The Postwar Period 221
was to contaminate Tito with a spray containing pneumonic plague virus,
though he himself would be vaccinated against it. The second method of assas-
sination planned for an attack during the marshal’s visit to London, at the
reception in the Yugoslav Embassy to which “Castro” would be invited thanks
to his “friend,” Vlatko Velebit. He was to shoot the marshal and flee after tear-
gassing the guests. A similar attempt could take place in Belgrade, during a
meeting between Tito and the ambassadors accredited to Yugoslavia. Accord-
ing to the fourth variant, Max would offer the marshal a precious box which,
when opened, would release a deadly gas (Grigulevich, of course, would have
been protected by an antidote).^367
On 1 March 1953, at a meeting that took place at midnight, KGB officers
informed Stalin about Max’s plans, but he was not totally convinced, feeling
that the problem should be reconsidered and that it would be better to focus on
internecine conflicts among the Yugoslav leaders to eliminate Tito. Evidently,
he still preferred a killer in the marshal’s inner circle.^368 With all probability,
this KGB report was the last document Stalin read before he had a massive
stroke at dawn the next day. As Roy Medvedev recounts, letters that were impor-
tant for him personally were later found in a drawer of his desk, under a pile of
newspapers. Among them was a message from Tito, who wrote that the Boss’s
hatchet men had tried to kill him by all possible means, without success. “If this
does not stop,” he wrote, “I will send just one man to Moscow, and it will not
be necessary to send another one.”^369 It will always remain a mystery whether
this was only a threat—although Tito would not have issued a threat unless he
were sure he could follow through—or, whether that piece of paper had some-
thing to do with Stalin’s sudden death. It cannot be ignored that Lavrentii P.
Beria, the bloodthirsty Soviet minister of internal affairs, had opposed the split
with Tito and remained in secret contact with him after 1948.^370 They met for
the first time in autumn 1944, during Tito’s visit to Moscow, at one of Stalin’s
dinners in his dacha. Obliged to drink a lot because of the Russian obsession
with toasts, Tito, who during the Partisan years rarely drank, felt sick and went
outside to vomit. Suddenly a shadow appeared behind him. “Don’t worry,” said
Beria, “it is just me, your friendly policeman.”^371 Did they remain friends even
after Tito’s expulsion from the Cominform?
When Stalin was in a coma after his stroke, Beria did everything he could
to prevent the doctors from helping him, since he was in disgrace and feared
the terrible fate of his predecessors, Genrikh Iagoda and Nikolai Ezhov, both
of whom had been shot in the thirties. Pavel Sudoplatov, the “wet work” spe-
cialist, was convinced that Stalin had been killed by Beria’s agents, as was Sta-
lin’s own son.^372 When the news of the Boss’s death came, Tito did not hide his
relief, although he considered Stalin to have been an intelligent statesman in