VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV
Stalin's Death
Until recently, Stalin's death was shrouded in mystery. His heir
Khrushchev, and later, his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, found him already
unconscious, in agony, a few hours before his death. Finally, we know
how he died. His guards, still defending their master, dead for thirty-five
years, have compiled collective memoirs that, regardless of their authors'
political sympathies, are of tremendous historic value.
Several days before his death, on February 28, 1953, Stalin invited
Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin, and Khrushchev to the Kremlin for a film
screening. It was his last meeting with his closest circle, and it is this fact,
together with his son Vasily drunkenly yelling, "They killed my father,"
that served as the basis for the theory that Stalin was killed by his allies -
one that is steadily receiving more currency in the Soviet Union. This
would have been a triumph of historical justice, however belated. As
Thomas Jefferson put it, "The tree of freedom must from time to time
be nourished by the blood of patriots and tyrants." Alas, throughout
thirty years of Stalin's tyranny - at least until late February of 1953 - no
one had ever tried to assassinate him, whereas he himself murdered mil–
lions of imaginary enemies and conspirators. Could the art of a successful
autocracy be exactly that: beating your potential enemies to a punch and
revealing conspiracies before they emerge?
Kremlin film screenings, as well as the feasts that followed them,
were routine events whose guest lists indicated Stalin's favor or disfavor
to his cohorts. In the preceding period, he had stopped inviting Molo–
tov, who did not have a disloyal bone in his body, and who easily rec–
onciled himself to his wife's arrest for her links to Zionists (she attended
the reception hosted by Golda Meir, the ambassador of the newborn
State of Israel) . Even after Stalin's death, Molotov protested
Khrushchev's exposures; for that he was expelled from the Party, to be
reinstalled shortly before his death . He died in 1986 at the age of 96, a
convinced and principled Stalinist whose fervor did not diminish after his
thirty years of serving the despot. Meanwhile, Stalin suspected him of
being "an agent of U. S. imperialism" solely on the basis of a rumor
that, while in the United States, Molotov rode home from Washington
to New York in a personal railroad car. How could he afford to do
that? He must have sold out to the Americans. Stalin sent a telegram
with an inquiry to Vyshinsky, the Soviet Ambassador to the United Na–
tions. Vyshinsky instantly responded that American railroads are privately
