agent. No generalissimo has had the intelligence assets that Stalin
did during the war.
Stalin used his service as the long and vengeful arm of Soviet
power. In the late 1930s, he used the NKVD to track and eventually
kill émigréWhite generals and his former rival Trotsky. Following
the war, the service kidnapped and killed enemies of Moscow in West
Germany and Austria. At his last Presidium meeting, Stalin reviewed
a program to kill the Yugoslav leader Joseph Tito. In the last years of
his life, Stalin prepared a purge of the party and the security service.
The centerpiece of the purge was to be the testimony in the case of
the Doctors’ Plotthat prominent physicians planned to poison the
leadership under the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency and
international Jewish organizations. Only Stalin’s death prevented an-
other blood-letting.
Stalin—like Beria, his primary intelligence and security lieu-
tenant—was a frightening boss. He often communicated with rezi-
denturasabroad using the pseudonym “Ivan Vasilevich,” demanding
information and action by his service. Good intelligence officers, as
well as incompetents and cowards, often found themselves on trial
for their lives for real and suspected omissions. Stalin also awarded
intelligence professionals with rank, privileges, and personal atten-
tion. When he left for his last vacation in the south in 1952, he made
sure that Yevgeny Pitovranov, an up-and-coming MGBofficer, was
specially invited to see him off.
Contrary to some recent literature, neither Beria nor the security
service was responsible for Stalin’s death. But Stalin’s decision to re-
place his chief bodyguard Vlasik in late 1952 may have indirectly
played a part in his death. When Stalin’s guard detail noticed that
Stalin had not awakened on the morning of 2 March, they first waited
hours before entering the room, and then waited hours more before
summoning medical help for the stroke that he had suffered. Stalin’s
policy of a tight control of his guards may have hastened his painful
death on 5 March.
The heritage of Joseph Stalin—like that of his intelligence ser-
vice—remains mixed in Russia. While there is now a treasure trove
of literature on the crimes of the Stalin era in the Russian language,
there has also been considerable rehabilitation of the leader and a
number of books on the wartime exploits of the security services.254 •STALIN, JOSEPH VISSARONOVICH (1878–1953)06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 254