Death of Joseph Stalin (1953): The Power Struggle That Followed

Joseph Stalin, ruler of the Soviet Union for almost three decades, died on 5 March 1953 after suffering a stroke at his dacha near Moscow. His death ended one of the most brutal dictatorships of the 20th century and set off a tense succession struggle among his lieutenants. Within months the feared security chief Lavrentiy Beria had been arrested, and Nikita Khrushchev began the rise that would lead him to denounce Stalin in 1956.

Background: the last years of Stalin

By the early 1950s Stalin was 73 and in poor health, suffering from high blood pressure and hardened arteries. He spent much of his time at the Blizhnyaya (“Near”) dacha at Kuntsevo, on the western edge of Moscow, where he held long late-night dinners with his inner circle.

His final years were marked by growing suspicion. In January 1953 the newspaper Pravda announced the so-called Doctors’ Plot, alleging that a group of prominent physicians, many of them Jewish, had conspired to murder Soviet leaders. Arrests and a press campaign followed, and many feared a new wave of purges like those of the late 1930s.

Stalin’s closest colleagues were themselves insecure. Vyacheslav Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan had fallen out of favour in late 1952, and the old security minister, Viktor Abakumov, was already in prison. Historians agree that no member of the leadership could be sure of surviving if Stalin lived much longer.

Stalin’s final illness

On the night of 28 February to 1 March 1953 Stalin dined at the dacha with Beria, Georgy Malenkov, Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin; the guests left in the early hours. The next day Stalin did not appear or call for his staff. Guards, afraid to disturb him without orders, waited until the late evening of 1 March, when one of them went in and found him lying on the floor, conscious but unable to speak.

The guards telephoned the leadership. Beria and Malenkov came to the dacha during the night, but doctors were not brought in until the morning of 2 March, many hours after the stroke. They found that Stalin had suffered a brain haemorrhage that had paralysed the right side of his body. Ironically, his own personal physician was among those arrested in the Doctors’ Plot.

Over the following days the leaders took turns at his bedside. His daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, later described his agony in her memoirs. The public was first told of his illness on 4 March. Stalin died at 9.50 pm on 5 March 1953, aged 74.

The funeral

Even before Stalin died, his colleagues met to divide power. On the evening of 5 March a joint meeting of the party and state leadership named Malenkov chairman of the Council of Ministers, with Beria, Molotov, Bulganin and Lazar Kaganovich as his deputies. Beria took control of a merged Ministry of Internal Affairs, which absorbed the state security service.

Stalin’s body lay in state in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions in central Moscow from 6 March. Vast crowds converged on the city centre, and in the crush many mourners were trampled or suffocated. The authorities never released a death toll; estimates range from about a hundred to several hundred dead.

The funeral took place on 9 March 1953. Malenkov, Beria and Molotov spoke from the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square, and Stalin’s embalmed body was placed in the Mausoleum beside Lenin’s. Across the Soviet Union and the communist world there were scenes of genuine grief, alongside quiet relief among many who had suffered under his rule.

The power struggle

The new leaders presented themselves as a “collective leadership” and moved quickly to ease some of the pressures of Stalin’s last years. On 14 March Malenkov gave up his post in the party secretariat, leaving Khrushchev as its leading member. On 27 March an amnesty freed around 1.2 million prisoners from the camps and colonies of the Gulag, mostly people serving shorter sentences for non-political crimes. On 4 April the Doctors’ Plot was officially declared a fabrication and the surviving doctors were released.

Beria was behind many of these reforms. He also proposed concessions in East Germany and greater rights for non-Russian nationalities. His colleagues, however, feared that he would use the security apparatus to seize power for himself, just as Stalin had done. The East German uprising of 17 June 1953, crushed by Soviet tanks, added to the sense of crisis.

Khrushchev built a coalition against Beria with Malenkov, Molotov and Bulganin. On 26 June 1953, at a meeting of the party Presidium in the Kremlin, Beria was arrested by a group of senior officers including Marshal Georgy Zhukov. He was accused of treason and of spying for foreign powers, tried in secret in December 1953 and shot on 23 December, together with several associates.

Khrushchev’s rise

With Beria gone, the contest was between Malenkov and Khrushchev. In September 1953 Khrushchev was formally named First Secretary of the Communist Party, and he used the post to place his allies in key positions across the country. In February 1955 Malenkov was forced to resign as head of government and was replaced by Bulganin, a Khrushchev ally.

In February 1956, at the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev delivered his Secret Speech, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, which condemned Stalin’s crimes against party members. In June 1957 Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich tried to remove Khrushchev but were defeated as the so-called Anti-Party Group. In March 1958 Khrushchev also became chairman of the Council of Ministers, completing his rise.

Consequences abroad

Stalin’s death changed the international climate. The new leadership signalled interest in reducing tensions with the West, and talks on ending the war in Korea, stalled since late 1952, resumed. The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in July 1953, although historians debate how much Stalin’s death contributed to it.

In Eastern Europe, the easing of terror encouraged demands for change, leading to the East German uprising of 1953 and, after the Secret Speech, the upheavals of 1956 in Poland and Hungary.

Myths and facts

A persistent claim is that Stalin was poisoned, most often by Beria. Some later writers pointed to Beria’s reported boasts and to irregularities in the medical records. However, no documentary proof has been found, and most historians accept that he died of a stroke caused by long-term hypertension and arteriosclerosis.

It is also sometimes said that the leaders deliberately let Stalin die. The long delay before doctors were called is real, but it is better explained by the fear and confusion around him: guards were terrified of entering his rooms uninvited, and his colleagues were uncertain what to do.

Timeline

• 1953, 13 January: Pravda announces the Doctors’ Plot.
• 1953, 1 March: Stalin is found collapsed at his dacha late in the evening after a stroke.
• 1953, 5 March: Stalin dies at 9.50 pm; Malenkov becomes head of government.
• 1953, 9 March: State funeral in Moscow; Stalin’s body is placed in the Lenin Mausoleum.
• 1953, 27 March: A mass amnesty frees around 1.2 million prisoners.
• 1953, 4 April: The Doctors’ Plot is declared a fabrication.
• 1953, 26 June: Beria is arrested at a Presidium meeting.
• 1953, September: Khrushchev becomes First Secretary of the Communist Party.
• 1953, 23 December: Beria is executed after a secret trial.
• 1956, 25 February: Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denounces Stalin.

Why it matters

Stalin’s death ended a system of personal terror that had cost millions of lives. The struggle that followed showed that his successors were unwilling to let any one man control the security police again, and it opened the way for Khrushchev’s partial de-Stalinisation, the release of Gulag prisoners and a period of cautious change in the Cold War.