Poison or Peritonitis?

Only the very greatest of the Communist great achieve burial. Normally the highest honor is cremation, followed by insertion of the urn into a hole in the Red Square. Last week All the Russias were agog not because Dictator Stalin's young wife had died a mysterious death but because she was buried. Scratching their tousled heads, Old Bolsheviks said they could not remember another State burial since that of Lenin in his glass case.

In the stinking hovel of a Tiflis locksmith, Sergei Alliluiev, a brown-eyed girl was born in 1902. As an infant she grew accustomed to the furtive visits of a tall, violent, smoldering-eyed man who talked Revolution to her father, receiving in exchange deftly filed pass keys and professional advice on how to handle combination locks.

The stranger, like the brown-eyed baby's mother, came from Georgia in the wild, fierce south of Russia--a land of authentic brigands who sniped at Tsarist officials from behind romantic mountain crags and unromantically ignored Georgia's pink & purple sunsets. As she grew to childhood, the locksmith's daughter knew her father's friend, the future Dictator of Russia, by his Georgian nicknames. "Soso" and "Koba." His daring robberies (which he called ''expropriations'') seemed as natural to her as his still more daring murders ("executions")--for were they all not done to get money for the Communist cause and at the orders of Nikolai Lenin, then a studious resident of London, England and a frequent visitor to the British Museum?

In 1913 Comrade "Koba" was exiled to Siberia and little was heard of him by the locksmith's adolescent daughter until he was pardoned by the Government of Alexander Kerensky who never did the smart thing.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 Comrade Koba's name was great in Russia, where Lenin called him "Stalin" (meaning "Steel") but he still had a wife. Did she die of pneumonia? Did Stalin divorce her as the story goes, "by mail"? At any rate potent Comrade Stalin, aged 40 came back to Tiflis in 1919, dazzled the 17-year-old daughter of his locksmith friend and carried her back to Moscow. Presumably he married her. Why not?" A story has it that for the first few years of their life together Stalin, the suspicious Asiatic husband, used to lock up Nadezhda Sergeivna Alliluieva in commodious rooms every morning and spend the day with the key in his pocket. She bore him at that time two children--Vassily, today a lad of 12 and Svetlana, now 7.

By the time Dictator Stalin launched the Five Year Plan in 1928 his Asiatic character had somewhat changed and his watchword became work, work, work-- even for women, even for his wife.

No longer sheltered or restrained, the brown-haired, brown-eyed, plain-featured and slightly plump spouse of Russia's Dictator became the chum of a blonde about her own age, Paulina Semionova Zhemchuzhina. a spouse of Soviet Premier Molotov.

Both young women liked work & study. Together they left the Kremlin Citadel early, four days out of five, fought for places on Moscow's crowded tramcars and were jolted to scientific schools in which they learned to "build Socialism.''

Paulina the blonde is still building it, as Director of the Soviet soap & cosmetic trust. She was greatly disappointed to discover, after exhaustive research, that it is impossible to make soap cheaply out of even the fattest frogs.

Meanwhile Nadezhda was plugging through a three-year course from which she expected to emerge the Director of a Soviet Rayon Trust. There was disagreement last week as to whether she graduated last July or would have graduated this December. She was last seen alive (by foreigners) on Sunday, Nov. 6, enjoying a performance at Moscow's Grand Theatre.

On Wednesday morning Tass, the official Soviet news agency, tersely announced: "Death came to Comrade Nadezhda Alliluieva on the night between the 8th and 9th."

Tass men said they had no idea how Death came. Since hardly one Russian in a million knew the Dictator's wife's name, the Tass announcement went almost unnoticed by Russians. Foreign correspondents who fancied themselves in the know expected the Dictator to order a quiet. perhaps secret cremation.

Next day the corpse, in a black crepe dress pinned at the throat with a brooch. was laid out in the Soviet Parliament Building on the third floor. The G. P. U. (secret police) band at one end of the room played a funeral dirge now and then. Five men dressed as workers stood guard around the coffin. Two middle-aged women entered, wept softly for about an hour and went away. Who were they?

As the day wore on news flew by word of mouth around Moscow that one could see the Dictator's wife, that she was dead. By evening a curious Muscovite queue waited four abreast for their turn.

Even then the official Soviet expression of condolence omitted the word "wife," paid tribute only "to the dear memory of our comrade and friend. . . . This Bolshevist woman has left us while still young and full of strength and infinitely faithful to the Revolution. . . . We will always keep in dearest memory the most faithful Bolshevist woman, the friend and devoted aid of Comrade Stalin."

There began to be whispers of a burial.

On Friday morning the red flag on the Kremlin staff was seen to be at half mast. Electric with anticipation a throng of more than 100,000 Muscovites gathered, waiting in the Red Square and all its approaches for they hardly knew what.

They waited all morning. Noon came with 12 brazen strokes from the Kremlin Clock Tower. But not until 3 p. m. did the medium-sized red coffin emerge at last from the mourning hall. It was borne shoulder high by vigorous young Premier Molotov, shaky old President Kalinin, strapping War Minister Voroshilov (often rumored a rival of Stalin) and hulking Minister of Heavy Industry Ordzhonikidze. a hot-eyed Georgian with a profile as pronounced as Jimmy Durante's.

Instead of the usual Red Funeral March, the wondering crowd heard Chopin's Marche Funebre. The red coffin was placed on a red hearse so richly carved that Walter Duranty called it a "museum piece." Six spirited black horses with red cloth wrapped around their ankles pranced off with the hearse across the Red Square, snorting and champing their bits.

Not a single journalist managed to get through the double line of G. P. U. special troops and Red Soldiers who guarded every inch of the five-mile funeral route from the Red Square to--of all places-- the Convent of New Virgins.

To be sure this most historic of Moscow's ancient convents is no longer a convent, but its burial yard is still hallowed ground. No alien was allowed to see where "the most faithful Bolshevist woman'' was buried or whether one of the two churches inside the Convent's high, castellated walls was in any way used.

In his early youth Josef Stalin studied at the Orthodox Seminary in Tiflis to become a priest, became instead a Communist. In the Convent of New Virgins many strange things have taken place. There Peter the Great shut up his too ambitious sister and had 300 of the Streltzi, her partisans, hanged one by one outside the window of her nun's cell, while he watched drinking.

Some say Mme Stalin died of "peritonitis." some say "appendicitis." "A long illness" was the official Soviet explanation, curious because of Mme Stalin's cheerful presence at a play two nights before her death. In the circumstances Paris' White Russians were entitled to their suspicions. Years ago they thought they learned through secret sources that "Stalin's wife tastes everything prepared for him several hours before he eats it." Last week they thought they knew the exact cause of Mme Stalin's death.

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