In Europe

murder Zhdanov.
    From 1950, therefore, there began a systematic persecution of predominantly Jewish doctors, military men and party leaders, and of Jews in general. In the early 1950s the camps of the Gulag were fuller than ever: at the peak, in the dark 1930s, there had been 1.8 million Soviet citizens in the camps; in 1953, there were 2.4 million. And the terror had now spread to the satellite countries as well: in Bulgaria, at least 100,000 people were detained in the infamous ‘Little Siberia’; in Hungary some 200,000 political prisoners were sent to the camps. Almost 140,000 Czechs and Slovaks, 180,000 Rumanians and 80,000 Albanians were interred as well.
    In familiar agitprop style, a campaign was started in January 1953 to whip up interest in the coming trials. Big articles appeared in
Pravda
and
Izvestia
telling of a ‘bourgeois-Zionistic-American conspiracy’ that had infiltrated the country, and the newspapers’ tone grew more anti-Semitic every day. The Jews – and not only Jews – lived in fear of mass deportation.
    Was it really a coincidence that, at precisely that point, on 5 March, 1953, Stalin died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage? Historians have been wondering about that ever since. The various eyewitness accounts of his death differ on essential points – a fateful sign, in itself – and it is certain that he lay dying for hours on the bedroom floor of his dacha. He had become a victim of his own terror: none of the staff dared at first to open his bedroom door, no doctor dared risk his life with an attempt to save Stalin's. In fact, for some time – whether out of fear or on purpose – no doctor was even summoned. Beria, who had been warned right away, shouted half-drunkenly at Stalin's bodyguards: ‘Can't you see that Comrade Stalin is fast asleep? Get out, all of you, and don't disturb him!’
    In the end, it was twelve hours after Stalin's stroke that a doctor was finally called; no good explanation has ever been given for the delay. As Stalin lay dying, his son Vasili screamed at Beria and other members of the Politburo: ‘You filthy swine, you're killing my father!’ And according to Molotov, Beria told him later: ‘I put him away, I saved all your lives.’
    Whatever the case, the fact is that Stalin's exit was a matter of life and death for many members of the Politburo in spring 1953. Most of themhad come to power during the previous purges, and they remembered all too clearly how Stalin had dealt with their predecessors. Molotov's Jewish wife had already been arrested, and men like Beria, Deputy Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov and Khrushchev knew that their time had probably come as well.
    When the physicians at last arrived, they hardly dared to unbutton Stalin's shirt. They asked Beria and the other leaders present for express permission for everything they did. Stalin's struggle with death lasted five days. ‘At the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and looked at everyone in the room,’ his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva recalled. ‘It was a terrible gaze, mad or perhaps furious, and full of the fear of death …’ But Stalin had barely drawn his last breath when Beria bounded out of the room, called loudly for his chauffeur and, as Khrushchev remembered it, walked around ‘beaming’. ‘He knew for a certainty that the moment for which he had been waiting so long had arrived.’
    The show trials were quickly called off, most of the defendants were freed, and the Gulag was slowly dismantled. Less than a month after his death, Stalin's name began not to be mentioned in
Pravda
any more. His portrait disappeared from public places. In late June, the seemingly simple and coarse Khrushchev was able to seize power. By the end of that year, in classic Stalinist fashion, his rival Beria had been arrested, condemned as a ‘British spy’ and an ‘enemy of the people’, and shot through the head. All of the older people I talked to in the former Eastern Bloc still knew exactly what they had been doing on the morning of Friday, 6 March, 1953, when the news of Stalin's death was announced.
    ‘My father was standing in the doorway,’ Yuri Klejner in St Petersburg told me. ‘He wiped his eyes: they were absolutely dry. I was six at the time. I tried to cry too, because that's what everyone was doing, but I couldn't either. A little neighbour girl said: “It's not right to play now that Comrade Stalin has died.”’ Irina Trantina, the daughter of a general in