THE DAYS OF STALIN'S DEATH

Abstract

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.

Harrison E. Salisbury was The Times's correspondent in Moscow from 1949 to 1954. This article is adapted from his memoirs, ''A Journey for Our Times,'' to be published by Harper & Row in May.

February in Moscow seems like the longest month of the year - day after day of cold wind, gray skies, falling snow; the women in gray quilted jackets and gray shawls sweeping the streets with witches' brooms; the Hotel Metropol's corridors dimmer and dimmer, ghosts in the corners, a time when life congeals and hope vanishes.

February 1953. For weeks I had been growing more and more edgy and even frightened. I had been living in Moscow as The New York Times's correspondent for four years. I knew the city, and I knew something was going on behind the scenes.

All signs pointed to it. There were the rumors of arrests, with Jews in the Ukraine, men in the Foreign Ministry, even the wife of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov said to be among the victims. There was the officially announced ''doctors' plot,'' in which nine Kremlin physicians, most of them Jewish, were charged with the deaths of high military and political figures. And there were the mysterious political shake-ups in Georgia and in the secret police.

I had no doubt that Stalin was concocting something worse than anything he had done in the past. My friend Thomas P. Whitney of The Associated Press and I were now sharing night duty at the Central Telegraph Office, watching for late breaks and communiques.

The week of March 1 was my duty week, and I spent the early evening of Tuesday, March 3, in my hotel room monitoring the Soviet news agency, Tass. Those were the days before transistor radios, and my technological wonder was one of those big Hallicrafters shortwave radio receivers that were then the pride of Central Intelligence Agency station chiefs. Mine was battleship gray - I had got it from a departing American naval officer - and the size and shape of a steel filing drawer.

Tass sent its reports to a network of small country papers all over the Soviet Union by radio, dictating them slowly, spelling out every name. Once in a while, Tass dictation carried an important item before it appeared on the main Tass news wire. I listened with half an ear, while combing the 15 or so provincial papers to which I subscribed. I was looking for clues to what was happening behind Stalin's curtains.

Stalin had celebrated his 73d birthday the previous December. For 29 years he had ruled Russia, dictator of dictators, his country frozen in terror, the winds of cold war so sharp I seldom exchanged a word with any Russian outside of official circles, except for my cook, my chauffeur or a few Metropol maids. Of late, they averted their heads when I passed down the corridors.

A little before midnight, I picked up my portable typewriter, made my way to the telegraph office on Gorky Street and settled down for the usual wait for the day's editions of Pravda, the paper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and Izvestia, the main Government paper. What was I was waiting for? What was it that frightened me and the three other American correspondents still in Moscow, our ranks thinned by the cold war at its height? Simply that no one knew what Stalin would do next. We were waiting for the 1930's to repeat themselves, for the purges to happen again, for a return of the time when the revolution was turned inside out, the heroes were declared villains and darkness fell at noon.

These were the thoughts that flowed through my mind as I drowsed in the small, cramped room set aside for foreign correspondents at Entrance 11 of the central telegraph. I looked at my watch. It was 2:30 A.M. No sign of the papers. As far as I could see, the only one awake in the telegraph office besides myself was Vasilyeva, the woman to whom we handed our news cables, her face just visible through the little opening in the frosted glass.

At 3:30 the papers still hadn't come, and I telephoned Izvestia's delivery office. The woman had heard nothing. At 4, the papers still had not arrived. I called again. No sign. I began to get jittery. Jean Noe, the Agence France-Presse correspondent who had been asleep at a narrow counter along the wall, was awake and calling someone. I called Izvestia again. The woman said the papers were late.

At 5, I called Tass. No, the man said, they hadn't heard anything, but he spoke in a way that gave me an idea something might be up. Jean Noe was stirring about. He had the same problem as I, but we did not speak. It was not considered appropriate. We were bitter competitors.

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 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.

My immediate reaction was one of relief. I had been dreading some new announcement about the alleged ''doctors' plot'' - some terrifying revelation, an arrest of Politburo members or even of a foreign correspondent, the opening of the trial. Now Stalin himself had been stricken. Yet there remained the inescapable thought: Who might be charged with guilt in Stalin's death?

And another question occurred to me as I pounded out my bulletins, sending them at the ''urgent'' rate. Stalin had arrested the doctors who had looked after his health for so many years; now his life lay in the hands of new and unknown physicians. Was this just an ironic twist? The next two days run together in my mind. I crisscrossed Moscow, talking to the diplomats - Americans, British, French. I broke my rules and talked to Russians in the street. They were very reserved. They did not know whether Stalin's illness was good or bad for them, and they were not going to discuss it with a foreigner.

I went to the Moscow synagogue on Arkhipov Street and heard Chief Rabbi Schliffer call on the congregation to pray for ''our dear leader and teacher, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin.'' The rabbi decreed a day of fasting and prayer -this for the man who had just unleashed an anti-Semitic campaign, filling Soviet Jews with terror of the unknown still to come.

I went to the great Yelokhov Cathedral and heard the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Aleksei, lead the congregation in solemn prayer for Stalin. ''All the Russian people and all people everywhere pray to God for the health of the sick one,'' he intoned. Hundreds of candles burned before the altars; young men and women joined their elders in crossing themselves. Shudders ran down my back as I watched the people sink to their knees in prayer for the man who had desecrated Orthodox churches by the hundred.

Moscow was passing through a time of high drama, but the outward signs were few. More people than usual clustered around the pasted-up newspapers on the hoardings. Queues gathered at the kiosks. The maids at the Metropol talked in little groups, quietly, not a word for foreign ears.

By Thursday, March 5, Stalin had been ill, according to the official account, for three and a half days. As I resumed my rounds after a night at the telegraph office and two or three hours' sleep, I was beginning to think that the successive announcements of measures being taken to save his life were meant to prepare people for his death. And the obvious question kept nagging at me: Why the long wait from Sunday night, when he was said to have suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, until 8 o'clock Wednesday morning, when the first announcement was made?

My guess was that Stalin's ''closest comrades in arms,'' as they called themselves, had waited to see what course the illness would take. If there was to be even a partial recovery, why say anything? Stalin would not thank them for taking such authority. It could well speed them to the cellars of the secret police. (I didn't know it then, but only a few months before, he had told them, ''You are blind like newborn kittens''; without him, he had said, they could not survive.) So they had waited - not only for 24 hours but for still another 24 hours - and when they put out that announcement on Wednesday morning, they must have known what the end would be.

I had my attention fixed on the Kremlin, where, I presumed, Stalin lay dying. Not until Nikita S. Khrushchev's candid talks with various Russians and foreigners in 1956, after his ''secret speech'' on Stalin before the 20th party Congress, was it revealed that, contrary to what had appeared in the communiques of March 1953, Stalin was stricken not in the Kremlin but at his country villa at Kuntsevo, in the Moscow suburbs. For several years, Stalin had lived at that residence - called Blizhny (''the nearby one'') to distinguish it from his other, more distant villas - commuting to the Kremlin in the swift motor convoys I often saw speeding along the streets.

Determined to get a beat on Stalin's death, I decided to establish headquarters at the central telegraph and stay there until he died. At 7 P.M. Thursday, I lugged my Hallicrafters, all 40 or 50 pounds of it, to the telegraph office. None of my colleagues were there, and I was a bit nervous about bringing the monster in; no one had done anything like that before. I wasn't there 10 minutes when two uniformed soldiers with bayoneted rifles appeared. Oh, Lord, I thought, I'm going to be put under arrest on the night of Stalin's death.

They were grim. They demanded to know what kind of a machine I had there. I told them it was a radio receiver. Radio sets in the central telegraph? ''Vospreshchayetsya!'' - forbidden. They probably thought it was a transmitter, and they ordered me to get it out.

I complied with alacrity. Fortunately, my car was outside. I gave the Hallicrafters to my chauffeur, Dimitry Grigorievich, tuned it in to Tass dictation, and told him to listen for news about Stalin. If he heard anything, he was to come quietly - quietly, I emphasized - into the telegraph office, and whisper in my ear.

I went back inside. My colleagues began to gather. We glared at each other like angry dogs. There was a new bulletin at 8:45 P.M.: Stalin was sinking rapidly. I got that off to London, then went for a quick auto tour around the Kremlin area. There were many cars parked in Red Square. Lights gleamed from the Government buildings. The flag flew at full staff over the dome of the central palace.

Back at the telegraph office, I wrote dispatches I could hand in at once when Stalin died. I listened to the midnight news broadcast. Nothing.

A few seconds after 4 A.M., my chauffeur slipped into the office and whispered in my ear. I quietly rose and gave my prepared cables on Stalin's death to the telegraph clerk. I also handed her a preagreed code message to The Times's foreign editor, Emanuel Freedman: ''Freedman, Final expense account mailed last night. Regards, Salisbury.''

Before I could get back to my typewriter, bedlam burst loose. The wire-service men filed their flashes, shouted for telephone connections to London and dashed into telephone booths to await their calls. Within a few minutes, a sleepy electrician in overalls appeared. As I watched, he ripped off the back of the telephone switchboard and yanked out the main cable.

Moscow was broadcasting news of Stalin's death in a score of languages. But we Moscow correspondents could not transmit a word. All the copy that I and the others had filed - including my ''expense account'' message to my editor - had been held by the censors.

I slipped outside to a pay telephone booth and called Spaso House, the American Ambassador's official residence. Jacob Beam, my old friend from London, was now our charge d'affaires in Moscow, and I knew this was one time he would not mind being woken up. ''He died at 9:50 P.M. last night, Jake,'' I said. ''Thanks,'' Jake replied, and hung up.

I stood by until 5:30 A.M., then went out and toured the center of the city. It was still dark, and the red stars glimmered like jewels in the Kremlin towers; the Spassky bell tower chimed the hours; the traffic police in their greatcoats and sheepskin collars stood at their posts under the brilliant lights of the central squares. There was no traffic. As I returned to the telegraph office, I saw a small convoy of trucks coming down Gorky Street. I wrote more copy, turned it in and sent angry notes to the censor demanding its release. The response - as I fully expected - was zero.

Once more I walked out of the telegraph office. Moscow was stirring. Buses were running. More and more convoys of trucks were entering the heart of Moscow - mustard-green trucks, with soldiers sitting cross-armed in rows, 22 to a truck, the blue-and-red-capped special troops of the M.V.D., the Ministry of Internal Affairs, whose camps ringed the capital. I was puzzled, and wondered if a coup d'etat might be under way.

Just before 8 o'clock, the dam broke, our copy cleared and our telephone connections were made. The Paris line came up, and I dictated my dispatches for relay to New York, where it was midnight. When I emerged from the telegraph office, the city was bustling. The dvorniki, the building porters, were putting up black rosettes and draping the buildings in red, placing black-bordered red flags in the stanchions. At the Hall of Columns, the old Noblemen's Club, workmen were stringing red and black bunting and hoisting into place an enormous gilt-framed portrait of Stalin.

Here, Stalin's body would lie in state, displayed in the beautiful old hall, with its white columns and crystal chandeliers, where the czarist nobility had danced their quadrilles. Here, one by one, Stalin had brought the Old Bolsheviks - Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and the rest - put them on trial, and sent them up Lubyanka Hill to the prison of the secret police, to meet their end with a bullet in the head from a Nagan pistol. How apt, I thought, that Stalin would lie in state in this hall. One way or another, they all met their end in this glittering souvenir of the Romanov dynasty.

Walking back to Red Square, I saw a crowd of two or three thousand standing across from the Spassky Gate. They were waiting for Stalin's body to be brought out. Only a few hours since the announcement of Stalin's death and already people assembling on their own - no orders, no agitprop. Never had I seen a crowd like this collect of its own volition in Russia. They stood silently, waiting. Here and there, an old peasant woman sobbed a bit, the conventional mark of mourning.

Now the security troops were everywhere. They were moving in from all sides. Buses stopped. Truck and passenger cars disappeared. Tanks emerged at the head of Gorky Street. No regular army troops - just the blue-and-red-capped security forces. They were placing a collar around the throat of Moscow, gradually moving in closer and closer, shutting off the circulation of traffic and blocking the streets with barricades of trucks and tanks. Now they began to enter Red Square, just a thin line at first, stopping people from entering, then slowly but irresistibly - no force, no commands - simply advancing and pressing the crowd back out of the square, sealing off the center of the city.

For the next several days, I moved within the heart of the heart of the Moscow security zone. I sauntered into Red Square, the square sealed off, not a person there except a work detail inscribing Stalin's name on the Lenin Mausoleum in preparation for his interment there. I walked up to the tomb as though I were conducting an inspection for the Central Committee, observed what was going on and walked out without being challenged by the guard. It never entered their heads that anyone would dare enter this forbidden zone without proper authority.

It was much the same when I left the Metropol early Sunday morning and made my way on foot through one barricade after another, walking with an air of authority past the soldiers huddling around their bonfires. The whole inner ring - the ''white stone city,'' as it is called - was in the hands of the security troops; so was the ''garden ring'' of boulevards beyond.

I walked to the Kursk railroad station, intending to take the electric train to Saltykovka, a village where I had a rented cottage for use during the summer months, and see what was happening in the countryside. I found some angry Muscovites reading a hand-lettered notice. Regular train service was operating out of Moscow, but no trains were coming into the capital. If I went to the countryside, I would not be able to get back.

The reason for the restriction was not hard to guess. When Lenin died in 1924, tens of thousands of Russians had clambered aboard trains to attend his funeral. This was not to be permitted for Stalin's last rites. No one could enter the city. Moscow, and all access to it, was in control of the security forces. It suddenly struck me that Moscow was held by Lavrenti P. Beria, chief of the secret police. These were his troops, his tanks, his trucks, his guns. He held the Kremlin within his power.

Alas, I could find no way of reporting this development at the time. The censors killed every attempt, even when I praised the efficient ''traffic control'' of the police, the ''skill'' with which they prevented jams in the heart of the city and the ''special measures'' they took to handle the hundreds of thousands of mourners who moved past Stalin's bier in the Hall of Columns. Later I was to learn of a special reason for the censors' sensitivity: Several hundred Muscovites had been crushed to death when a line of mourners got tangled up in one of the inner Moscow courtyards.

Stalin was buried on the morning of Monday, March 9. Three men spoke from atop the Lenin mausoleum -Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov.

Malenkov, a middle-aged fat boy, was surprisingly appealing. He spoke beautiful, cultured Russian. He seemed to be promising a new, intelligent regime.

Beria was ingratiating and condescending to his companions. After all, he held them in the grip of his security troops. Molotov, alone of those present, conveyed to me a feeling of loss. His words, as always, were dull metal; there was no poet in this man, whose unfailing dourness had won him the sobriquet kamyennyi zad, stone bottom. Yet his voice broke repeatedly, his face was white as paper. I jotted down in my notebook: ''Such sorrow in his voice!''

I knew that his wife had been arrested. I did not know that she had been in prison since 1949, that, ever since then, Molotov had been barred from Stalin's inner circle, excluded from the midnight drinking parties at Blizhny. Stalin had marked Molotov as a target of his forthcoming phantasmagoria. Molotov knew that. Yet he was close to tears as he spoke of his tyrant master.

At 11:50 A.M., Molotov concluded. The Red Army band, 300 strong, struck up Chopin's ''Funeral March.'' The leaders descended from atop the mausoleum. The black and red coffin, with Stalin's corpse, lay open before the entrance to the tomb.

There was a moment of silence. Then the hands of the Spassky tower clock pointed straight up. The tower bells pealed and the salute guns of the Kremlin sounded in counterpoint. Malenkov, Molotov, Beria and the others lifted the coffin and carried it inside. Every factory whistle in Moscow screamed, then fell silent. The guns slammed on until 12:30. All over Russia, every moving vehicle halted - every train, bus, tram, truck, car.

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 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.

Thirty years later, the enigmas have not vanished. The real circumstances surrounding the methods used by Stalin in purging and compelling the confessions of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and the rest still are not known. The shadow of Stalin, so often charged with manipulating ''fatal illnesses'' and utilizing poisons to rid himself of possible rivals and enemies, still overhangs the Russian scene.

A similar question haunts Stalin's final days. After Beria was arrested in July 1953, I began to realize that in Stalin's last months, Beria himself had lost much of his power. Clearly, he had been destined to go in Stalin's ''last roundup.''

Did this pasty-faced man with the pince-nez meekly permit the net to close upon him? Soon after his arrest, I heard tales of how Beria had fallen to his knees beside Stalin's sickbed when he thought the patient was regaining consciousness, crying, ''Forgive me, forgive me.'' Later, I was to hear that, when placed before a military tribunal headed by Marshal Ivan Konev and forced to listen to the accounts of the widows of old party comrades he had murdered, he again fell to his knees, begged for his life and had to be dragged off to the Lubyanka cellars and the execution squad. Coward Beria was. But did he and his Politburo comrades wait like ''blind kittens'' for their master to devour them? I do not think so.

Many of the important figures in Stalin's entourage had vanished. One was his personal bodyguard, Gen. Nikolai Vlasik. Another was his ghastly personal secretary, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, who was arrested, I now know, in January 1953. The commandant of the Kremlin had died suddenly in February. The doctors who looked after Stalin for many years had been secretly arrested in the autumn of 1952.

Stalin had decided that Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, his drinking companion since their days in Tsaritsyn in 1919, had for years been a British spy. Anastas I. Mikoyan, Stalin's fellow Caucasian in the Politburo, was also on the blacklist. Stalin's inner circle had shrunk to Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin and Khrushchev.

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 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.

An important source of information on Stalin's last hours are the accounts that were given by Khrushchev in his memoirs, which were published in the West, and in his conversations. Whatever the variants, one element in his story remains constant:

On the evening and night of Saturday, Feb. 28, to Sunday, March 1, he, Malenkov, Beria and Bulganin were in Stalin's company. They saw a movie at the Kremlin, then went to the Blizhny dacha and drank until 5 or 6 in the morning. Khrushchev says Stalin was in good health and good spirits, and quite drunk.

Early Sunday evening, Khrushchev expected a call from Stalin inviting him back to Blizhny. That was the usual custom. The call never came. When he was already in bed, he got a call from Malenkov, who told him the security guards at Blizhny were worried: Stalin had not called for his dinner, as he usually did at about 11 P.M. Malenkov proposed that Khrushchev, Beria and Bulganin meet at the villa as soon as possible.

By the time they got there, the security men had sent an elderly servant, Matryona Petrovna, into Stalin's room, the room where he worked, ate, slept on a couch and held his drinking parties. She found him asleep on the floor. This must have been at about 1 A.M. The guards put him on the couch. Khrushchev says that he and his colleagues did not think it was ''suitable'' to make their presence known when Stalin was in ''such an unpresentable condition,'' and that they left.

But, he says, they were back at the villa a few hours later, again at the security guards' request. Matryona Petrovna had been sent in a second time. Stalin was still sleeping, but it was an ''unusual kind of sleep.''

The quartet called in some doctors, who found Stalin semiparalyzed, apparently having suffered a stroke. He was in a coma. Khrushchev gives no times for this, but it must have been the early morning of Monday, March 2.

Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, and his son Vasily were summoned to the dacha sometime on Monday, perhaps in the early afternoon. By then, Mikoyan and many other high officials were there. Molotov was not. He was not permitted into the dying Stalin's presence. Svetlana, who stayed through to the end at 9:50 P.M. Thursday, March 5, has given us an account of the last hours in the book, ''Twenty Letters to a Friend,'' that was published after her defection to the United States in 1967. Her picture supports the evidence that her father had suffered a stroke.

Yet there has never been any explanation of the curious events of Sunday evening, March 1 - the guards calling in the four members of the inner circle after midnight, the quartet's failure to act when they arrived. It probably was not unusual for Stalin to get heavily intoxicated and sleep it off. But to come to the villa, not look at the unconscious Stalin, go away, and then return considerably later, in the early hours of Monday morning, is most curious.

Did they think at first, as Khrushchev implies, that the old man was just drunk again? Or did they hope that something more serious had happened, and that if they let him go a few more hours they might be rid of him for all time? In fact, did they know something more serious was wrong?

Was the preceding Saturday evening as jolly, as benign, as Khrushchev suggests, or had some great row finally broken out? According to one of Khrushchev's accounts, they knew that the doctors' case would come to trial in mid-March. Were they prepared to let events move forward and possibly engulf them all? Three of them - Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev - were as crafty, as skilled, as tough as any figures to be found in Russia. Did those three march down the path to the precipice without making a move to save themselves?

This is a question that has been closely debated for 30 years by Soviet specialists and historians. Some believe that events followed a perfectly normal course; the Harvard historian Adam B. Ulam can be numbered among such authorities. Others, like the prominent Soviet emigre historian Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, are convinced that Stalin was a victim of a plot in which Beria played the central role. Svetlana began raising questions about her father's fatal illness even before she left the Soviet Union. I have talked with a close relative of one of the Politburo members who were at the villa on the day of Stalin's death; the relative strongly believes that Stalin was speeded to his grave.

I myself, having examined the available evidence, including some that perhaps should be described as circumstantial, have come down on the side of those who feel that Stalin's death was not a natural one. I believe that when Stalin began his long sleep on that weekend of Feb. 28-March 1, one or all of Stalin's top four lieutenants played something more than a spectator's role.

I never expect to adduce explicit proof of that hypothesis. If such proof existed, it undoubtedly has long since been destroyed - along with so much of the evidence of those crimes that Stalin himself perpetrated.

Illustration

photo of Stalin's coffin borne by pallbearers