Long before the Second World War ended, communist party leaders from Eastern and Northern Europe were already making regular trips to the Soviet Union for rest cures and medical treatment. Between 1949 and 1979, at least fifteen general secretaries, presidents, prime ministers, and prominent activist figures from communist and workers’ parties around the world died on Soviet territory while ostensibly receiving care. The Russian investigative magazine Top Secret published a detailed account of these deaths under the headline “They Came to the Soviet Union and Then They Died,” reconstructing the strange final days of some of the most powerful communist figures of the twentieth century.
The Bulgarian Communist Party chief who talked to Tito and paid with his life
The first prominent victim after 1949 was Georgi Dimitrov, general secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party. In the years following the war, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito had made a decisive break with Stalin, refusing to subordinate Belgrade’s interests to Moscow’s. Dimitrov, then serving as chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, had begun moving in a similar direction. He held direct talks with Tito on establishing a “Balkan Federal Republic,” a proposal that would have created a regional power bloc independent of Soviet control. Stalin noticed, and he was not pleased.
In December 1948, Dimitrov was elected general secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party. He was already ill with diabetes, and four months later he traveled to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. Moscow assigned him to the Barvikha Sanatorium, the most prestigious medical facility in the country, reserved for the Soviet elite. Two months later, he was dead. He was 67.
The official cause of death was never disclosed. What followed was a series of actions that deepened suspicion rather than dispelling it. Bulgarian doctors were barred from approaching the body. Soviet officials moved with extraordinary speed to embalm the corpse, a procedure carried out personally by Ilya Zbarsky, a prominent Soviet chemist and member of the Academy of Medical Sciences who had performed the same procedure on Lenin’s body decades earlier. Forensic specialists have since observed that embalming or cremation were, at the time, the most effective means of destroying evidence of poisoning in a corpse.
Poland’s ‘Little Stalin’ dies at the congress where Khrushchev denounced the original
The death of Bolesław Bierut, Poland’s first president and chairman of the Polish United Workers’ Party, provoked even sharper suspicion than Dimitrov’s had.
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In February 1956, the man known as “the Polish Stalin” traveled to Moscow to attend the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On February 25, during the congress, Bierut fell suddenly ill. Soviet officials pressed him to stay in Moscow for treatment. He died on March 12.
Moscow announced that Bierut had died of a heart attack. The Polish public rejected this explanation almost immediately. The political logic was too obvious: Bierut had been implementing policies that ran directly against Khrushchev’s new program of “de-Stalinization,” the carefully managed relaxation of some of the worst Stalinist practices that Khrushchev had just initiated with his secret speech. Under that reading, Bierut had ceased to be useful and had become a liability. Many Poles concluded he had been poisoned on Khrushchev’s orders.
The French Communist Party chief dies aboard a Soviet ship
The victims were drawn from beyond the socialist bloc. On July 11, 1964, Maurice Thorez, the recently retired general secretary of the French Communist Party, died suddenly aboard the Soviet vessel Lithuania as it sailed toward Yalta. The official diagnosis stated that the 64-year-old Thorez had suffered simultaneous circulatory failure in both his heart and brain. Medical specialists who reviewed the case called this combination all but impossible to occur by chance.
Italy’s top communist is stonewalled by Khrushchev and collapses three days later
On Aug. 11, 1964, Palmiro Togliatti, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party, the largest communist party in Western Europe, flew to Moscow. His trip was framed as a combination of rest and medical treatment, but his real purpose was to meet Khrushchev directly to discuss the international situation and relations between the Soviet and Italian parties.
Khrushchev was not there. He had left Moscow without notice to inspect a region outside the capital, leaving Togliatti stranded. Mikhail Suslov, the Central Committee secretary responsible for international affairs, suggested Togliatti travel to Crimea in the meantime, promising to arrange a meeting with Khrushchev in Yalta as soon as possible.
Togliatti understood the slight immediately. He was furious. During his time in Yalta he wrote what became known as the “Yalta Memorandum,” a document pointed enough to have alarmed any Soviet reader. “It is profoundly mistaken,” he wrote, “to claim that everything in socialist countries, including the Soviet Union, is proceeding well.” He then listed the failures and abuses of rotting communist parties from within. He also argued at length for what he called “polycentrism,” the proposition that the international communist movement should have several centers of gravity rather than a single one in Moscow. Soviet leaders had no interest in that argument.
The summit never took place. Togliatti was taken on restricted guided tours of Crimea and permitted to speak publicly only once, at the Artek Pioneer Camp, a children’s summer program.
On Aug. 13, as Togliatti was about to address the children and teachers gathered in the camp’s square, he collapsed. The account was recorded by Colonel Korolyov, then head of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, Ninth Section in Crimea, who was present: “Togliatti’s wristwatch fell from his arm with a sharp crack, and then he collapsed to the ground and lost consciousness. Staff rushed him to the hospital.” He never regained consciousness.
‘Natural causes’ cannot explain a pattern this consistent
The deaths did not stop with Togliatti. In the three decades following 1949, the list of foreign leaders who traveled to the Soviet Union for medical care and died there also includes Lal Bahadur Shastri, then prime minister of India; Houari Boumédiène, president of Algeria; and Agostinho Neto, president of Angola.
In every case, Soviet authorities attributed the death to natural causes. In every case, the circumstances surrounding the death, the rush to control access to the body, the speed of embalming, the absence of independent medical review, and the political inconvenience the deceased had lately represented to Moscow raised questions that a simple “natural causes” ruling could not resolve.
