Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
On 1 March 1953, Stalin's staff found him semi-conscious on the bedroom floor of his Kuntsevo Dacha. [560] He was moved onto a couch and remained there for three days, [561] during which he was hand-fed using a spoon and given various medicines and injections. [562] Stalin's condition continued to deteriorate, and he died on 5 March. [563]
There were many local rumours that Beso was not Stalin's real father, [22] which in later life Stalin himself encouraged. [21] Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore nonetheless thought it likely that Beso was the father, in part due to the strong physical resemblance that they shared. [ 21 ]
The first report about Stalin's illness appeared in Pravda three days after the stroke (1 March) and one day before he died. Pravda issue 63 (12631), dated 4 March 1953. Another report on Stalin's medical condition was published four days after the stroke (1 March) and 7 hours before he died.
Upon hearing of his son's death, Stalin reportedly stared at his photograph; he would later soften his stance towards Dzhugashvili, saying he was "a real man" and that "fate treated him unjustly." [39] Meltzer would be released in 1946 and re-united with Galina, though the years apart had made Galina distant from her mother. [40]
After Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Beria's ambitions sprang into full force. In the uneasy silence following the cessation of Stalin's last agonies, he was the first to dart forward to kiss his lifeless form (a move likened by Montefiore to "wrenching a dead King's ring off his finger"). [59]
Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin (Russian: Васи́лий Миха́йлович Блохи́н; 19 January [O.S. 7 January] 1895 – 3 February 1955) was a Soviet secret police official who served as the chief executioner of the NKVD under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolay Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria.
The only individual with comparable influence was Lenin's right-hand man, Yakov Sverdlov, who died in March 1919 as a result of the Spanish flu pandemic. [176] In November 1917, Lenin and his wife took a two-room flat within the Smolny Institute; the following month, they went on a brief holiday in Halila, Finland. [177]
Stalin's original declaration in March 1946 that there were 7 million war dead was revised in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev with a round number of 20 million. In the late 1980s, demographers in the State Statistics Committee ( Goskomstat ) took another look using demographic methods and came up with an estimate of 26–27 million.