ABSTRACT
Stalin spent the last days of February 1953 mostly at his Kuntsevo dacha. He stayed there late on Saturday night 28 February and went to bed at 4 am. On Sunday morning, 1 March 1953, the bodyguard Gogi Zautashvili, a native of Gori, was manning a control board on which bulbs lit up indicating which of the doors in Stalin’s three identical rooms were open. Gogi Zautashvili became alarmed when one of the bulbs lit up and did not go off. It meant that Stalin had opened a door to one of his three rooms and the door had not closed after him automatically, as it should have. Zautashvili waited for a few moments, then notified the chief bodyguard on duty that night, M.Starostin who at first was afraid to disturb Stalin, but an hour later he tried calling him on the internal telephone. There was no response. After several more attempts to reach Stalin by phone, Starostin ordered the guards to break through the steel-plated door of his apartment. They found Stalin lying on the floor in the doorway between the second and third rooms, his body curled in a fetal position, his head resting on his arm. He could not talk. The right side of his body was paralyzed. The bodyguards and Stalin’s maid placed him on a couch.1 Starostin reported Stalin’s condition to S.D.Ignatiev, the minister of state security, who refused to take action and told Starostin to call Politburo members Beria and Malenkov. Beria did not answer his phone. Malenkov called back half an hour later and said, ‘I couldn’t find Beria. Try to find him yourself.’ Then Beria called and ordered, ‘Don’t tell anybody about Stalin’s illness, and don’t call anybody!’ Beria and Malenkov arrived at Kuntsevo at 3 am Monday morning, 2 March. Malenkov took off his squeaky shoes and tiptoed over to Stalin. Beria was already looking intensely at Stalin’s face. He knew that Stalin intended to destroy him and saw in Stalin’s condition the chance to save himself by murdering him. Turning to the bodyguard in the room, he snapped, ‘Don’t raise a fuss, don’t bother us, and don’t disturb Comrade Stalin.’ Then he cursed Starostin in the Kremlin slang, unprintable except for the words: ‘Who appointed you idiots to serve Comrade Stalin?’ Beria and Malenkov left, saying that physicians would arrive soon. They arrived around 9 am, six hours later.2
