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The Timashuk Woman. Counting against all the old Politburocrats and Kremlin toadies was the party's and people's hatred of Stalin. All were guilty by association, and by the innumerable crimes they had committed at the dictator's direction, but Malenkov was closer to Stalin than any of the others. As Stalin lay ill, a letter reached him from a woman doctor called Timashuk, warning him of improper treatments being used by his doctors. The "sickly suspicious" Stalin ordered the top specialists of the Kremlin dispensary arrested, called in Security Boss Semyon D. Ignatiev* and told him:
"If you do not obtain confessions from the doctors we will shorten you by a head." The doctors were arrested and charged with having murdered Politburocrats Zhdanov and Shcherbakov and having attempted to poison some top Red marshals.
Khrushchev, telling of the episode in his famed secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956, said that the woman Timashuk was a professional provocateur ("an unofficial collaborator with the organs of state security") and that an unnamed "someone" had put her up to the job. Khrushchev left the identity of the "someone" open.
Was it Malenkov? The question hung in the air above the Congress meeting. In the same speech, Khrushchev revealed that one of Stalin's last acts was an effort to liquidate almost the whole Presidium. The inference Khrushchev may have wanted drawn from these facts is that "someone" was exploiting the dying Stalin's well-known psychosis to get all his rivals for leadership liquidated.
Though an able administrator and an adroit politician. Georgy Malenkov was probably too ruthless an intriguer for the big institutions (NKVD, the army, etc.) to entrust their future to. Though he lasted 23 months as Premier of the Soviet Union. Malenkov lasted only 16 days as First Secretary of the party, the crucial job Stalin willed him. Next in line after Malenkov in the hierarchy was Beria (who was quickly liquidated, a sop to popular anti-Stalin feeling, as much as for the crimes he had committed). Then came Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan.
Some distance down the line, for he had ascended to the Politburo at the top of the hierarchy a dozen years after the oldest hands, was Nikita Khrushchev. It is unlikely that Khrushchev had a personal apparatus powerful enough to catapult him into the general secretaryship of the party a fortnight after Stalin's death. The great institutions behind the struggle obviously settled for the ebullient little man from the village of Kalinovka in the region of Kursk because, at that step of the leadership crisis, Khrushchev had the advantage of a fairly new face, and being a man without ideological subtlety, he would have to yield to advice given by the great institutions: the army, the NKVD, the reconstituted party.