The most striking thing is illuminated by the passages quoted below:
It is the horrible fear that anything you did or didn't do could mean death/torture to oneself and one's family, that you no one trusted you and no one could be trusted.
His paranoia, too, was at an all-time high.
When he had gone in for his regular check-up in 1951, his doctor told him to rest more and work less, words that Stalin did not take well, biographer Roman Brackman wrote in The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life. “[T]hree decades earlier, plotting to hasten [Premier Vladimir] Lenin’s death and pretending to worry about his health, [Stalin] had insisted that Lenin be kept from his daily duties,” he explained.
The doctor was arrested and charged with working as a spy for British intelligence.
That winter, Stalin had been waging a witch hunt against Kremlin physicians, many of whom were Jewish, claiming they murdered top Soviet officials in a “doctors' plot. The trial against the Kremlin doctors was to commence within weeks.
Three of them — Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev — were as crafty, as skilled, as tough as any figures to be found in Russia.
According to later interviews, those working at the dacha claimed they were too scared to disturb Stalin.
It took until around 10:30 at night for someone to check on Stalin. [i.e. almost an entire day...]
While the consensus among those present was to call a doctor, the officers on guard wanted to wait on instructions from the party leadership. Eventually, they got Beria on the phone, who demanded they tell no one of Stalin’s illness.
Faria in the journal Surgical Neurology International, Lozgachev said that Beria, upon seeing Stalin snoring, asked, “Lozgachev, why are you in such a panic? Can’t you see, Comrade Stalin is sleeping soundly. Don’t disturb him and stop alarming us.”
Signs pointed to Beria having fallen out of Stalin's good graces—and thus he potentially stood to gain the most from the leader's death. But Beria could have also believed what he was saying; to an untrained eye, Stalin may very well have appeared to be sleeping. And with the doctors’ plot trial in the offing, no one wanted to have to be the one to call a doctor.
Intentionally or not, it took until around 7 in the morning for the members to reach a decision to call the Minister of Health to select doctors for an initial look. When the doctors finally arrived, they found Stalin unresponsive, his right arm and leg, paralyzed, and his blood pressure at the alarmingly high rate of 190/110. “They had to examine him, but their hands were too shaky. To make it worse, the dentist took out his dentures, and dropped them by accident,”
The message said he was receiving suitable medical treatment under the close eye of party leaders, worded in such a way to reassure a public frenzied by the doctors' plot allegations that none of the doctors treating Stalin were in any way connected to the alleged conspiracy. (Ironically, those consulted actually did include several imprisoned Kremlin doctors, according to Joshua Rubenstein in The Last Days of Stalin. One, a pathologist named Aleksandr Myasnikov, said he was mid-interrogation when his captors suddenly started asking for medical advice instead.)
von Marwitz
/https%3A%2F%2Ftf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ffiler_public%2F7f%2F3f%2F7f3f6274-a841-4b23-beba-575654abd3b7%2Fnpg_99_tc1_stalin_r.jpg)
getpocket.com
