreements on the second proposal, the first proposal was warmly supported.
One can imagine what kind of reaction was caused by such options for the development of a solid part of the world economy in the United States. Moreover, the West perfectly understood that these were not empty words. No one in the world expected that after such an extremely destructive war, the Soviet Union would restore its economy in the shortest possible time. In fact, by the beginning of 1948, the restoration stage was completed, which, incidentally, made it possible not only to carry out the monetary reform, but also simultaneously to abolish the rationing system. In terms of the growth rate of economic power, the USSR was ahead of any country at that time. America was well aware that the formula "the USSR with its technical base and natural resources, plus China with its unlimited human resources" would bring death to the West. The results of WWII showed unequivocallythat a conversation with the Soviet Union from a position of strength, while Stalin is at its head, has no chance.
What was left to do? Remove Stalin …
Igor Saveliev. Secrets of the 20th century magazine