"Under the Sign of Scorpion" by Juri - Gnostic Liberation Front

The conspirators could wait no longer, since the Soviet Union would
have fallen apart altogether if the decree had been put into practice.
At Stalin's stately home in Kuntsevo (formerly Orlov's estate), 84 km
from Moscow, his bodyguards, Piotr Lozgachev and Mikhail Stratostin,
became suspicious on the evening of March 1, 1953, since they had not
heard from Stalin all day. They were both afraid to go in to him on their
own authority. Lozgachev finally plucked up courage to open the door. He
found Stalin stretched out on the floor by the dining table, with one elbow
propped awkwardly against the carpet. Beside him lay a pocket watch and
a copy of Pravda. He was conscious, but had lost the power of speech.
Stratostin immediately informed Georgi Malenkov, the Party's general
secretary, who asked him to call Beria too. Beria did not want anyone else
to know about Stalin's illness. He turned up at three o'clock in the mor-
ning together with Malenkov. They brought no doctor. They listened to
Stalin's loud snoring for a while. Then Beria turned to Lozgachev and said
in a menacing voice: "Are you trying to cause panic, eh? Don't you see
that comrade Stalin is fast asleep?"
Nikita Khrushchev came along only at 7:30 on the morning of the 2nd
of March and only after that did the first doctors appear. Beria had made
sure that Stalin received no medical aid for the first 12-13 hours since the
discovery of his illness. Stalin died three days later, on the 5th of March.
Beria was named people's commissary for internal affairs for his contri-
bution to Stalin's demise. At the same time, everything was done to re-
cstablish Jewish rule. Stalin had really tried his best to get rid of the
extremist Jews as soon as he began to mistrust them. For instance, Piotr
Pospelov (actually Fogelson) had worked as the chief ideologist of the
Communist Party between 1940 and 1949. Stalin had Pospelov discharged
and made him director of the Institute for Marx, Engels and Stalin Studies.
He was also fired from this post in 1952.
Beria released the Jewish cultural workers and doctors who had been
imprisoned as quickly as possible. M. Ryumin and other Chekists, who
were involved in the preliminary investigation against the leading Jewish
doctors, were executed in 1954. Professor B. Kogan had himself been an
important Bolshevik leader, who enforced the Soviet regime in Volynia in
1954. (The Soviet Estonian magazine Aja Pulss, No. 9, 1988, p. 28.)
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