Servants were informed that Stalin had been at his dacha with Molotov and Kalinin-but unsurprisingly, they gossiped dangerously. The doctors, a profession whose Hippocratic oath was to be as undermined by the Bolsheviks as by the Nazis, signed the lie. They would announce she had died of appendicitis. It would be taken as a political protest. It was clear enough that Nadya had committed suicide but Molotov, Kaganovich and her godfather Yenukidze got Stalin’s agreement that this self-destruction could not be announced publicly.
Molotov, Kaganovich and Sergo came and went, deciding what to do: as usual in such moments, the Bolshevik instinct was to lie and cover up, even though in this case if they had been more open, they might have avoided the most damaging slanders. “Conclusion-death was immediate from an open wound to the heart.” This scrap of paper, which one can now see in the State Archive, was not to be seen again for six decades. “There is a five-millimetre hole over the heart-an open hole,” noted the Professor. But he was certainly aware that his enemies would whisper that he had. No one with any knowledge of that night has ever suggested that Stalin killed her. Yet the bruise could have been caused by falling off the bed. ” There were bruises on her face: did Stalin really have something to hide? Had he returned to the apartment, quarrelled with her, hit her and then shot her? Given his murderous pedigree, one more death is not impossible. On the right part of face and neck, there are blue and red marks and blood. “The face is absolutely tranquil, the eyes semi-closed, semi-open. Near the pillow on the bed is a little gun.” The housekeeper must have replaced the gun on the bed. “The position of the body,” the professor scrawled on a piece of squared paper ripped from one of the children’s exercise books, “was that her head is on the pillow turned to the right side. “I had no time to take her to the cinema.” He told Vlasik, “She’s completely overturned my life!” He stared sadly at Pavel, growling, “That was a hell of a nice present you gave her! A pistol!”Īround 1 p.m., Professor Kushner and a colleague examined the body of Nadezhda Stalin in her little bedroom. ” wrote his daughter Svetlana, so he kept asking whether it was true he had been inconsiderate, hadn’t he loved her? “I was a bad husband,” he confessed to Molotov. He could not understand why it had happened, raging what did it mean? Why had such a terrible stab in the back been dealt to him of all people? “He was too intelligent not to know that people always commit suicide in order to punish someone. He asked his sister-in-law Zhenya Alliluyeva “what was missing in him.” The family were shocked when he threatened suicide, something they “had never heard before.” He grieved in his room for days: Zhenya and Pavel decided to stay with him to make sure he did not harm himself. Hours later, Stalin stood in the dining room absorbing the news. It’s a reminder of how changes in technology and governance combine to define national power and how governments, if they are to be great, must learn from their failures - in the case of The Wager, the failure to set clear and achievable missions and the failure to ensure that manpower was aligned with technology.PART TWO The Jolly Fellows: Stalin and Kirov 1932–1934 Grann, who also wrote “Killers Of The Flower Moon,” weaves a gripping nonfictional narrative of hubris, poor planning and shipwreck - along with a history of sailing and Britain’s aspiration toward naval hegemony.
#DEATH OF STALIN HAVE A NICE LONG NAP OLD MAN SERIES#
Eventually most of them straggled home through a series of heroic sailings - in pulses of worn seamen, each with a different story of what happened. As order disintegrated alongside the food supply and hope of survival, the crew broke into factions. The Wager, shipwrecked with just a fraction of its original crew that had survived, created an adult version of Lord of the Flies. As the flotilla rounded Patagonia and Cape Horn they were beset by storms. In August 1740, the British man-of-war The Wager along with seven other ships set off on an ill-conceived mission: capture Spanish ships loaded with treasure that were sailing off South America while evading capture or destruction by the powerful Spanish navy. David Grann, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder”
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