Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

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JOSEPH STALIN’S PRIVATE VILLA

SOCHI, RUSSIA

OCTOBER 17, 1945

AFTERNOON

Joseph Stalin is down but not out.

The sixty-six-year-old Russian dictator is taking a rare vacation at his favorite hideaway. At his direction, the lavish mountain home has been painted forest green, so that it is completely camouflaged within a grove of cypress trees.1 Despite this cloak of invisibility, Stalin is on guard as he strolls alone in the palm-tree-lined courtyard. Trademark pipe clenched firmly between his teeth, he is obsessively contemplating his future—and that of the Soviet Union.

“The Boss,” as Stalin is known, desperately needs time away from Moscow. The fresh air and quiet of this retreat one thousand miles due south of the Russian capital are more than a mere tonic to the overworked despot. Unbeknownst to the Americans and British, Stalin suffered two minor heart attacks at the Potsdam Conference, which he concealed from the public. Despite the ailments, Stalin was able to continue negotiating the future of Europe.

The stress of the war, combined with years of working sixteen hours a day while puffing on a pipe filled with strong tobacco, is taking a savage toll on Stalin’s body. He is afraid that any sign of weakness might lead to an attempt to oust him from power. Only his personal physician, Vladimir Vinogradov, knows the full extent of his health problems. But even at leisure, Stalin is a workaholic and finds vacationing to be a nuisance. Now, as he takes two months away from the Kremlin, spending his days in gardening and long walks, he still receives dozens of reports from Moscow each day.

And these reports trouble him deeply.

Stalin’s absence is causing a furor. TASS, the official Soviet news agency, has simply explained that “Comrade Stalin has departed for vacation to rest,” but few in Moscow or around the world believe there is not more to the story. Foreign diplomats and the international press scurry to learn the truth about what’s happening in Sochi, as rumors fly.2

There are rumors that Stalin will soon quit his job, to be replaced either by Marshal Georgy Zhukov or perhaps by foreign affairs commissar Vyacheslav Molotov. “Stalin may leave his post,” the Chicago Tribune is reporting. “The ambitious aspirations of Marshal Zhukov to become a dictator have full backing of the army, while Molotov is backed by the Communist Party.”

Stalin considers such rumors as a poruganiie—a desecration not only of his reputation but of the power to which he clings so dearly. Two men who learned the hard way how ruthlessly Stalin deals with those who attempt to usurp his power were Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov. Trotsky was once a trusted commissar of foreign affairs, just as Molotov is now. But the bond between Stalin and Trotsky was broken when their ideologies about the true nature of communism began to differ. Eventually, Trotsky was forced to flee Russia, taking up residence in Mexico. There he openly criticized Stalin, believing that he was safe from the long arm of the NKVD.

Trotsky was wrong.

In August 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader attacked Trotsky in his home, plunging the sharp tip of an ice axe deep into the former revolutionary’s skull. Miraculously, Trotsky initially survived the blow, only to die one day later in the hospital.

Trotsky’s assassination mimicked that of his thirty-two-year-old son, Lev Sedov, two years earlier. At the time of his death, Sedov was on the NKVD execution list because he was arranging an international Communist conference in Paris that would celebrate his father’s, rather than Stalin’s, vision of communism.

Sedov suffered an acute attack of what appeared to be appendicitis in late January 1938. His symptoms mysteriously disappeared, then reappeared a few weeks later. Immediately, his best friend, an anthropologist named Mark Zborowski, informed Russian intelligence that Sedov had checked into a small Paris hospital known as the Clinique Mirabeau.

Unbeknownst to Sedov, Zborowski was an NKVD agent.

A few days after emerging from surgery, Sedov was in good spirits. He joked with his wife, Jeanne, and for several days was thought to be enjoying a normal recovery. But when his wife came to visit him on February 14, 1938, Sedov appeared listless.

“You know what they did to me last night?” he asked his wife. Suddenly, Sedov stopped talking, apparently unable to finish his thought. Two days later, to the horror of his wife, he died. An examination found strange purple bruising on his abdomen. Sedov was autopsied twice, but Parisian medical authorities ruled that he’d died from natural causes.3

The NKVD chiefs were relentless in their zeal to develop untraceable poisons. Beginning with Genrikh Yagoda; his successor, the reprehensible Nikolai Yezhov; and then the even more heinous Lavrentiy Beria, the ruthless spymasters pushed Soviet scientists to experiment with deadly toxins.4

The research was done at a top-secret laboratory known as the Kamera (“the Chamber”), where poisons of all kinds were tested on Russian political prisoners. The goal of the scientists working at the Kamera was to concoct an odorless, tasteless poison that would go undiscovered in case of an autopsy.

“We set ourselves the task of developing in the laboratory poisons so that they could be consumed using wine, drinks and food without modifying the taste or color of the food and drink,” one Russian official would testify at Yezhov’s secret trial in 1940.5 “It was also proposed that we invent fast-acting and slow-acting poisons but they had to have no visible impact on the body so that the autopsy on someone who had been poisoned would be unable to detect that the person had been poisoned.”

The Kamera came into being during Stalin’s reign of terror. Various poisons were used to silence enemies of the state. Now, as he endures his necessary time away from Moscow, Stalin has plenty of enemies in need of silencing. He lives like a monk as he plots the future. After spending each day in the gardens, the Boss spends his nights reading hand-carried reports from Moscow. He receives no visitors, and communicates with the outside world only through the occasional telephone call. Among the dossiers he receives each day are reports from Beria apprising him of the findings of the many NKVD surveillance teams hidden throughout occupied Europe. Stalin is already making plans to replace Zhukov as deputy minister of defense, and to humiliate Molotov before firing him as commissar of foreign affairs. As to relationships with the Western Allies, the time away from Moscow is giving Stalin an even greater resolve. “It is obvious that in dealing with such partners as the U.S. and Britain we cannot achieve anything serious if we begin to give in to intimidation or betray uncertainty,” he messages his top advisers in Moscow. “To get anything from this kind of partner, we must arm ourselves with the policy of stoikosti i vyderzhki”—“tenacity and steadfastness.”

The dacha in which Joseph Stalin now rests was built in 1934. Since then, he has personally signed the death warrants of forty thousand people—among them, political rivals, military officials, troublesome intellectuals, and personal enemies. Anyone who dares cross Joseph Stalin soon finds himself dead. All it takes is the stroke of a pen—and perhaps a lethal dose of untraceable poison.

* * *

Two thousand miles northwest of Stalin’s dacha, George S. Patton is restless. Many thoughts run through his mind now that it is no longer occupied by war. Patton understands that he is a famous person throughout the world, and that his future might lie in political activism—he’d rather be “outside the tent pissing in, than inside the tent pissing out,” in his own words. In a way, speaking out about controversial issues would give the general an opportunity to wage rhetorical war. Above all, Patton remains a warrior, but his battlefield may be changing.

And that prospect is not lost on his enemies, one of whom is currently resting in South Russia.

Another is dealing with captured Nazis at Nuremberg.