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To acquire power, said Salisbury, the junta may actually have murdered Stalin; everything points to it. Just before Stalin's death, he was preparing for the bloodiest purge in Soviet history. He had already touched off a widespread campaign of violent anti-Semitism with the "doctors' plot." Many longtime party workers had mysteriously disappeared. Molotov's friends and even his wife had been banished to Siberia. "There was not a man in . . . the Politburo who could not feel the hot breath of the purge on his neck . . . Every man in the inner circle was threatened . . . [If] Stalin just happened to be struck down by a ruptured artery in his brain on March 2, it must be recorded as one of the most fortuitous occurrences in history. It saved the lives of some thousands of Russians and . . . it almost certainly spared the lives of the little group of men who stood closest to Stalin."
With Stalin dead, the "little group" was threatened by only one other man: MVD Chief Lavrenty Beria. For 78 hours Beria "held Russia in the hollow of his pudgy hand. [He] might have proclaimed himself dictator." All communications were cut off between Moscow and the world outside as soon as Stalin's death was announced. Beria ordered thousands of his armed MVD men to throw an "iron collar around Moscow's heart." The secret police walled off the city in concentric circles, using their trucks as barriers. Even government leaders who wanted to get in and out of the Kremlin had to get Beria's permission. "[From] the moment Beria sealed off the Kremlin," wrote Salisbury, "he signed his own death warrant." His weakness, says Salisbury, was that "he was not strong enough to rule. But he was too dangerous to any other ruler . . . too big for the triumvirate but not big enough to be dictator."
The Old Look. As the first step in creating a new look in domestic affairs, the junta set to work to erase the memory of Stalin. He had been in his grave barely ten days when his name disappeared from Pravda entirely. (In a single day before, it had sometimes appeared 125 times on Page One alone.) "Since the Kremlin had become synonymous with Stalin," the new leaders of Russia moved their residences out of the fortress headquarters. In domestic affairs they stepped up production of consumer goods (e.g., aluminum pots and pans, cotton prints), freed from political prisons some of Stalin's bitterest enemies, discontinued the Stalin prizes for literature, science and the arts, did away with night work in factory and government offices.