“He liked to repeat to us, you are blind like kittens,” Khrushchev recalled. When it came to members of his inner circle, he especially wanted to remind them they were all disposable. Rather than chart a clear course forward, Stalin proceeded to shake up the Kremlin hierarchy, appointing in a host of young, relative unknowns in positions in ways that were “designed to conceal and confuse the lines of succession rather than clarify,” wrote Salisbury. The great role, the only important one at the congress, was played by Stalin himself.” Instead, New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote, “If it had seemed for a short time that the great roles at the party congress were to go to Malenkov and Khruschev, such ideas were quickly dispelled. When he summoned a Communist Party Congress-the first in over a decade-in 1952, those attending expected it to outline the roadmap of party succession. But whether Stalin wanted to admit it or not, his health was indeed flagging.

The doctor was arrested and charged with working as a spy for British intelligence. “hree decades earlier, plotting to hasten Lenin’s death and pretending to worry about his health, had insisted that Lenin be kept from his daily duties,” he explained. When he had gone in for his regular check-up in 1951, his doctor told him to rest more and work less, words that Stalin did not take well, biographer Roman Brackman wrote in The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life. His paranoia, too, was at an all-time high. He suffered either a heart attack or a series of strokes in 1945, and his health hadn't been the same since. The move was in part for company, in part to keep an eye on them.

“As soon as he woke up, he would ring us- the four of us-and either invite us to see a film or start some long conversation about a question that could have been resolved in two minutes,” Khrushchev later recounted. Stalin’s “comrades-in-arms” at that time included Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s likely successor and deputy premier Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s influential chief of secret police, who was also jockeying for power Nikita Khrushchev, whom Stalin had summoned to Moscow to balance the power dynamics of Malenkov and Beria and Nikolai Bulganin, Stalin’s defense minister. Easily depressed when left on his own, he regularly summoned four members of his inner circle to join him there for a movie and a meal.

Near the end of his life, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had taken to spending almost all of his free time at his dacha in the Moscow suburb of Kuntsevo.

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