On March 1, 1953, the most feared man in the world lay on the floor dying in the Kuntsevo Dacha, outside Moscow, in a pool of his own urine. He had been there for hours. Guards had discovered him sometime after midnight—crumpled beside his bed, a half-empty glass of mineral water nearby—but no one dared enter the room. They waited, and whispered, and did nothing. There was not a single man brave enough to check his pulse.
When Stalin’s inner circle finally arrived—Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Bulganin—they looked at him, decided he was merely sleeping, and left. They did not return until later. No doctor was summoned until the following afternoon, nearly twelve hours after he was found. The physicians who came were terrified. Over the years, Stalin had imprisoned or executed many of the Soviet Union’s finest doctors. Those who remained knew that failing to save him—or even succeeding—could cost them their lives.
Stalin was 74 years old and had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. For the next three days, he lay dying on a sofa in his dacha as his lieutenants stood by. Beria, the secret police chief, seemed almost gleeful, cracking crude jokes and then dropping to his knees to kiss Stalin’s hand whenever the old man’s eyes briefly opened. Witnesses later described those eyes as dark, furious, and bewildered. At one point, Stalin raised his left hand, as if pointing at the ceiling, at someone in the room, or at nothing at all.
On the night of March 5th, his breathing turned to a death rattle. His face darkened to a deep red, almost purple. Then, at 9:50 in the evening, the rattling stopped. Beria was the first to respond. He strode from the room, his voice ringing down the corridor, calling for his car. The other men stood over the body in silence.
Outside, it was a bitter Russian winter. In the cities, when the news was announced, people wept in the streets—wept for the man who had sent their fathers and brothers to the camps, who had starved their villages, who had ruled through blood and terror for thirty years. They wept because he was the only world they had ever known, and now that world was gone, and nobody knew what would come next. Stalin was given a state funeral in Moscow on March 9, and four days of national mourning were declared. On the day of the funeral, of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens visiting the capital to pay their respects, at least 109 were later acknowledged to have died in a crowd crush. Stalin’s body was embalmed and interred in Lenin’s Mausoleum until 1961, when it was moved to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
Stalin died as he had lived: surrounded by men who had feared him all their lives. The immediate aftermath was a chaotic free-for-all. A collective leadership briefly took over, led initially by Georgy Malenkov and Lavrenti Beria, who immediately began jockeying for control. Recognizing the fear Stalin had instilled, they began releasing political prisoners and scaling back repressive policies. Within months, Nikita Khrushchev outmaneuvered his rivals and consolidated his position as the new leader of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, this resulted in the arrest and execution of Lavrentiy Beria, largely orchestrated by Khrushchev to prevent him from taking Stalin’s place. In 1956, he delivered a watershed address at the Twentieth Party Congress, formally denouncing Stalin’s crimes, mass terror, and dictatorial abuses.