BlogWonks

My grandfather knew it. Many did, after all, historically speaking anyone care to list out what has happened to many soviet leaders?

They failed to get Hitler, but it seems that eventually they did get Stalin.

To quote the Mel Brookes 10,000 year old man when he told the story of the lightning hitting “Phil”

“There is something bigger than Phil”

After the news article is another that gives a bit of history into the man who developed and mixed the poison. He was later tried…

Secret documents reveal Stalin was poisoned

December 21 was the 126th birthday of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Historian and publicist Nikolay Dobryukha says the Kremlin archives contain documented evidence proving that Stalin was poisoned.

The discovered documents absolutely disprove all affirmations saying that Stalin died of cerebral hemorrhage caused by his poor health. These documents are the records of Stalin’s medical examination within the period of over 30 years. These documents also demonstrate that Stalin was not at all apprehensive of medical examinations and was not afraid of receiving treatment of doctors as it was rumored. It was also said that for fear to visit doctors Stalin often resorted to self-medication. In fact, highly-qualified doctors were called for in case of Stalin’s slightest indisposition and had close medical examination of the high-ranking client all day round.
Records made in September 1947 state that Joseph Stalin had initial stage hypertension, also chronic articular rheumatism and overfatigue. Doctor Kirillov made a record of Stalin’s blood pressure – 145 per 85 – which was excellent for his age of 67 at that time.

At the age of 70, Stalin’s blood pressure made up 140 per 80 and the pulse made up 74 beats per minute before taking bath. After the bath, blood pressure dropped to 138 per 75 and the pulse made up 68 per minute. The Soviet leader did not complain of bad sleep, had regular bowel movements and was fine in general. The medical records show Stalin had the blood pressure of 140 per 80 and the pulse 70 beats per minute at the age of 72. At that, the latter measuring was made when Stalin had flu and fever. It is unlikely that younger and healthier people can register similar showing. And this is astonishing that no other medical record mentions of the initial stage hypertension of Stalin.

It was not true when some people stated that “Stalin was seriously ill, especially after the dramatic stress he endured during WWII”. These talks appeared as soon as bulletins about Stalin’s health were published for the first time on March 4, 1953. These official bulletins stated that on the night of March 2 Joseph Stalin had cerebral hemorrhage caused by his hypertension and atherosclerosis.
The false statements were encouraged by Lavrentiy Beria and his prot?g?s Malenkov and Khrushchev as soon as they became leaders of the country.

The discovered documents reveal that the Soviet leader got poisoned within February 28 – March 1, 1953, between the Saturday night and Monday, the period when majority of doctors cannot be reached for because of their day off. That was done on purpose to give the poison enough time to take effect.

But it is not also ruled out that conspirators first immediately poisoned Stalin and only after that his double fell victim of the poison as well. In fact, Beria did not expect the poisoning would be so protracted and that is why he felt incredibly nervous. On March 4, newspapers controlled by Beria reported that “Stalin had cerebral hemorrhage staying in his Moscow apartment on the night of March 2” which was not true because Stalin died at the out-of-town residence. Why did Beria need to report the leader died in his Moscow apartment? Probably he spread misinformation to use Stalin’s look-alike: maybe Stalin died immediately after poisoning staying in the out-of-town residence and his double “fell ill” in an instant in the Kremlin and then on the night of March 2 was moved to the out-of-town residence to substitute the already dead Lord. In a word, Beria’s plan turned out to be not quite smooth. To be on the safe side, when it was publicly announced Stalin was dead Beria still arrested the head of a laboratory making poisons for secret killings.

Many people knew that Beria was going to wage war against Stalin. His son Sergo said that father highly likely schemed something against Stalin with the help of his supporters in law enforcement structures and with his own intelligence structure that was not controlled by any of the governmental structures.

Stalin’s bodyguards say that the leader got poisoned immediately after he drank mineral water. Indeed, Stalin was found dead lying near a table on which a bottle with mineral water and a glass stood. The poison took effect instantaneously. Some sources state that Stalin fell down dead and others insist he fell down unconscious.

Study of the archives revealed that on November 8, 1953 the Kremlin sanitary department wanted to hand “medicaments and three empty mineral water battles” over to the Stalin Museum. But for some reason, the department handed just two empty bottles to the Museum on November 9. What is the secret of the third lost bottle?

The journal kept by doctors treating Stalin brings to nothing the memoirs and researches of Stalin’s last illness and death. As seen from the records in the journal the doctors obviously understood that Stalin was poisoned. This is proved by prescriptions they made: ice application to the head; sweet tea with lemon; catharsis with sulfur-acid magnesia and so on.

When doctors examined Stalin at 7 a.m. March 2 they found the patient lying on his back on a sofa with the head turned to the left and the eyes closed. The hyperemia of face was moderate; the breathing was not upset. The pulse made up 78 beats per minute, the heart sounds were rather muffled. The blood pressure made up 190 per 110. The stomach was soft and the liver protruded 3-4 cm from under the rib edge. Stalin was unconscious; his condition was grave.

Doctor Lukomsky discovered that Stalin’s right arm and leg were paralyzed. From time to time his left leg and arm moved a little. The medical records suggest that doctors did their best to treat the leader for poisoning and for its consequences, blood supply disturbance and insult, at the same time. But none of them pronounced that was poisoning.

It was on March 3 when Stalin’s doctors registered that condition of the patient grew even worse and heart activity got weaker. Next day, March 4, the condition of the patient grew extremely grave because of frequent respiratory standstills. Suddenly, the skin on the face, legs and arms became blue which is quite typical of poisoning with some poisons. When a human organism is poisoned with aniline, nitrobenzene and others hemoglobin turns into methemoglobin having dark color. It is not ruled out that Stalin was poisoned with a mixture of different poisons.
On the night of March 5, doctors got results of Stalin’s blood and urine tests which indicated the patient suffered from poisoning. But the doctors were afraid to tell Beria about poisoning as they feared he would blame any of them for the poisoning. Stalin’s liver was still enlarged, another factor typical of poisoning.

Early in the morning March 5, Stalin had bloody vomit as a result of which the pulse declined and the blood pressure dropped. The doctors were at a loss how to explain what was happening to the patient. All day long Stalin had bloody vomit and was in collapse several times.

In the evening on March 5, Stalin was wet through with perspiration, the pulse was thready and cyanosis intensified. The doctors gave the patient carbogene several times but the condition did not improve. At 9:40 p.m. Stalin had artificial ventilation but in vain. His death was registered at 9:50 p.m.

Many of documented evidence left by doctors, including premortal examination of Stalin, disagree with recollections of other eyewitnesses. For instance, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana said she could not recognize the father as his illness changed him beyond recognition. Was it possible that Beria’s people substituted Stalin with his double and even his relatives could not recognize him?
One of the documents pertaining to Stalin’s death discovered in the Kremlin archives seems to be particularly mysterious. The document says that nurse Moiseyeva gave Stalin an injection of calcium gluconate at 8:45 p.m. Never before that over the whole period of illness was Stalin given such an injection. At 9:48 p.m., the nurse affixed her signature to a document revealing she gave Stalin an injection of 20-percent camphor oil. Finally, the woman made an injection of adrenalin to Stalin for the first time over the whole course of treatment and made an official record of the fact. Soon after that the Soviet leader died. This coincidence probable gave rise to rumors that a Jewish woman trained by Beria dispatched Stalin to the next world by giving him a special injection.
When contemporary doctors studied medical records of Stalin’s illness and last hours of life they stated adrenaline injections were forbidden for patients registering the same symptoms that Stalin had.

But it is a fact that soon after Stalin’s brothers-in-arms distributed authority at a special plenary session in the Kremlin, they came to the out-of-town residence where Stalin was still staying alive and gave him the fatal injection.

And here is the story behind the poison…

Poisons Tested On Stalin’s Prisoners

Carey Scott,
Sunday Times, UK,
October 15, 1995

Stalin’s scientists tested poisons on prisoners who were under sentence of death in the 1940s, it has been revealed. They chronicled the men’s death throes in gruesome experiments devised to improve the assassination techniques of communist agents abroad.

Recently discovered official documents show that Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s feared security chief, set up a secret poisons laboratory in which deadly substances were administered to more than 100 prisoners who were awaiting execution. They included an American and several Germans and Japanese.

By 1945 the tests had enabled Soviet scientists under the direction of Grigory Mairanovsky, a biologist, to develop poisons which could be secreted in pens, walking sticks and other seemingly innocent items and could kill victims swiftly and without trace.

Conducted between 1938 and 1945 in central Moscow, they made possible some notorious murders including the assassination of Georgy Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, in London in 1978. He was killed with a poisoned pellet fired from an umbrella on Waterloo Bridge.

Beria had ordered the laboratory to be set up in 1938 after officers of the NKVD the forerunner of the KGB complained that they lacked effective poisons. Vladimir Bobrenyov, an investigator at the Russian general prosecutor’s office, has made a lengthy study of the case, unearthing Mairanovsky’s original reports.

“Mairanovsky apologised for the problems with the poisons, but said that unfortunately they could only practise on animals,” said Bobrenyov. “He explained that the exact results on humans were therefore hard to predict.”

A few days later the trembling Mairanovsky was called before Beria. When the scientist again explained why the reaction of humans to his poisons could not be predicted accurately, Beria smiled and asked him: “Who’s stopping you from experimenting on humans?”

The small laboratory on Varsonofevsky Lane, near the NKVD’s Lubyanka headquarters, sprang into action. The “patients,” said Bobrenyov, were prisoners who had been condemned to death by firing squad. They would have been better off being shot.

They were brought in groups to the small lab, isolated in cells, given “medicine” by “doctors” and then watched through small windows.

According to Bobrenyov, the poisons were at first administered in food. Mairanovsky’s reports describe how one of the first victims, a healthy, strong man, “rushed about the cell as his stomach pains worsened… it was clear he understood. He ran to the steel door, blood pouring from his eyes, beating the door with his fists and his feet. He shoved his hand into his slobbering mouth.”

The report describes how he visibly weakened, shrank “and grew quieter and quieter, until he was completely still.”

Sometimes poisons deadly to animals would not kill the prisoners and just produced pains and high fevers. But this was no reprieve. “If they didn’t die, then they’d nurse them back to health and try again,” said Bobrenyov. “They would sometimes make as many as three attempts to kill them until they finally succeeded.”

There were no survivors from the experiments.

The prisoners were almost all convicted on Statute 58: engaging in anti-Soviet propaganda. One was an unnamed American who had been accused of spying and who was in contact with the American embassy throughout his time in prison in the southern town of Penza.

Then he was taken to the Moscow laboratory where he was told he needed a “preventive” injection. The “vaccine” was curarine, an alkaloid drug which is lethal if given in sufficient quantities.

In 1945 Mairanovsky’s researchers made a breakthrough with tests on German prisoners. The men died much faster than previous subjects within 14 or 15 seconds of their injections. But the real test came when the bodies were sent to Moscow’s Sklifosovsky hospital for post-mortems. The verdicts: natural causes.

The scientists were jubilant. “Mairanovsky felt he was on the verge of success,” said Bobrenyov. “The results had exceeded all expectations.”

However, Mairanovsky had not simply worked out how to kill people quickly and without trace. He had also noticed that when he administered the chemical mix he called Injection C, victims displayed a tendency to talk and answer questions during the 24 hours before they died.

“This led me to think that perhaps the mix could be used on suspects during the course of an investigation, to obtain what we call greater openness from suspects during interrogations,” Mairanovsky wrote. “It could have been extremely useful… with those prisoners who too energetically refused to admit their guilt.”

Mairanovsky was denied the chance fully to test out these theories; Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s successor as head of the NKVD, closed down the laboratory in 1945.

When Beria fell from grace after Stalin’s death in 1953, his order to conduct experiments on people was one of the crimes for which he was executed. Mairanovsky was jailed and, according to Bobrenyov, not one of the people who worked in the poison laboratory died of natural causes.

“They hanged themselves, shot themselves, drank themselves to death, or ended up dying in mental institutions,” Bobrenyov said.