Death of Stalin

A new regime dawns as the Soviet dictator breathes his last

As dawn broke over Moscow on 5 March 1953, perhaps the most powerful man in the world lay dying. Four days earlier, one of Stalin’s guards had discovered him lying on the bedroom floor in his dacha on the edge of Moscow, soaked in his own urine. The dictator had suffered a massive stroke. Within hours, the most powerful men in the Communist Party had assembled by his bedside. The end seemed certain, though he lingered for days, sometimes opening his eyes and once pointing to a photograph.

By the morning of 5 March, Stalin was visibly weakening, his face ashen, his breathing laboured. As he sank towards death that afternoon, his hated secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, searched his safe to remove and destroy any incriminating documents. Already the Soviet leaders were jockeying for position, desperate to preserve their power under the new regime.

Yet still Stalin, the man who had ordered the deaths of millions, clung to life. At nine o’clock that evening, long after many of his associates had expected him to die, he was still fighting for breath. At 9.40pm, with his pulse failing, the doctors gave him an injection of adrenalin and camphor to stimulate his heart. The dictator began to shudder; as his biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore puts it, he had started to “drown in his own fluids”.

Later, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana remembered the final moment. “He literally choked to death as we watched,” she wrote. “The death agony was terrible … At the last minute, he opened his eyes. It was a terrible look, either mad or angry, and full of the fear of death.” For a moment, Stalin raised his hand, as if pointing or threatening. “Then,” Svetlana wrote, “the next moment, his spirit after one last effort tore itself from his body.”