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A little before 6, I called Tom Whitney. ''Better come down,'' I said. ''The papers are very late. Something must be breaking.'' Just before 8 A.M., the papers were brought in by the little old delivery woman. There, in the middle of Pravda's and Izvestia's front pages, was a short medical bulletin announcing that [Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin] had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. According to the bulletin, which was signed by the Minister of Health, A.F. Tretyakov, and by nine examining physicians, Stalin was unconscious and partly paralyzed. His condition was critical. The attack had occurred on the night of March 1-2, ''in his quarters in Moscow'' - that is, in the Kremlin. It was now Wednesday morning. The news had been held up more than 48 hours.
On Red Square, there was total silence. A single sparrow left the Kremlin walls and swooped over the mausoleum. Then the amplified voice of General Sinitsin, commander of the Moscow garrison, thundered out, echoing against the gray walls of the still-shuttered merchants' arcade across the square. The thousands of troops began to mark time, their leather boots raising a surf of sound. The band struck up Glinka's ''Hail to the Czar,'' comfortably retitled ''Hail to the Russian People.'' The red flag over the domed Kremlin palace slowly rose to full mast. During my years in Moscow, I had often found Stalin's name mentioned as many as 200 times on the front page of a single issue of Pravda. In April 1953, a bare month after his death, Stalin's name vanished from the Soviet press. But scrub as they would, his successors could not erase Stalin's terrible imprint. Even after [Nikita S. Khrushchev]'s ''secret speech'' of 1956 - the denunciation of Stalin and his crimes that overturned a whole era when its contents became known in Russia and throughout the world - more questions remained than had been answered.
Did this quartet speed Stalin out of the world? After Khrushchev's ''secret speech,'' melodramatic tales of the days preceding Stalin's death circulated in Moscow -of Voroshilov hurling his party card on the table before Stalin; of Lazar Kaganovich and [Vyacheslav M. Molotov] turning on their master; of the whole Politburo in rebellion against Stalin's plan to purge Russia's Jews and send them to Siberia. It was said later that plans had been so far advanced that the writer Ilya Ehrenburg had been picked to deliver a petition to Stalin begging him to let Russia's Jews emigrate to Siberia, so as to protect them from the just anger of the noble Russian people for their crimes - ''crimes'' such as participation in the ''doctors' plot,'' plans to set up a Jewish state in the Crimea, and other absurdities.