Although during the congress he was on stage some of the time, he said nothing until October 14, the last day. When he approached the microphone, he was greeted with thunderous applause, more God than man. He did not make the slightest effort at oratory, but that was of no account: he was the Master, the Boss, the fearsome Leader, the terrorist, and the emperor all rolled into one. The audience, bonding with the great man, was spellbound before he said anything and clung to every syllable once he began. It was as if, so one of them recalled, each word was a “lofty revelation, great Marxist truth, a pearl of wisdom about the present and a prediction for the future.”28
They were a privileged group, this audience, masters themselves, powerful, identifying with the Kremlin in the grand battle for the future. In a few short minutes, Stalin reminded them that the Bolsheviks, the “shock brigade” of world revolution, had succeeded against the odds. Their victory had made it easier for the next “shock brigades” to win in Eastern Europe and China, and so it would go until judgment day. The class struggle was becoming “simpler” against the capitalist bourgeoisie, which had dropped the last trace of its liberalism. It now defended the rights of the “exploiting minority,” not those of the “exploited majority.” Given those trends, he concluded, there was “every reason to count on the success and victory” of Communism all over the world.29
In his “remarks” published on the eve of the congress, he went more deeply into the problem. He contended that the capitalist countries had advanced by trying to “strangle” those that did not go along with the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union and the “people’s democracies” in Europe and China, he claimed, were able to succeed on their own and in fact were eliminating global markets and securing scarce resources. As he saw things, capitalist rivals would have to compete more fiercely among themselves for what was left and would end up making war on one another. The class struggle would heat up within those states as a prelude to the final showdown with Communism, just as he had said all along. Granted, there was a peace movement, but it would never be strong enough to stem the tide of the great fight to come.
According to this view, the United States and its capitalist lackeys had tried to seduce the Communists into taking part in the Marshall Plan, in an effort to beef up their own flagging economies. But the final battle could be delayed only so long. In the end, he was convinced, the only way to be rid of war was to eliminate its cause—capitalism. Stalin’s faith in the inevitable ideological clash and war with the capitalists remained unshaken.30
He brought up again his favorite theory on the general crisis of capitalism, which was both economic and political. The first stage of the crisis had led to the First World War and made the Russian Revolution possible, the second stage had led to the last war, and the ultimate battle was at hand. On one side there would be “the ever-increasing decay of the world capitalist system” and on the other “the growing economic power of the countries that have fallen away from capitalism—the USSR, China and the other People’s Democracies.” To his great satisfaction, the theory and the predictions he made in the late 1920s now looked more valid than ever.31
Anyone who thought Stalin’s energy might be flagging could see otherwise two days later in Sverdlov Hall. On October 16, in an address to the Central Committee, he spoke without notes for an hour or more and was often in a rage. He demanded the expansion of the party executive, just as Lenin had done at the end of his life.32 A new Central Committee would have 125 members, increased by over two-thirds from the previous one. He dissolved the Orgburo and enlarged the Politburo from 9 members and 2 candidates into a “Presidium” of 25 members and 11 candidates.33
The part of the speech to the Central Committee that Konstantin Simonov remembered was Stalin’s solemn pronouncement that “it was approaching the time when others would have to continue the work he had done.” The “difficult struggle with the capitalist camp was ahead and the most dangerous thing in this struggle was not to flinch, to be scared, to retreat, to capitulate.” As usual he did not talk about himself and instead reminded them of Lenin’s fearlessness.34
Everyone in the hall was then startled when he turned to threaten the Communist veterans. Pointing to Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Mikoyan—all of them to a greater or lesser extent already out of favor—he said that they should be relieved of their duties. Here he was also following in Lenin’s footsteps. In fact, whenever Stalin thought aloud about possible heirs, he ran them all down, and in their presence he would demean or insult each one to show how undeserving they were.35 That day in Sverdlov Hall, the Master singled out Molotov for an especially fierce drubbing, blamed him for several mistakes and—along with his wife, Polina, then serving time in a camp—for conspiring to create a Jewish homeland in the Crimea. Stalin said that no sooner did the Politburo make a decision than Molotov informed his spouse and her friends, and they were not to be trusted. These remarks puzzled many and revealed that Stalin was sinking ever more deeply into a manic preoccupation with conspiracies.36
There were also signs that he was preparing for another war. That was the impression recollected by Lieutenant General N. N. Ostroumov, one of the deputy chiefs of the air force staff. In the spring of 1952 Stalin ordered no fewer than one hundred new tactical bomber divisions, a massive buildup whose purpose the experts could not figure out.37
Before he had a chance to act on his growing phobias against the West or the Jews or his own comrades, he died in circumstances that are still subject to controversy. New documents have recently turned up, but there will never be enough information to quiet doubters who insist that Beria or someone involved in a plot may have poisoned Stalin. On Saturday, February 28, he hosted a dinner at his dacha in Kuntsevo, and his guests Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Bulganin stayed until around four early Sunday morning. The guards grew anxious during the day, waited until special mail arrived at around ten P.M. to intrude, and found him collapsed and semiconscious. Instead of calling for a medical team, they phoned the politicians, who arrived in the early morning of March 2. Everyone hesitated to send for doctors, perhaps half afraid that Stalin, who seemed fast asleep, should awaken to find physicians there. The Doctors’ Plot was in full swing at the time, and he might suspect his followers of wanting to kill him. Emergency help was finally requested, and a medical team arrived at seven A.M., when it was already too late. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage with loss of consciousness, speech, and paralysis of the right arm and leg.
REACTIONS TO STALIN’S DEATH
A recently discovered document in the Russian archives provides some details about Stalin’s final days. With the exception of several “short moments” on March 3, he never regained consciousness and died on March 5, 1953, at 9:50 P.M.38
According to Dr. Alexander Myasnikov, one of those called to treat Stalin and one of the specialists who performed the autopsy on March 6, there was evidence of stomach hemorrhaging “caused by hypertension.” They also discovered that the dictator suffered from “strong sclerosis of the cerebral arteries,” which had developed over the last several years. Among the symptoms of this thickening and hardening of the arteries in the brain, Myasnikov mentioned, were disorders of the nervous system, which might help explain some of the dictator’s behavior in the last years of life, when he grew more suspicious than ever.39 On the other hand, as late as the previous October, Stalin had been perfectly capable of delivering a lengthy speech without notes to the Central Committee. When India’s ambassador K. P. Menon and Dr. Saiffudin Kitchlu had met with the Soviet leader back on February 16, in what would be his last contact with foreigners, they found him in top form. Their lengthy discussion covered the whole range of international problems, and Stalin had all the facts at his fingertips.40