(Material by M. Ershov)
“Medicine is innocent here ...” This is exactly what the doctors Levin and Pletnev, who treated the writer in recent months of his life, and later brought in as defendants in the process of the "Right-Trotsky bloc". Soon, however, they "recognized" the deliberately wrong treatment and even "showed" that their accomplices were nurses who gave the patient up to 40 injections of camphor per day. But as it was in fact, there is no consensus. The historian L. Fleischlan directly writes: "The fact of Gorky's murder can be considered irrevocably established." V. Khodasevich, on the contrary, believes in the natural cause of the death of a proletarian writer.
As you know, Gorky's adopted son, Zinovy Peshkov, made a brilliant military and diplomatic career in France, which could have an extremely unfavorable effect on his closest relatives in the country of the Soviets. Aleksey Maksimovich warned about this in his letters to Zinovy, resorting to the "Aesopian language". The writer did not trust the mail, but handed them over with an opportunity - through the journalist Mikhail Koltsov or through close friends whom he completely trusted. In these letters of Gorky, “the fear of death” was felt, - we read in the memoirs of Louis Aragon, now stored in the Triolet-Aragon archival fund in Paris. However, there are no original letters and telegrams from Gorky in this archive! No traces of their presence have been found in other writers' archives either. Some researchers believe that Gorky wanted to send his friends in France and his Personal diary. However, this diary disappeared without a trace, repeating the fate of many of his letters.
In his letters to Aragon and Triola, the writer repeatedly urged them to come to Moscow, persistently called them to the USSR for a necessary and urgent conversation. What? This could not be trusted in a letter, and, realizing this, in May 1936, Elsa and Louis went to the USSR. Their path ran through London and Leningrad. In the northern capital, they stayed for a while at Lily Brik. The delay of the guests in Leningrad looked strange, since at that time Alexei Maksimovich fell seriously ill. And yet Aragon hesitated. One gets the impression that he deliberately delayed the day of his arrival in Moscow and appeared in the capital, as previously known documents testify, only on June 18 - the day Gorky died! However, in an interview with the Pravda newspaper published on June 16 (!) 1936, Aragon said that he had arrived in Moscow the day before, that is, on June 15!
It was officially reported that on June 1, Gorky caught an elementary flu, which caused serious complications. Bulletins about the writer's health were published on the front pages of Pravda and Izvestia - a fact unprecedented even for famous writer. The impression was that readers were being "prepared" for the worst, although there seemed to be no reason for this.
There were two periods of improvement in the patient's condition. The first refers to the time after the June 8 visit to Gorky by Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov. As the Kolkhoznik magazine wrote in those days, “Gorky literally got up from the grave ...”
The second time the patient suddenly felt better from 14 to 16 June. Gorky then got out of bed and, according to eyewitnesses, said: “Enough lying around! I have to work, answer letters!” He shaved, cleaned himself up, sat down at his desk...
Little is known about what happened in the next two days, but the fact remains: Gorky's health deteriorated sharply, and on June 18 at 11.10 in the morning he died ...
In 1938, the process of the "right-wing Trotskyist bloc" already mentioned above took place, in which doctor Pletnev appeared among other "enemies of the people". For the "deliberately incorrect treatment" of the great proletarian writer, Pletnev received a solid sentence and was sent to the Vorkuta camps. There, in 1948, he met with the German communist B. Hermand, who was serving a term. They often had conversations in which they touched on the circumstances of Gorky's death. B. Hermand, after her release, spoke about these conversations in her memoirs. It followed from them that sharp deterioration Gorky's state of health on June 17 was due to the fact that he tried ... sweets given to him by Stalin! As you know, Yagoda had a special laboratory that produced various poisons ... By the way, the report on the autopsy of Gorky's body does not mention "testing for poisoning." The testimony of a certain A. Novikov has been preserved, former captain The NKVD, with whom M. Brown, a member of the French Resistance, spoke, who left a note about this conversation in his diary: “When I said that an autopsy was supposed to detect poisoning if poisons were used, Novikov just waved his hand: “You don’t understand anything! The autopsy report was drawn up before death Gorky!"
Story about last days The writer's life would be incomplete without mentioning the woman who was the last to see Gorky alive. Her name is Mura Zakrevskaya-Budberg. She lived with Alexei Maksimovich for 12 years, of which 7 years - abroad, and he loved her passionately and selflessly. It is not surprising that the writer dedicated his largest novel, The Life of Klim Samgin, to her. Moura was admitted to all business and financial papers and to the most intimate archives of the writer. The tragedy lies in the fact that Mura was closely associated with the Cheka, and every step of Gorky instantly became known to the authorities. This woman lived long life and died in 1974, leaving behind hundreds of notes, drawings, notes and stories about herself. But none of these pieces of paper brought researchers closer to unraveling the mystery of Gorky's death, because Mura destroyed her entire personal archive in advance ...
If we accept the version of the deliberate murder of Gorky by order of Stalin, then the question arises: why was it necessary to hasten the death of a writer who supported the policy of the "leader of the peoples", approved the process of the "Industrial Party" in 1930, spoke very positively about " forced labor in the name of reforging"? But, on the other hand, it was Gorky who never wrote a biography of Stalin, although he was given such a "party order" and provided everything for this. necessary materials. The writer disobeyed the leader, and this was never forgiven to anyone! In addition, Gorky was fussing about the publication of "Demons" by F.M. Dostoevsky and defended the repressed writers and scientists.
The consequences of such disobedience were the denial of a passport for a trip to Italy for treatment, the establishment of censorship for correspondence with Romain Rolland, the perusal of correspondence addressed to the writer ... “Surrounded ... Surrounded ... Neither back nor forward! This is unusual! - such a desperate confession escaped Gorky in one of his letters. The assassination of Kirov was an event that put an end to hopes for reconciliation between the authorities and the intelligentsia and the Bolshevik opposition. Mass executions, exile, the liquidation of the Society of Old Bolsheviks and the Society of Political Prisoners, the trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev, apparently, could not help but lay a heavy burden on the writer's heart ...
Romain Rolland noted in his diary that the cause of Gorky's untimely and not entirely natural death was his high prestige in the West. This opinion was shared by many of the writer's contemporaries. Even the "accuser" A.Ya. Vyshinsky admitted this in his speech: “The enemies of the people could not deprive Gorky of the opportunity to conduct an active political activity otherwise, how to stop his life!”
After the death of M. Gorky, persecution and repression began against his employees and closest associates. And a certain G. Stetsky, who kept under personal control the correspondence between Gorky and Romain Rolland, was appointed chairman of the commission on literary heritage writer. Literary critics to this day sometimes call this fact the “second death” of the great writer ...
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A day is a small life, and you have to live it as if you have to die now, and you were suddenly given another day.
The most active ally of the disease is the despondency of the patient.
How can you not trust a person? Even if you see - he is lying, believe him, that is, listen and try to understand why he is lying?
A. M. Gorky with his son
Maksim Gorky
(Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov) was born on March 29, 1868. His father was a cabinet maker (according to another version, I. S. Kolchin, manager of the Astrakhan shipping company), and his mother was the daughter of the owner of the dye house. At the age of nine, he was orphaned, and his grandmother had a decisive influence on him,
“Due to the exceptionally difficult living conditions, disagreements and complex contradictions in the views on reality with the populists who took over Derenkov’s bakery, the death of his grandmother, the arrest and death of people close to him, Gorky becomes mentally depressed, which he later described in the story “A case from the life of Makar ". On December 12, 1887, Gorky tried to commit suicide in Kazan.
Having bought an old revolver at the market, Maksim Gorky at eight o'clock in the evening on the banks of the Kazanka near the Fedorovsky monastery he shot himself in the chest. “The bullet went past the heart, only slightly touching the lung. The wounded man was brought first to the police station, and then to the zemstvo hospital.”
From December 12 to 21, Gorky was in this hospital. In March 1888, at the suggestion of Romas, he left Kazan ... ". January 2 1888
years after the failed assassination attempt suicide discharged from the local hospital.
In a short essay "On the Harm of Philosophy," Gorky artistically, colorfully, but apparently quite truthfully describes mental illness which he suffered in 1889—1890 years. However, it is unlikely that Gorky himself believed that philosophy made him mentally ill, although cosmogonic crazy ideas or ideas play big role in Gorky's delirium.
Gorky's friend, who lectured him on philosophy, loved bread sprinkled with a thick layer of quinine, he repeatedly poisoned himself until, in 1901, he finally poisoned himself with an indigoid. After two lectures, Gorky fell ill. And maybe even earlier! Already at the second lecture of Vasilyev Gorky „
I saw something indescribably terrible: inside a huge, bottomless bowl, overturned on its side, ears, eyes, palms of hands with spread fingers are rushing about, heads without faces are rolling, human legs are walking, each separately from the other, something clumsy and hairy is jumping, resembling a bear, the roots of the trees move like huge spiders, while the branches and leaves live apart from them; multi-colored wings fly, the eyeless muzzles of huge bulls look at me mutely, and their round eyes jump in fright over them; here the winged leg of a camel runs, and after it the horned head of an owl swiftly rushes - the whole inside of the bowl that I see is filled whirling motion separate members, parts of pieces, sometimes connected to each other in an ironically ugly way.
In this chaos of gloomy disunity, in a silent whirlwind of torn bodies, hate and love majestically move, opposing each other, indistinguishably similar to one another, a ghostly, bluish radiance pours from them, reminiscent of the winter sky on a sunny day, and illuminates everything moving with a deathly monotonous light. ".
„Felt after a few days my brain melts and boils, giving birth to strange thoughts, fantastic visions and pictures. A feeling of melancholy, sucking out life, seized me, and I began to fear madness. But I was brave, I decided to go to the end of fear, and that is probably what saved me.".
A whole series of fantasies follows, which Gorky experienced partly as a hallucinatory, and of which the most interesting, since it contains a "description" of eternity, is the following:
„
Big black men with brass heads could come out of the mountain on which I was sitting. Here they are in a close crowd walking through the air and filling the world with a deafening ringing; trees, bell towers fall from it, like cut by an invisible saw, houses are destroyed, and now everything on earth has turned into a column of greenish burning dust, only a round, smooth desert remains, and in the middle I am alone for four eternities. Exactly —at four, I saw these eternities: huge dark gray circles of fog or smoke, they slowly rotate in impenetrable darkness, almost not differing from it in their ghostly color ...
„... Across the river, on a dark plane, a human ear grows almost to the sky, an ordinary ear, with thick hair in a shell, grows and —listens to whatever I think."
“With the long two-handed sword of a medieval executioner, flexible as a whip, I killed countless people; they walked towards me from right and left, men and women, all naked, walked in silence, bowing their heads, obediently stretching their necks. Behind me stood an unknown creature, and it was by his will that I killed, and it breathed cold needles into my brain.
“A naked woman came up to me on bird-like paws instead of feet, golden rays emanated from her breasts. So she poured handfuls of burning oil on my head, and flaring up like tufts of cotton, I disappeared.
In addition to hallucinations of vision, Gorky at that time had clearly expressed hallucinations of hearing, which were so intense that they called him to noisy performances:
„
And at home, two mice, tamed by me, were waiting for me. They lived behind wood-panelled walls; in it, at the level of the table, they gnawed a gap and crawled right onto the table when I began to make noise with plates of dinner left for me by the landlady.
And so I saw: funny animals turned into little gray imps and, sitting on a box of tobacco, dangled their shaggy legs, looking at me importantly, while a dull voice, who knows whose name, whispered, reminiscent of the quiet sound of rain:
— common goal of all devils—to help people in search of misfortune.
- It's a lie! I shouted angrily. “No one seeks misfortune...
Then someone appeared. I heard how he rattles the latch of the gate, opens the door of the porch, the hallway, and—here he is in my room. He is round like soap bubble, without hands, instead of a face he has a clock face, and the hands p are made of carrots, I have had an idiosyncrasy for her since childhood. I know that this is the husband of the woman I love, he only changed clothes so that I would not recognize him. Here he turns into real person, plump with a blond beard, soft look kind eyes; smiling, he tells me all the evil and unflattering things that I think about his wife and that no one but me can know.
“Out!” I shout at him.
Then behind my wall there was a knock on the wall—it was the landlady, dear and clever Filizata Tikhomirova, knocking. Her knock brings me back to the world of reality, I pour water over my eyes cold water and through the window, so as not to slam the doors, not to disturb the sleeping ones, I climb out into the garden, where I sit until morning.
In the morning, over tea, the hostess says:
And you screamed again at night ...
I am inexpressibly ashamed, I despise myself."
A very important symptom that completes the picture of Gorky's illness, which we are trying to reproduce here from excerpts from On the Harm of Philosophy, is sharp dream stupor, leading to the fact that Gorky, while working, suddenly forgets himself and his surroundings and unconsciously introduces into his work elements that are completely alien to it, which are not in direct or indirect connection with it, as happens in a dream, where the most impossible contradictory facts are connected in one unit. Here is what Gorky says:
„
At that time, I worked as a clerk for a sworn attorney A.I. Lapina, beautiful person to whom I owe a lot. Once, when I came to him, he met me, frantically waving some papers, shouting:
- you are crazy
went? What is it you, my friend, wrote in the appeal? Kindly rewrite immediately - today the deadline for submission expires. Marvelous! If this is a joke, then it's a bad one, I'll tell you!
I took the complaint from his hands and read in the text a clearly written quatrain:
The night is endless...
My torment is beyond measure.
If only I could pray.
If only I knew the happiness of faith.
For me, these verses hit with the same surprise as for the patron, I looked at them and almost did not believe that it was written by me.
And fantasies and visions take possession of Gorky more and more:
“From these visions and nightly conversations with different faces, which, it is not known how, appeared in front of me and imperceptibly disappeared, as soon as the consciousness of reality returned to me, from this too interesting life on the border of madness it was necessary to get rid of. I have already reached such a state that even in the daytime, by the light of the sun, I anxiously awaited miraculous events.
“I probably wouldn’t be very surprised if any house in the city suddenly jumped over me. Nothing, in my opinion, prevented the cabbie’s horse, standing on its hind legs, from proclaiming in a deep bass:
- Anathema.
To these extravagant antics of unbridled fantasy, to dream stupor, hallucinations, obsessive ideas, actions and deeds are sometimes added:
“Here, on a bench in the boulevard, near the wall of the Kremlin, sits a woman in a straw hat and yellow gloves. If I go up to her and say:
- There is no god.
She exclaims in surprise, offended:
- How? And - me? - will immediately turn into winged creature and fly away, after that the whole earth will immediately grow with thick trees without leaves, oily, blue mucus will drip from their branches and trunks, and as a criminal they will sentence me to be a toad for 23 years the booming bell of the Ascension Church.
Since I really, unbearably want to tell the lady that there is no God, but I can clearly see what the consequences of my sincerity will be, I leave as soon as possible, sideways, almost running.
Reality, the world of real phenomena, ceases at times to exist completely for Gorky:
"Everything is possible. And it is possible that there is nothing, so I need to touch the fences, walls, trees with my hand. This is somewhat reassuring. Especially if you beat hard with your fist for a long time, you are convinced that it exists.
The earth is very insidious, you walk on it as confidently as all people, but suddenly its density disappears under your feet, the earth becomes as permeable as air, remaining dark, and the soul headlong falls into this darkness endlessly. for a long time, it lasts seconds".
"The sky is also unreliable; it can at any moment change the shape of the dome to the shape of a pyramid, top down; the tip of the top rests against my skull and I will have to stand motionless at one point, until the iron stars that hold the sky together become rusty, then it will crumble into red dust and bury me.
Everything is possible. Only it is impossible to live in a world of such possibilities.
My soul hurt a lot. And if two years ago I had not made sure personal experience how humiliating the stupidity of suicide, I probably would use this method of curing a sick soul" .
(Delirium fever ). This diagnosis is supported by the characteristic combination of symptoms (fantasies, illusions, hallucinations, the affect of fear), which we have already pointed out, illustrating them with excerpts from Gorky's description of his illness, dream stupor and fever. Kraepelin briefly characterizes febrile delirium as delirium, "accompanied by a more or less sharp dream-like stupor, an obscure often perverted assimilation of the surroundings and fantastic experiences, sometimes also quite strong anxiety with a timid or cheerful mood."
Gorky undoubtedly suffered from feverish delirium, which, thanks to Gorky's fascination with cosmogonic fantasies, received especially rich food and flourished magnificently, perhaps longer than it would have been under other, less favorable conditions.
Gorky turned to a psychiatrist for advice and reports how his psychiatrist treated him, thus giving us the opportunity to judge the psychiatric science of that time in its application in practice.
„.
.. A small, black, humpbacked psychiatrist, a lonely man, clever and skeptic, asked for two hours how I live, then, slapping my knee with a terribly white hand, said:
- You, my friend, first of all need to throw books to hell and in general all the rubbish that you live by. According to your complexion, you are a healthy person, and you are ashamed to dismiss yourself like that. You need physical labor. As for women, how? Well! This doesn't work either. Leave abstinence to others, and get yourself a wench who is more greedy in the game of love - this will be useful.
He gave me some more advice, equally unpleasant and not acceptable to me, wrote two recipes, then said a few phrases that I remember very well:
“I heard something about you and—I beg your pardon if you don’t like it. You seem to me a man, so to speak, primitive. And at primitive people fantasy always prevails logical thinking. Everything that you read, saw, aroused in you only a fantasy, and it is completely irreconcilable with reality, which, although also fantastic, is in its own way. Then: one ancient wise man said: who willingly contradicts, he is incapable of learning anything sensible. Well said: first, study, then contradict, so it is necessary.
Seeing me off, he repeated with a smile of a merry devil:
“And the butterfly is very useful for you.” .
I deliberately quote the entire passage where Gorky draws a picture of a psychiatrist, because historical value this passage. Oddly enough, but long before the emergence and spread of Freudian psychoanalysis (The book "Studien uber Hystherie", which Freud wrote together with Joseph Breuer and served as the basis and starting point for psychoanalysis, was published only in 1895), attributing to the sexual sphere, in fact psychosexual disorders, leading role in the development of mental illness, there was a view among Russian psychiatrists that sex life takes the most active part in the formation of a healthy and diseased human psyche, and the psychiatrist who gave Gorky advice insists (!) "a woman who is greedier for a love game", assuring him that it will be useful to him!
Gorky mentions many times that his sexual desire in his youth was poorly developed, explaining this in part by severe physical labor partly by a passion for literature and science. Dr. I. B. Galant (Moscow)psychiatry. en › book _ show . php...
In 1918, Maxim Gorky published in the newspaper " New life"an article denouncing the consequences Bolshevik coup in the country: “No, the proletariat is not generous and not just, and yet the revolution was supposed to establish possible justice in the country ... If the internecine war consisted in Lenin clinging to Milyukov’s petty-bourgeois hair, and Milyukov ruffled Lenin’s magnificent curls. .. But it’s not the lords who fight, but the serfs, and you won’t rejoice when you see how healthy forces countries perish, mutually destroying each other. And thousands of people walk the streets and, as if mocking themselves, shout: "Long live the world!"
Maxim Gorky died on June 18, 1936 in the town of Gorki, near Moscow. He was buried on June 20, 1936 in Moscow on Red Square near the Kremlin wall. Gorky's brain was sent for study at the Brain Institute in Moscow. Around his death, as well as the death of his son Maxim, there is still a lot of uncertainty. It is interesting that among other accusations of Genrikh Yagoda at the so-called Third Moscow Trial in 1938, there was a charge of poisoning Gorky's son. According to Yagoda's interrogations, Maxim Gorky was killed on the orders of Trotsky, and the murder of Gorky's son, Maxim Peshkov, was his personal initiative.Some publications blame Stalin for Gorky's death. An important precedent for the medical side of the accusations in the "doctors' case" was the Third Moscow Trial (1938), where among the defendants were three doctors (Kazakov, Levin and Pletnev), who were accused of killing Gorky and others.
Eighty years ago, the great Russian writer and public figure Maxim Gorky died. The circumstances of his death are still in doubt.
Text: Pavel Basinsky
Photo courtesy aif.ru
Did he die due to illness, due to old age (but Gorky was not yet old - 68 years old), or was he killed by Stalin?
Before going to the state dacha in Gorki on May 28, 1936, he demanded to turn to the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent. He has not yet seen the monument by Vera Mukhina to her son Maxim, who died of pneumonia two years ago. Having examined the grave of his son, he wished to look at the monument to Stalin's wife, Alliluyeva, who had committed suicide.
In the memoirs of Secretary Kryuchkov strange entry: « A.M. died on the 8th". But Gorky died on June 18!
The widow Ekaterina Peshkova recalls: “ 8/VI 6 p.m.… A. M. — in a chair with eyes closed, with his head bowed, leaning now on one, then on the other hand, pressed to his temple and resting his elbow on the arm of the chair. The pulse was barely noticeable, uneven, breathing weakened, the face and ears and limbs of the hands turned blue. After a while, as we entered, hiccups began, restless movements of his hands, with which he seemed to be pushing something away or filming something ...»
"We" are the closest members of Gorky big family: Ekaterina Peshkova, Maria Budberg, Nadezhda Peshkova (Gorky's daughter-in-law), nurse Lipa Chertkova, Pyotr Kryuchkov, Ivan Rakitsky (an artist who has lived in the "family" since the revolution).
Budberg: " His hands and ears turned black. Was dying. And dying, he weakly moved his hand, as they say goodbye at parting».
But suddenly… " After a long pause, A. M. opened his eyes, the expression of which was absent and distant, slowly looked around everyone, stopping for a long time at each of us, and with difficulty, muffled, but separately, in some strangely alien voice, said: “I was so far away, it's so hard to come back from there"».
He was brought back from the other world by Chertkova, who persuaded the doctors to allow him to inject twenty cubes of camphor. After the first injection was the second. Gorky did not immediately agree. Peshkova: A. M. shook his head negatively and said very firmly: “Don’t, you have to stop.” Kryuchkov recalled that Gorky "did not complain", but sometimes asked him to "let go", "pointed to the ceiling and doors, as if wanting to escape from the room."
But there are new faces. Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov came to Gorky. They had already been informed that Gorky was dying. Budberg: " Politburo members who were informed that Gorky was dying entered the room and expected to find the dying man, were surprised by his cheerful appearance.».
Why was he given a second injection of camphor? Stalin is coming! Budberg: " At this time, P. P. Kryuchkov, who had left before, came in and said: “They just called on the phone - Stalin is inquiring, can he and Molotov come to you? A smile flashed across A.M.’s face, he replied: “Let them go, if they still have time.” Then A. D. Speransky (one of the doctors who treated Gorky. - P. B.) entered with the words: “Well, A. M., Stalin and Molotov have already left, but it seems that Voroshilov is with them. Now I insist on an injection of camphor, because without this you will not have enough strength to talk with them.».
Peshkova: " When they entered, A. M. had already come to his senses so much that he immediately started talking about literature. talking about a new French literature, about the literature of nationalities. He began to praise our female writers, mentioned Anna Karavaeva - and how many of them, how many more of these we will have, and we all need to be supported ... They brought wine ... Everyone drank ... Voroshilov kissed Al. M. arm or shoulder. Al. M. smiled happily, looked at them lovingly. They left quickly. As they left, they waved at him at the door. When they left, A.M. said: “What good guys! How much power they have ... "»
This was recorded in 1936. In 1964, when asked by journalist Isaac Don Levin about the circumstances of Gorky's death, Peshkova said something else: “ Don't ask me about it! I won't be able to sleep for three days if I talk to you about this.».
Stalin came a second time on June 10 at two o'clock in the morning. Gorky was asleep. Stalin was not allowed. A visit at two in the morning to a terminally ill patient is difficult to understand normal person. The third - and last - visit took place on 12 June. Gorky did not sleep. However, the doctors, no matter how they trembled before Stalin, gave ten minutes to talk. What were they talking about? ABOUT peasant uprising Bolotnikov. Then they moved on to the position of the French peasantry.
Stalin undoubtedly guarded the dying Gorky. And he was buttoned up with all the buttons. Gorky lived in a "golden cage". L. A. Spiridonova published a secret sheet of household expenses of the 2nd department of the ACS of the NKVD “along the line” of the Gorky family:
“The approximate consumption for 9 months of 1936 is as follows:
a) food rub. 560 000
b) repair expenses and park expenses rub. 210 000
c) the content of the state rub. 180 000
d) different households. expenses rub. 60,000 Total: rub. 1010 000".
An ordinary doctor received at that time about 300 rubles a month. Writer for a book - 3000 rubles. Gorky's "family" cost the state about 130,000 rubles a month.
He understood the falsity of his position. There is evidence that he suffered last years. Read The Moscow Diary by Romain Rolland and the memoirs of the writer Ilya Shkapa. But Gorky died stoically, like a very strong man.
And let's not forget that his sins are not our sins. Gorky sinned a lot because he did a lot. Behind him is not only his literature, but also the political struggle, and newspapers, and magazines, and entire publishing houses (before the revolution and Soviet), scientific institutions, institutes, Union of Writers. And yes! Solovki and Belomorkanal. Behind him not only him writer's biography, but also a biography of the entire pre-revolutionary Russia and the first twenty years of Soviet power.
Mighty, great man! Let's change him.
Mosaic at the Moscow metro station "Park Kultury", opened on May 15, 1935, i.е. a year before the death of Maxim Gorky
“Medicine is innocent here…” This is exactly what the doctors Levin and Pletnev, who treated the writer in the last months of his life, and later brought in as defendants in the process of the “right-wing Trotskyist bloc” at first stated. Soon, however, they "recognized" the deliberately wrong treatment...
... and even "showed" that their accomplices were nurses who gave the patient up to 40 injections of camphor per day. But as it was in fact, there is no consensus.
The historian L. Fleischlan directly writes: "The fact of Gorky's murder can be considered irrevocably established." V. Khodasevich, on the contrary, believes in the natural cause of the death of a proletarian writer. 
On the night when Maxim Gorky was dying, a terrible thunderstorm broke out at the government dacha in Gorki-10.
The autopsy was carried out right here, in the bedroom, on the table. The doctors were in a hurry. “When he died,” Gorky’s secretary Pyotr Kryuchkov recalled, “the attitude of the doctors towards him changed. He became just a corpse for them ... They treated him terribly. The orderly began to change his clothes and turned him from side to side, like a log. An autopsy began. .. Then they began to wash the insides. They sewed up the incision somehow with a simple twine. They put the brain in a bucket ... "
This bucket, intended for the Institute of the Brain, Kryuchkov personally carried to the car. In Kryuchkov's memoirs there is a strange entry: "Alexey Maksimovich died on the 8th." But Gorky died on June 18...
Ekaterina Peshkova, the writer's widow, recalls:
"June 8, 6 pm. Aleksey Maksimovich's condition worsened so much that the doctors, who had lost hope, warned us that the near end was inevitable ... Alexei Maksimovich - in an armchair with his eyes closed, with his head bowed, leaning first on one, then on the other hand pressed to the temple and leaning with the elbow on the arm of the chair.
The pulse was barely noticeable, uneven, breathing weakened, the face and ears and limbs of the hands turned blue. After a while, as we entered, hiccups began, restless movements of his hands, with which he seemed to be pushing something away or filming something ... "
"We" are the closest family members: Ekaterina Peshkova, Maria Budberg, Nadezhda Peshkova (Gorky's daughter-in-law), nurse Chertkova, Pyotr Kryuchkov, Ivan Rakitsky, an artist who lived in Gorky's house. It is certain to all assembled that the head of the family is dying.
When Ekaterina Pavlovna approached the dying man and asked: "Do you need anything?" Everyone looked at her with disapproval. It seemed to everyone that this silence could not be broken. After a pause, Gorky opened his eyes, looked around at those around him: "I was so far away, it's so difficult to return from there."
And suddenly the mise-en-scene changes... New faces appear. They were waiting in the living room. Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov enter with a cheerful gait to the resurrected Gorky. They had already been informed that Gorky was dying. They came to say goodbye. Behind the scenes - the head of the NKVD Heinrich Yagoda. He arrived before Stalin. The leader didn't like it.
"Why is this one hanging around here? So that he wouldn't be here."
Stalin behaves in the house in a businesslike way. Shuganul Genrikh, scared Kryuchkov. "Why so many people? Who is responsible for this? Do you know what we can do to you?" The "owner" has arrived... The leading party is his! All relatives and friends become only a corps de ballet.
When Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov entered the bedroom, Gorky came to his senses so much that they started talking about literature. Gorky began to praise women writers, mentioned Karavaeva - and how many of them, how many more will appear, and everyone needs to be supported ... Stalin jokingly besieged Gorky: “We’ll talk about business when you get better. there is wine, we would drink a glass to your health."
They brought wine... They all drank... As they left, at the door, Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov waved their hands. When they left, Gorky seemed to say: "What good guys! How much strength they have ..."
But how much can one trust these memoirs of Peshkova? In 1964, when asked by the American journalist Isaac Levin about Gorky's death, she replied: "Don't ask me about it! I won't be able to sleep for three days..."
The second time Stalin and his comrades came to the terminally ill Gorky on June 10 at two in the morning. But why? Gorky was asleep. No matter how afraid the doctors were, they did not let Stalin in. Stalin's third visit took place on 12 June. Gorky did not sleep. The doctors gave ten minutes to talk. What were they talking about? About Bolotnikov's peasant uprising... We moved on to the position of the French peasantry.
It turns out that on June 8, the main concern of the Secretary General and Gorky, who returned from the other world, were writers, and on the 12th, French peasants became. All this is somehow very strange.
The visits of the leader seemed to magically enliven Gorky. It was as if he did not dare to die without Stalin's permission. This is unbelievable, but Budberg will directly say this: "He died, in fact, on the 8th, and if it were not for the visit to Stalin, he would hardly have returned to life."
Stalin was not a member of the Gorky family. So the nighttime intrusion attempt was driven by necessity. And on the 8th, and the 10th, and the 12th, Stalin needed or straight Talk with Gorky, or steely confidence that such a frank conversation would not take place with someone else. For example, with Louis Aragon, who was traveling from France. What would Gorky say, what statement could he make?
After Gorky's death, Kryuchkov was accused of having "killed" Gorky's son Maxim Peshkov with "wrecking methods of treatment" on instructions from Yagoda. But why?
If we follow the testimony of other defendants, the "customers" - Bukharin, Rykov and Zinoviev - had a political calculation. In this way, they allegedly wanted to hasten the death of Gorky himself, fulfilling the task of their "leader" Trotsky. Nevertheless, even at this trial, there was no talk of the direct murder of Gorky. This version would be too incredible, because the patient was surrounded by 17 (!) Doctors.
One of the first to talk about the poisoning of Gorky was the revolutionary émigré B.I. Nikolaevsky. Allegedly, Gorky was presented with a bonbonniere with poisoned sweets. But the candy version doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Gorky did not like sweets, but he loved to treat them to guests, orderlies and, finally, his beloved granddaughters. Thus, anyone around Gorky could be poisoned with sweets, except for himself. Only an idiot would think of such a murder. Neither Stalin nor Yagoda were idiots.
There is no evidence of the murder of Gorky and his son Maxim. Meanwhile, tyrants also have the right to the presumption of innocence. Stalin committed enough crimes to hang on him one more - unproven.
The reality is this: on June 18, 1936, the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky died. His body, contrary to the will to bury him next to his son in the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent, was cremated by order of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the urn with the ashes was placed in the Kremlin wall.
At the request of the widow E.P. Peshkova was refused to give her part of the ashes for burial in her son's grave by a collective decision of the Politburo ...
Alexei Maksimovich Gorky (Peshkov) died on June 18, 1936 at the age of sixty-eight. Among the people, Gorky enjoyed the well-deserved fame of the great writer, and the not-quite-deserved fame people's protector. Rumors immediately spread throughout the country that Aleksei Maksimovich had been poisoned. She added additional "fuel to the fire", obviously premature death in 1934, the son of the great writer, thirty-seven-year-old Maxim Peshkov.
“Medicine is innocent here…” This is exactly what the doctors Levin and Pletnev, who treated the writer in the last months of his life, and later brought in as defendants in the process of the “right-wing Trotskyist bloc” at first stated. Soon, however, they "recognized" the deliberately wrong treatment and even "showed" that their accomplices were nurses who gave the patient up to 40 injections of camphor per day. But as it was in fact - there is no consensus. The historian L. Fleischlan directly writes: "The fact of Gorky's murder can be considered irrevocably established." V. Khodasevich, on the contrary, believes in the natural cause of the death of a proletarian writer.
It was officially reported that on June 1, Gorky caught an elementary flu, which caused serious complications. Bulletins about the writer's health were published on the front pages of Pravda and Izvestia - a fact unprecedented even for the famous writer. The impression was that readers were being "prepared" for the worst, although there seemed to be no reason for this.
There were two periods of improvement in the patient's condition. The first refers to the time after the June 8 visit to Gorky by Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov. As the Kolkhoznik magazine wrote in those days, “Gorky literally got up from the grave ...”
The second time the patient suddenly felt better from 14 to 16 June. Gorky then got out of bed and, according to eyewitnesses, said: “Enough lying around! I have to work, answer letters!” He shaved, cleaned himself up, sat down at his desk...
Little is known about what happened in the next two days, but the fact remains: Gorky's health deteriorated sharply, and on June 18 at 11.10 in the morning he died ...
In 1938, the process of the "right-wing Trotskyist bloc" already mentioned above took place, in which doctor Pletnev appeared among other "enemies of the people". For the "deliberately incorrect treatment" of the great proletarian writer, Pletnev received a solid sentence and was sent to the Vorkuta camps. There, in 1948, he told the German communist B. Hermand that the sharp deterioration in Gorky's health on June 17 was due to the fact that he tried the sweets given to him by Stalin! As you know, Yagoda had a special laboratory that produced various poisons.
By the way, the report on the autopsy of Gorky's body does not mention "testing for poisoning." The testimony of a certain A. Novikov, a former captain of the NKVD, has been preserved. According to M. Brown, a member of the French Resistance, he said: “You don't understand anything! The autopsy protocol was drawn up before Gorky's death!
At the trial, G. Yagoda admitted his participation in the poisoning of Maxim Peshkov and A.M. Gorky, explaining this by a passion for Maxim's wife and a desire to cohabit with her. It is difficult to judge where the self-incrimination is, where the truth is, but Yagoda was a member of the Gorky family and still cohabited with Peshkov's widow.
Trotskyists were blamed for Gorky's death. Lev Davidovich, of course, could not remain silent.
“Maxim Gorky was neither a conspirator nor a politician. He was a compassionate old man, an intercessor for the offended, a sentimental Protestant ... In this atmosphere, Gorky was a serious danger. He was in correspondence with European writers, foreigners visited him, the offended complained to him, he formed public opinion. There was no way to keep him silent. It was even less possible to arrest him, deport him, let alone shoot him. The idea to speed up the liquidation of the sick Gorky “without shedding blood” through Yagoda should have presented itself under these conditions to the owner of the Kremlin as the only way out ... ”he writes.
The version of the deliberate murder of Gorky, by order of Stalin, does not hold up well to criticism. The writer supported the policy of the “leader of the peoples”, approved the process of the “Industrial Party” in 1930, spoke very positively about “forced labor in the name of reforging” - he is talking about the Gulag. Although, on the other hand, it was Gorky who never wrote a biography of Stalin, although he was given such a "party order" and provided all the necessary materials for this. The writer disobeyed the leader, and this was never forgiven to anyone.
The assassination of Gorky by the Trotskyists also seems unlikely to me - he did not interfere with them at all.
Most likely, the writer died of natural causes.
Witnesses to Gorky's autopsy say: “It turned out that his pleura had grown like a corset. And when it was torn off, it broke, before it was calcified.
P.P. KRYUCHKOV testifies: “The doctors were even delighted that the condition of the lungs turned out to be in such a bad condition. All responsibility was removed from them.
However, the Stalinists took advantage of his death to speak out against Trotsky, and the Trotskyists were not averse to using it against Stalin. A living writer of this level was not needed by either one or the other.
