Death of Stalin and the Thaw
Stalin had a stroke on the night of 28 February 1953 and lay on the floor for many hours because nobody dared to open the door. He had spent the evening at his dacha at Kuntsevo with Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev and Bulganin, watching a film and drinking, as he did most nights. His standing order was that no one entered his rooms unsummoned. When he had not emerged by the following evening the guards argued about it for hours before sending a housekeeper in, and found him on the floor of the dining room in soaked clothes, conscious and unable to speak. The politburo members were called and came, examined him, and left again without calling a doctor until the following morning — twelve hours or more after he was found. The delay is variously explained by terror of being blamed and by a straightforward wish to let him die. His own doctors were unavailable, several of them having been arrested weeks earlier in the Doctors' Plot, a fabricated conspiracy of mainly Jewish physicians accused of medical murder, which had been building towards a new purge. He died on 5 March. The crowds at the lying in state were so large that people were crushed against buildings and lampposts, and hundreds died. The Doctors' Plot was dropped within weeks and the accused released. Beria was arrested in June and shot in December, the purge machinery was dismantled, and Khrushchev denounced him to a closed session of the party congress three years later.
- Year: 1953 CE
- Category: Political
