Stalin suffered a stroke on March 1, 1953, and lay unattended for hours because his guards feared entering his room uninvited. He died four days later at his Kuntsevo dacha outside Moscow. His death triggered a scramble for power among Soviet leaders, a brief thaw in political repression, and eventual denunciation of his crimes by Nikita Khrushchev three years later.
For years Stalin had ruled by fear so absolute that even his own security detail dared not disturb him. When he failed to emerge from his room at his Kuntsevo dacha on the night of March 1, guards found him lying on the floor, incontinent and unable to speak, but no one summoned help for hours, terrified of the consequences of intruding on the vozhd without permission. By the time doctors arrived, the damage from the stroke was severe and irreversible.
He lingered for four days, surrounded by anxious Politburo members, including Beria, Khrushchev, and Malenkov, who watched him die with a mixture of dread and calculation, already maneuvering for succession. He died on the afternoon of March 5, 1953, having ruled the Soviet Union since the late 1920s through forced collectivization, famine, the Great Terror, and victory in World War II at a staggering human cost.
Millions of Soviet citizens wept in the streets, genuinely bereft despite the terror he had inflicted, while millions of others, in the camps of the Gulag, dared to hope. His body lay in state alongside Lenin's in Red Square; a crush of mourners trying to view it killed an unknown number of people, a fittingly grim coda. Within three years Khrushchev would denounce Stalin's crimes in his Secret Speech, beginning a slow national reckoning.