IHT: 50 years later: Was Stalin poisoned?

	50 years later: Was Stalin poisoned?
	Michael Wines/NYT The New York Times	Wednesday, March 5, 2003

MOSCOW Exactly 50 years after Stalin died, felled by a brain hemorrhage at his dacha near Moscow, an exhaustive study of long-secret Soviet records lends new weight to an old theory that he actually was poisoned, perhaps to avert a looming war with the United States.

That war may well have been closer than anyone outside the Kremlin suspected at the time, say the authors of a new book based on the records.

The 402-page book, "Stalin's Last Crime," will be published later this month by HarperCollins. Relying on a previously secret account by doctors of Stalin's final days, its authors suggest that Stalin may have been poisoned with warfarin, a tasteless and colorless blood thinner also used as a rat killer, during a final dinner with four members of his Politburo on March 1, 1953.

They base that theory in part on early drafts of the report, which show that Stalin suffered extensive stomach hemorrhaging during his death throes. Virtually all references to stomach bleeding were excised from the 20-page official medical record, which was not issued until June 1953, more than three months after his death.

Four Politburo members were at that dinner, including Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor. The authors, the Russian historian Vladimir Naumov and a Yale University Soviet scholar, Jonathan Brent, suggest that the most likely suspect in the killing is Lavrenti Beria, for 15 years Stalin's despised minister of internal security.

But with virtually everyone connected to the case now dead, the truth may never be known, Brent said in an interview this week.

"Some doctors are skeptical that if an autopsy were performed, that a conclusive answer to the question of whether he was poisoned could be found," he said. "I personally believe that Stalin's death was not fortuitous. There are just too many arrows pointing in the other direction."

Working with the Russian authorities, Brent and Naumov, the secretary of a Russian government commission to rehabilitate victims of repression, have spent years in the archives of the KGB and other Soviet organs. Their book traces the fabulous course of the so-called Doctors' Plot, a supposed collusion in the late 1940s by Kremlin doctors to murder top Communist leaders.

The collusion was in fact a fabrication by Kremlin underlings, acting largely on Stalin's orders. By the time Stalin revealed the plot to a stunned Soviet populace in January 1953, he had elevated it into a vast conspiracy, led by Jews under the United States' secret direction, to kill Stalin and destroy the Soviet Union itself.

The following month, the Kremlin ordered the construction of four giant prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north, apparently in preparation for a second Great Terror - this time directed at the millions of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent.

But the terror never unfolded. On March 1, 1953, two weeks after the camps were ordered built and two weeks before the accused doctors were to go on trial, Stalin collapsed at Blizhnaya, a north Moscow dacha a few kilometers from the Kremlin. He had just finished an all-night dinner with four members of the Politburo, including Khrushchev and Beria; Georgi Malenkov, the Communist Party secretary, and Nikolai Bulganin, a former war minister.

After four days of prolonged agony, Stalin died, 50 years ago Wednesday, at 73. Death was laid to a hemorrhage on the left side of his brain.

Most, though not all of that, is uncontested. But in their book, Naumov and Brent cite wildly varying accounts of Stalin's last hours as evidence that - at the least - Stalin's underlings denied him medical help in the first hours of his illness, when it might have been effective.

Khrushchev and others recalled long after Stalin's death that they had dined with him until the early hours of March 1. He and other reports state that guards found Stalin on the floor, a copy of Pravda nearby, in a darkened room late that evening.

Yet no doctors were summoned to the dacha until the morning of March 2 - by one account, on Beria's orders. And the official medical account of Stalin's death maintains that he became ill in the early hours of March 2, a full day after he actually suffered a stroke.

The effect of the altered official report is to imply that doctors were summoned soon after Stalin was found, rather than after a delay of eight or more hours.

Just a year earlier, the authors write, Stalin's personal physician had advised him to think about retiring because he suffered from hardened arteries and poor general health. "He was ready to die," the authors write. "The question is whether he was ready to die just then, two weeks before the Jewish doctors were allegedly to be put on trial."

The authors allow that a cerebral hemorrhage remains the most straightforward explanation for Stalin's death and that poisoning remains for now a matter of speculation. But physicians who examined the doctors' account of Stalin's last days said similar physical effects could have been produced by a 5-to-10 day dose of warfarin, which had been patented in 1950 and was being aggressively sold worldwide.

The question of why Stalin might have been killed is easier. Because Stalin had systematically eliminated many of his closest underlings, including several heads of his secret police, the Politburo members lived in fear of their lives.

Beyond that, however, the book cites a previously secret report as evidence that Stalin was preparing to add a new dimension to the Doctors' Plot conspiracy. That document - an interrogation of a supposed American agent named Ivan Varfolomeyev, in 1951 - indicated that the Kremlin was preparing to accuse the United States of a plot to destroy much of Moscow with a new super-weapon, then to launch an invasion of Soviet territory along the Chinese border.

Incredibly, Varfolomeyev's plot, called "the plan of the internal blow," also alleged a conspiracy by the captains of American industry to build a military arsenal capable of destroying the Soviet state.

Naumov said in an interview Tuesday that that plan, combined with other Soviet military preparations in the Russian Far East at the time, strongly suggest that Stalin was preparing for a war along the Pacific Coast of the United States. What remains unclear, he said, is whether he planned a first strike or whether the mushrooming conspiracy unfolding in Moscow was to serve as a provocation that would lead both sides to a flash point.

"I am told that the only case when the two sides were on the verge of war was the Cuban crisis," in 1962, he said. "But I think this was the first case. And this first time that we were on the verge of war was even more dangerous," he said, because the true devastation of nuclear weapons was not yet an article of faith.

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