Joseph Stalin

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1. Brett
   

   If we can believe the four wily men who inherited his vast power, Stalin, supreme dictator of the Soviet Union and puppet master of all of Eastern Europe, suffered a fatal stroke while brooding alone in a sparely furnished room. He lay stricken and unconscious for untold hours because his bodyguard, family, and government associates were too terrified, after 27 years of his ironfisted rule, to knock on the door.
   
   If true, this sordid, pitiable demise contrasted dramatically with the career of a man who delighted in ordering the torture and execution of his most loyal followers. At least 30 million, and possibly double that amount, were shot, hanged, starved, beaten, or drugged to death because of his insane fear of opposition. Millions were enslaved in cruel concentration camps and forced to work for the state. Uncounted tens of millions in the Ukraine died when he forced farmers to join his collectives and send their produce elsewhere. On the more personal level, he was amused by inviting an old colleague to dinner, flying into a carefully rehearsed rage, and ordering the hapless, bewildered victim of his sadistic cruelty to the execution chamber. It is said that he once left a Bolshoi Ballet performance of Swan Lake at intermission, drove over to Red Square's Lubyanka Prison to shoot some former loyalists in the head, and returned to the theater for the second act.
   
   By early 1953, when Stalin was 73 years old, these paranoid tendencies and unpredictable explosions were increasing in virulence. "Fear and hatred of the old tyrant," according to U.S. Ambassador George Kennan, was "so thick in the air that you could almost smell it." In January a woman working as a secret agent for Lavrenti Beria, head of the State Security Service, accused Stalin's personal physician of involvement in a so-called "doctors' plot" to kill important military leaders by means of "faulty treatment." Eight other top physicians were imprisoned, most of them Jewish. Perhaps in anticipation of a pogrom, Stalin began to fan the flames of anti-Semitism.
   
   The preceding fall, the 19th Congress of the Communist Party had, for the first time, defied the tyrant's will, if only in minor ways. Scheming surreptitiously behind the scenes, Stalin was apparently planning to purge the old guard communists and install new men loyal only to him. The dictator's plans were intently watched by the quartet nearest him: Beria, Defense Minister Nikolai Bulganin, Deputy Prime Minister (and designated successor) Georgi Malenkov, and Nikita Khrushchev, head of the powerful Moscow city and regional party committees. Communist leaders no less entrenched than they had previously vanished without warning under the capricious reign of "Uncle Joe."
   Not long before his death, Stalin suddenly banished his private secretary, for decades his alter ego in all matters large and small. On February 15, his chief bodyguard succumbed to what an official announcement called a "premature death" -no doubt a euphemism for execution. Stalin's physician still languished behind bars. Meanwhile, rumors that the great man was ill had been circulating among the Moscow elite since December; but his daughter, Svetlana, was unable to get through to him, despite numerous frantic attempts. Months earlier she had seen him dwindling from the effects of arteriosclerosis.

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