The year 1953 was the last in the life of the all-powerful Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. In January he had a medical checkup done by a team of prominent doctors led by the famous professor Vinogradov, who detected a sharp deterioration of the patient's health and recommended strict bed confinement and complete inactivity. The diagnosis angered the dictator and, soon after, Vinogradov and a number of other leading Soviet doctors were arrested and renounced as "agents of international Zionism". The arrests triggered the so-called Doctors' Case and a new spiral of the Great Terror of the Thirties was only prevented by Stalin's death on March 5, 1953. Stalin had a stroke when he was staying behind armored doors at his country dacha just outside Moscow. The bodyguards found his prostrate on the floor of his dining room. Stalin was still breathing but unconscious. Fully aware of the strongman's profound distrust of the doctors, the security officers never called an ambulance. They only notified members of Stalin's inner circle who finally allowed the doctors to examine the dying leader. There was nothing much they could possibly do, though and, on March 5, Joseph Stalin died. Some people in the West still believe that Stalin could have been poisoned by his associates, including the head of his much feared secret police, Lavrenti Beria.
Stalin's death wrote an end to a whole era of a political system based on the oppression of anyone who dared not to toe the party line. The system had penetrated every imaginable aspect of the social life, from politics and economics to culture and ideology, and the deification of Stalin had etched itself indelibly on the hearts and minds of millions of people. Thousands of grief-stricken mourners flocked to Moscow from all across the nation to pay their last respects to the Father of All Nations and hundreds were trampled to death in a stampede caused by poor organization during the funeral day. Stalin's embalmed body was placed inside the Lenin mausoleum next to that of the founder of the Soviet state.
The country needed a new leader and the blood-stained monster, Lavrenti Beria, came in from behind to fill the void. His main rival, Nikita Khrushchev, was busily canvassing the support of fellow Politburo members to get rid of the man notorious for the endless purges and tortures he had masterminded during his long tenure as the country's secret service supreme. During a meeting of the ruling Politburo held in June, Khrushchev accused Beria of careerism, nationalism and links with British intelligence. Immediately after, a team of top Army Generals, led by the legendary Marshal Georgy Zhukov, arrested Beria who was later tried and executed
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