The mysterious death of Maxim Gorky. Mental illness of Maxim Gorky Return to Russia

Eighty years ago, the great Russian writer and public figure Maxim Gorky died. The circumstances of his death are still in doubt. Did he die due to illness, 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 there is a strange entry: "A.M. died on the 8th." But Gorky died on June 18!

Widow Ekaterina Peshkova recalls: "8/VI 6 pm ... A. M. - in a chair with his eyes closed, with his head bowed, leaning on one or the other hand, pressed to his temple and leaning with his elbow on the arm of the chair. The pulse is barely noticeable , uneven, breathing weakened, his face and ears and limbs 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 a large family to Gorky: 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. He 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 him for a long time on each of us, and with difficulty, muffled, but separately, in some strange alien voice said: "I've been 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 finish.” Kryuchkov recalled that Gorky “did not complain”, but sometimes asked him to “let go”, “pointed to the ceiling and doors, as if wanting to get out of the room."

But there are new faces. Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov came to Gorky. They had already been informed that Gorky was dying. Budberg: "Members of the Politburo, 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 that time, P.P. Kryuchkov, who had gone out before, came in and said: “They just called on the phone - Stalin is managing, 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, and 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. He spoke about the new French literature, about the literature of nationalities. He began to praise our women writers, mentioned Anna Karavaeva - and how many of them, how many We will have more of these, and we all need to be supported... They brought wine... Everyone drank... Voroshilov kissed Al. M. on the hand or on the shoulder. Al. M. smiled joyfully, looked at them lovingly. They quickly left. Leaving, at the door They waved their hands at him. When they left, A. M. said: “What good guys! How much power do 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 it."

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 person is difficult to understand for a 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 the 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 list of household expenses of the 2nd department of the ACS of the NKVD through 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

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 in recent 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, the Writers' Union. And yes! - Solovki and Belomorkanal. Behind him is not only his writer's biography, but also the biography of all pre-revolutionary Russia and the first twenty years of Soviet power.

Mighty, great man! Let's change him.

Unknown facts from the life of Gorky. April 19th, 2009

There were many mysteries in Gorky. For example, he did not feel physical pain, but at the same time he experienced someone else's pain so painfully that when he described the scene of a woman being stabbed, a huge scar swelled on his body. From a young age he suffered from tuberculosis and smoked 75 cigarettes a day. He tried several times to commit suicide, and each time he was saved by an unknown force, for example, in 1887, he deflected a bullet aimed at the heart by a millimeter from the target. He could drink as much alcohol as he wanted and never got drunk. In 1936 he died twice, on June 9 and 18. On June 9, the already dead writer miraculously revived the arrival of Stalin, who came to Gorky's dacha in Gorki near Moscow in order to say goodbye to the deceased.

On the same day, Gorky arranged a strange vote of relatives and friends, asking them: should he die or not? In fact, he controlled the process of his dying ...
Gorky's life is an amazing carnival that ended tragically. The question still remains unresolved: whether Gorky died a natural death or was killed on Stalin's orders. The last days and hours of Gorky are filled with some kind of horror. Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov drank champagne near the bedside of the dying Russian writer. Nizhny Novgorod friend of Gorky, and then a political emigrant Ekaterina Kuskova wrote: "But they also stood over the silent writer with a candle day and night ..."
Leo Tolstoy at first mistook Gorky for a peasant and spoke obscenities to him, but then he realized that he had made a big mistake. “I can’t treat Gorky sincerely, I don’t know why myself, but I can’t,” he complained to Chekhov. “Gorky is an evil person. and reports everything to some kind of his god.
Gorky paid the intelligentsia in the same coin. In letters to I. Repin and Tolstoy, he sang hymns to the glory of Man: "I don't know anything better, more complicated, more interesting than man..."; "I deeply believe that there is nothing better than a man on earth ..." And at the same time he wrote to his wife: "It would be better if I didn’t see all this bastard, all these miserable, little people ..." (this is about those who Petersburg raised glasses in his honor). (And who is his wife, an NKVD agent?)
He passed Luka, a crafty wanderer,” wrote the poet Vladislav Khodasevich. This is just as true as the fact that he was a wanderer always and everywhere, being connected and in correspondence with Lenin, Chekhov, Bryusov, Rozanov, Morozov, Gapon, Bunin, Artsybashev, Gippius, Mayakovsky, Panferov, realists, symbolists, priests, Bolsheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, monarchists, Zionists, anti-Semites, terrorists, academicians, collective farmers, GEP workers and all people on this sinful earth. "Gorky did not live, but examined ... ." - said Viktor Shklovsky.
Everyone saw in him "Gorky", not a person, but a character that he himself invented while in Tiflis in 1892, when he signed his first story "Makar Chudra" with this pseudonym
A contemporary of the writer, emigrant I.D. Surguchev seriously believed that Gorky once made a pact with the devil - the same one that Christ refused in the desert. "And he, an average writer in general, was given success that neither Pushkin, nor Gogol, nor Leo Tolstoy, nor Dostoevsky knew during their lifetime. He had everything: fame, money, and female sly love." Maybe right. It's just not our business.
Pundits on his planet, after reading the report on the trip, nevertheless asked:
- Did you see the man?
- Saw!
- What is he?
- Oh-oh... That sounds proud!
- What does it look like?
And he drew a strange figure in the air with his wing.

Gorky was married to Ekaterina Pavlovna Volzhina, in marriage - Peshkova (1876-1965; public figure, employee of the International Red Cross).
Son - Maxim Maksimovich Peshkov (1896-1934). His sudden death was explained, like Gorky's death, by poisoning.
The adopted son of Gorky, whose godfather he was - Zinovy ​​\u200b\u200bMikhailovich Peshkov - general of the French army, brother of Y. Sverdlov).
Among the women who enjoyed the special favor of Gorky was Maria Ignatievna Budberg (1892-1974) - a baroness, nee Countess Zakrevskaya, by her first marriage, Benkendorf. Lev Nikulin writes about her in his memoirs; “When we are asked who Klim Samgin is dedicated to, who Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya is, we think that her portrait stood on Gorky’s table until his last days” (Moscow. 1966. N 2). She was with him and in the last hours of his life. A photograph has been preserved where Budberg, next to Stalin, walks behind the coffin of Gorky. It was she, who, fulfilling the task of the GPU, brought Gorky's Italian archive to Stalin, which contained what Stalin was especially interested in - Gorky's correspondence with Bukharin, Rykov and other Soviet figures who, having escaped from the USSR on a business trip, bombarded Gorky with letters about the atrocities of "the wisest and greatest" (about Budberg, see: Berberova N. Iron Woman. New York, 1982).
http://belsoch.exe.by/bio2/04_16.shtml
The common-law wife of M. Grky was also Maria Andreeva.
YURKOVSKAYA MARIA FYODOROVNA (ANDREEVA, ZHELYABUZHSKAYA, PHENOMENON) 1868-1953 Born in St. Petersburg. Actress. On stage since 1886, in 1898-1905 at the Moscow Art Theater. Roles: Rautendelein ("The Drowned Bell" by G. Hauptmann, 1898), Natasha ("At the Bottom" by M. Gorky, 1902), etc. In 1904 she joined the Bolsheviks. Publisher of the Bolshevik newspaper "New Life" (1905). In 1906 she married an official Zhelyabuzhsky, but later became the common-law wife of Maxim Gorky and emigrated with him. In 1913 she returned to Moscow after breaking off relations with Gorky. She resumed acting work in Ukraine. Together with M. Gorky and A. A. Blok, she participated in the creation of the Bolshoi Drama Theater (Petrograd, 1919), until 1926 she was an actress of this theater. Commissioner of theaters and spectacles of Petrograd (in 1919-1921), director of the Moscow House of Scientists (in 1931-1948).
With what did Gorky come to our world?

In 1895, almost simultaneously, he published in Samarskaya Gazeta the romantic tale "About the Little Fairy and the Young Shepherd", the famous "Old Woman Izergil" and the realistic story "On the Salt", dedicated to describing the hard work of tramps in the salt mines. The patterned, brightly colored fabric of the artistic narrative in the first two works does not harmonize in any way with the mundane everyday depiction of tramps, in one of which the author himself is guessed. The text of the story "On the salt" is replete with rude cruel images, common speech, abuse, conveying feelings of pain and resentment, "senseless rage" of people brought to complete stupefaction in salt hard labor. The romantically colored landscape in "Old Woman Izergil" ("dark blue patches of sky adorned with golden flecks of stars"), the harmony of colors and sounds, the amazingly beautiful heroes of the legend of the little fairy (the shepherd does not resemble a Wallachian shepherd, but a biblical prophet) create a sunny fairy tale about love and freedom. The story "On the Salt" also describes the sea, the sky, the shore of the estuary, but the color of the story is completely different: unbearably scorching heat, cracked gray earth, red-brown grass like blood, women and men swarming like worms in greasy mud. Instead of a solemn symphony of sounds - the squeal of wheelbarrows, rude and angry abuse, groans and "dreary protest".
Larra is the son of a woman and an eagle. His mother brought him to people in the hope that he would live happily among his kind. Larra was the same as everyone else, "only his eyes were cold and proud, like those of the king of birds." The young man did not respect anyone, did not listen to anyone, behaved arrogantly and proudly. There was both strength and beauty in him, but he repelled him with pride and coldness. Larra behaved among people, as animals behave in a herd, where everything is allowed to the strongest. He kills the "obstinate" girl right in front of the whole tribe, not knowing that by doing so he signs a sentence for himself to be rejected for the rest of his life. Angry people decided that: “The punishment for him is in himself!” They let him go, gave him freedom.
the theme of an ungrateful, capricious crowd, because people, having fallen into the thickest darkness of the forest and swamp swamps, attacked Danko with reproaches and threats. They called him "an insignificant and harmful person", they decided to kill him. However, the young man forgave the people for their anger and unfair reproaches. He tore out his heart from his chest, which burned with a bright fire of love for these same people, and lit the way for them: “It (the heart) burned as brightly as the sun, and brighter than the sun, and the whole forest fell silent, lit by this great torch love for people...
Danko and Larra are antipodes, they are both young, strong and beautiful. But Larra is a slave to his egoism, and this makes him lonely and rejected by everyone. Danko lives for people, therefore he is truly immortal.
The falcon is a symbol of a fearless fighter: "We sing glory to the madness of the brave." And Already is a symbol of a cautious and sensible man in the street. The images of cowardly loons, a penguin and seagulls are allegorical, which frantically rush about, trying to hide from reality and its changes.
Chudra says: “You have chosen a glorious lot for yourself, falcon. That’s the way it should be: go and look, you’ve seen enough, lie down and die - that’s all!”
Izergil lives among people, looking for human love, ready for heroic deeds for her sake. Why is the ugliness of her old age so cruelly emphasized by the writer? She is “almost a shadow” - this is associated with the shadow of Larra. Apparently, because her path is the life of a strong person, but who lived for himself.
“... O brave Falcon! In a battle with enemies, you bled to death ... But there will be time - and drops of your hot blood, like sparks, will flare up in the darkness of life and will light many brave hearts with an insane thirst for freedom, light! .. We sing a song to the madness of the brave! .. "
For him, a fact, a case from reality, was always important. He was hostile to the human imagination, he did not understand fairy tales.
Most of the Russian writers of the 19th century were his personal enemies: he hated Dostoevsky, he despised Gogol as a sick man, he laughed at Turgenev.
His personal enemies were the Kamenev family.
- Trotsky's sister, Olga Kameneva (Bronstein) - the wife of Lev Kamenev (Rozenfeld Lev Borisovich), who headed the Moscow Soviet from 1918 to 1924, a former member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. But the most interesting thing is that until December 1934 (before his arrest), Lev Kamenev was the director of the Institute of World Literature. M. Gorky (?!).
Olga Kameneva was in charge of the theatrical department of the People's Commissariat of Education. In February 1920, she told Khodasevich: “I am surprised how you can get to know Gorky. All he does is cover up scammers - and he himself is a scammer. If not for Vladimir Ilyich, he would have been in prison long ago! Gorky had a long acquaintance with Lenin. Nevertheless, it was Lenin who advised Gorky to leave the new Russia.

Having gone abroad in 1921, Gorky, in a letter to V. Khodasevich, sharply criticized N. Krupskaya's circular about the removal from Soviet libraries for the mass reader of the works of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, V. Solovyov, L. Tolstoy and others.
One of the many testimonies that Gorky was poisoned by Stalin, and perhaps the most convincing, although indirect, belongs to B. Gerland and was published in No. 6 of the Socialist Bulletin in 1954. B. Gerland was a Gulag prisoner in Vorkuta and worked in the barracks of the camp together with Professor Pletnev, also exiled. He was sentenced to death for the murder of Gorky, later replaced by 25 years in prison. She recorded his story: “We treated Gorky for heart disease, but he suffered not so much physically as morally: he did not stop tormenting himself with self-reproach. He no longer had anything to breathe in the USSR, he passionately longed back to Italy. The Kremlin was most afraid of the famous writer's open speech against his regime, and, as always, he came up with an effective remedy at the right time. who loved to treat his visitors. This time he generously gave sweets to two orderlies who worked with him, and he himself ate some sweets. An hour later, all three began excruciating stomach pains, and an hour later death occurred. An autopsy was immediately performed. Result "He lived up to our worst fears. All three died of the poison."

Long before Gorky's death, Stalin tried to make him his political ally. Those who knew Gorky's incorruptibility could imagine how hopeless the task was. But Stalin never believed in human incorruptibility. On the contrary, he often pointed out to the NKVD officers that in their activities they should proceed from the fact that incorruptible people do not exist at all. Everyone has their own price.
Under the influence of these appeals, Gorky returned to Moscow. From that moment on, a program of appeasing him, sustained in the Stalinist style, began to operate. At his disposal were given a mansion in Moscow and two comfortable villas - one in the Moscow region, the other in the Crimea. The supply of the writer and his family with everything necessary was entrusted to the same department of the NKVD, which was responsible for providing for Stalin and the members of the Politburo. For trips to the Crimea and abroad, Gorky was allocated a specially equipped railway car. On Stalin's instructions, Yagoda (Enoch Gershonovich Yehuda) sought to catch Gorky's slightest desires on the fly and fulfill them. Around his villas, his favorite flowers were planted, specially delivered from abroad. He smoked special cigarettes ordered for him in Egypt. On demand, any book from any country was delivered to him. Gorky, by nature a modest and moderate person, tried to protest against the defiant luxury that surrounded him, but he was told that Maxim Gorky was alone in the country.
Along with concern for Gorky's material well-being, Stalin instructed Yagoda to "re-educate" him. It was necessary to convince the old writer that Stalin was building real socialism and was doing everything in his power to raise the standard of living of the working people.
He participated in the work of the so-called association of proletarian writers, headed by Averbakh, who was married to Yagoda's niece.

The famous book "The Stalin Canal", written by a group of writers led by Maxim Gorky, who visited the White Sea Canal, tells, in particular, about the gathering of the builders of the canal - security officers and prisoners - in August 1933. M. Gorky also spoke there. He said excitedly, “I am happy, overwhelmed. Since 1928, I have been looking closely at how the OGPU re-educates people. You have done a great job, a great job!”
Completely isolated from the people, he moved along the conveyor organized for him by Yagoda, in the constant company of Chekists and several young writers who collaborated with the NKVD. Everyone who surrounded Gorky was made to tell him about the miracles of socialist construction and sing praises to Stalin. Even the gardener and cook assigned to the writer knew that from time to time they had to tell him that they "just" received a letter from their village relatives who report that life there is getting more and more beautiful.
Stalin was impatient for a popular Russian writer to immortalize his name. He decided to shower Gorky with royal gifts and honors and thus influence the content and, so to speak, the tone of the future book.
Sun. Vishnevsky was at Gorky's banquet and says that it even mattered who was further and who was closer to Gorky. He says that this spectacle was so disgusting that Pasternak could not stand it and ran away from the middle of the banquet.

They boast that there has never been slavery in Russia, that she immediately stepped into feudalism. Pardon me, Russia has not stepped anywhere. All attempts to reform the social structure burned in the slave psychology, so convenient for the bureaucratic-feudal state ...
In a short time, Gorky received such honors that the greatest writers of the world could not even dream of. Stalin ordered that a large industrial center, Nizhny Novgorod, be named after Gorky. Accordingly, the entire Nizhny Novgorod region was renamed Gorky. Gorky's name was given to the Moscow Art Theatre, which, by the way, was founded and gained worldwide fame thanks to Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and not Gorky.
The Council of People's Commissars by a special resolution noted his great services to Russian literature. Several businesses have been named after him. The Moscow City Council decided to rename the main street of Moscow - Tverskaya - into Gorky Street.
The famous French writer, Russian by origin, Victor Serge, who stayed in Russia until 1936, in his diary, published in 1949 in the Parisian magazine Le Tan Modern, spoke about his last meetings with Gorky:
“I once met him on the street,” writes Serge, “and was shocked by his appearance. He was unrecognizable - it was a skeleton. He wrote official articles, really disgusting, justifying the trials of the Bolsheviks. But in an intimate setting he grumbled. He spoke with bitterness and contempt about the present, entered into or almost entered into conflicts with Stalin. Serge also said that Gorky cried at night.

In Russia, Gorky lost his son, perhaps skillfully groomed by Yagoda, who liked Maxim's wife. There is a suspicion that Kryuchkov killed Maxim on behalf of Yagoda. From Kryuchkov’s confession: “I asked what I need to do. To this he answered me:“ Eliminate Maxim. ”Yagoda said that he should be given as much alcohol as possible and then he should have caught a cold. Kryuchkov, according to him, did this When it turned out that Maxim had pneumonia, they did not listen to Professor Speransky, but listened to Dr. Levin and Vinogradov (not brought to trial), who gave Maxim champagne, then a laxative, which hastened his death.
In the last years of his life, Gorky became a dangerous burden for the Soviet government. He was forbidden to leave Moscow, Gorki and the Crimea when he traveled south.
As an example of "socialist realism", government critics usually point to Gorky's story "Mother", written by him in 1906. But Gorky himself in 1933 told his old friend and biographer V. A. Desnitsky that "Mother" was "long, boring and carelessly written." And in a letter to Fyodor Gladkov, he wrote: "Mother" is a book, really only a bad one, written in a state of vehemence and irritation.
“After Gorky’s death, the NKVD officers found carefully hidden notes in his papers. When Yagoda finished reading these notes, he cursed and said: "No matter how you feed the wolf, he keeps looking into the forest."
“Untimely Thoughts” is a series of articles by M. Gorky, published in 1917-1918 in the newspaper Novaya Zhizn, where he, in particular, wrote: “Rumors are spreading more and more insistently that on October 20 there will be a“ performance of the Bolsheviks ”- in other words: the disgusting scenes of July 3-5 can be repeated ... An unorganized crowd will crawl out into the street, poorly understanding what it wants, and, hiding behind it, adventurers, thieves, professional killers will begin to “create the history of the Russian revolution” ”(emphasis added by me - V.B.).

After the October Revolution, Gorky wrote: “Lenin, Trotsky and those accompanying them have already been poisoned by the rotten poison of power ... The working class must know that it will face famine, a complete breakdown of industry, the destruction of transport, a long bloody anarchy ...”.

“Imagining themselves as Napoleons from socialism, the Leninists tear and rush, completing the destruction of Russia - the Russian people will pay for this with lakes of blood.”

“To frighten with terror and pogrom people who do not want to participate in the frantic dance of Mr. Trotsky over the ruins of Russia is shameful and criminal.”

“People's commissars treat Russia as a material for experiment, the Russian people for them are the horse into which bacteriologists inoculate typhus so that the horse develops anti-typhoid serum in its blood. It is precisely such a cruel and doomed to failure experiment that the commissars perform on the Russian people, not thinking that the exhausted, half-starved horse can die.
At Lubyanka, the investigator was summoned to the office one at a time. Each signed a non-disclosure agreement. Everyone was warned that if he let out even one word, at least to his own wife, he would be immediately liquidated along with his entire family.
The notebook found in the mansion on Povarskaya Street was M. Gorky's diary. The full text of this diary was read only by the most responsible employee of the NKVD, by some of the Politburo and, of course, by Stalin.
Stalin, puffing on his pipe, was sorting through photographs of pages from Gorky's diary lying in front of him. He fixed his heavy gaze on one.

“An idle mechanic calculated that if an ordinary vile flea is increased hundreds of times, then it turns out to be the most terrible beast on earth, which no one would be able to control. With modern great technology, a giant flea can be seen in the cinema. But the monstrous grimaces of history sometimes create similar exaggerations in the real world ... Stalin is such a flea that Bolshevik propaganda and the hypnosis of fear have increased to incredible proportions.
On the same day, June 18, 1936, Genrikh Yagoda went to Gorki, where Maxim Gorky was being treated for influenza, accompanied by several of his henchmen, including a mysterious woman in black. The People's Commissar of the NKVD looked at Alexei Maksimovich for a short time, but the woman, according to eyewitnesses, spent more than forty minutes at the writer's bedside ...
It was the day of the solar eclipse.
On the morning of June 19, a mournful message was placed in Soviet newspapers: the great proletarian writer Alexei Maksimovich Gorky died of pneumonia.
But here is other evidence. During Gorky's last illness, M.I. Budberg was on duty at Gorky's deathbed and, together with other people close to him (P.P. Kryuchkov, nurse O.D. Chertkova, his last affection), was an eyewitness to the last moments of his life. Particularly difficult for her were the night hours of duty, when Gorky often woke up and was tormented by attacks of suffocation. All these observations of M.I. Budberg are confirmed by the memoirs of E.P. Peshkova, P.P. Kryuchkov and M.I. Budberg herself, which were recorded by A.N. Tikhonov, a friend and colleague of Gorky, immediately after the death of the writer.
Whether it really was so or not (there are many versions of what Gorky died from, and the above is just one of them), we will probably never know.
MARIA Ignatievna Budberg, nee Zakrevskaya, by her first marriage, Countess Benckendorff, a truly legendary woman, an adventurer and a double (and maybe triple, even German intelligence) agent of the GPU and British intelligence, the mistress of Lockhart and Herbert Wells.
Being the mistress of the English envoy, Lockhart, she came to him for the family's travel documents. But while she was in the capital, bandits attacked her estate in Estonia and killed her husband. But the Chekists found Moura herself in bed with Lockhart and escorted her to the Lubyanka. The accusations were clearly not groundless, since the head of the English mission Lockhart himself rushed to rescue the countess. He failed to rescue the agent-mistress, and he himself fell under arrest.
Most likely, it was not beauty (Maria Ignatievna was not a beauty in the full sense of the word), but Zakrevskaya's wayward character and independence that captivated Gorky. But in general, her energy potential was huge and immediately attracted men to her. At first he took her to his literary secretary. But very soon, despite the big age difference (she was 24 years younger than the writer), he offered her a hand and a heart. Maria did not want to officially marry the petrel of the revolution, or maybe she did not receive a blessing for marriage from her "godparents" from the NKVD, however, be that as it may, for 16 years she remained Gorky's common-law wife.
The NKVD agents allegedly bring her to the dying writer, and specifically, the well-known Yagoda. Moura removes the nurse from the room, declaring that she will prepare the medicine herself (by the way, she never studied medicine). The nurse sees how Mura dilutes some liquid in a glass and gives the writer a drink, and then hurriedly leaves, accompanied by Yagoda. The nurse, peeping behind her through the crack of the half-open door, rushes to the patient and notices that the glass from which Gorky drank the medicine has disappeared from the writer's table. So Moura took it with her. 20 minutes after her departure, Gorky dies. But this is most likely another legend.
Although the NKVD did indeed have a huge secret laboratory engaged in the manufacture of poisons, this project was supervised by Yagoda, a former pharmacist. In addition, it is necessary to recall one more episode: a few days before Gorky's death, he was sent a box of chocolates, which the writer loved very much. Not eating them, Gorky treats two orderlies caring for him. A few minutes later, the orderlies show signs of poisoning and die. Subsequently, the death of these orderlies will become one of the main points of indictment in the "doctors' case", when Stalin accuses the doctors who treated the writer of killing him.
In Russia, people are buried according to seven categories, Kipnis joked. - The seventh is when the deceased himself controls the horse that carries him to the cemetery.
Leon Trotsky, who was well versed in the Stalinist climate prevailing in Moscow, wrote:
“Gorky was neither a conspirator nor a politician. He was a kind and sensitive old man, protective of the weak, sensitive Protestant. During the famine and the first two five-year plans, when general indignation threatened the authorities, repressions exceeded all limits ... Gorky, who enjoyed influence at home and abroad, could not endure the liquidation of the old Bolsheviks, prepared by Stalin. Gorky would have immediately protested, his voice would have been heard, and the Stalinist trials of the so-called "conspirators" would have turned out to be unfulfilled. It would also be absurd to attempt to prescribe silence to Gorky. His arrest, deportation or open liquidation was even more unthinkable. There was only one possibility: to hasten his death with poison, without shedding blood. The Kremlin dictator saw no other way out.”
But Trotsky himself could have desired the removal of a writer who knew too much and was unpleasant to him for family reasons.
In his book Vladimir Lenin, published in Leningrad in 1924, on page 23, Gorky wrote about Lenin:
“I often heard him praise his comrades. And even about those who, according to rumors, did not seem to enjoy his personal sympathies. Surprised by his assessment of one of these comrades, I noticed that for many this assessment would have seemed unexpected. “Yes, yes, I know,” said Lenin. - There's something lying about my relationship with him. They lie a lot and even especially a lot about me and Trotsky. Hitting the table with his hand, Lenin said: “But they would point out another person who is capable of organizing an almost exemplary army in a year and even gaining the respect of military specialists. We have such a person!”
All this was thrown out by the editors of the posthumous edition of Gorky's collected works, and instead they inserted the following gag: “But still, not ours! With us, not ours! Ambitious. And there is something bad in him, from Lassalle. This was not in the book written by Gorky in 1924, shortly after Lenin's death, and published in the same year in Leningrad.
Gorky's book on Lenin ended (in 1924) with these words:
“In the end, the honest and truthful, created by man, wins, that without which there is no man wins.”
In the collected works of Gorky, these words of his were thrown out, and instead of them, the party editors entered the following gag: “Vladimir Lenin is dead. The heirs of his mind and will are alive. They are alive and working as successfully as no one has ever worked anywhere in the world.”

Nadya Vvedenskaya is married to her father's intern Dr. Sinichkin. Around - nine brothers of the young bride... The wedding night. As soon as the groom approached the bride, at the moment when they were alone in the room, she ... jumped out the window and ran away to Maxim Peshkov, her first love ...

Nadia met the son of Maxim Gorky in the last grade of the gymnasium, when one day she came to the skating rink with her friends. Maxim immediately struck her with boundless kindness and equally boundless irresponsibility. They didn't get married right away.
After October and the Civil War, Maxim Peshkov was going to the Italian shores, to his father. And then Lenin gave Maxim Peshkov an important party assignment: to explain to his father the meaning of the "great proletarian revolution" - which the great proletarian writer took for an immoral massacre.

Together with her son Gorky, in 1922 Nadezhda Vvedenskaya also went abroad. They got married in Berlin. The Peshkovs' daughters were born already in Italy: Marfa - in Sorrento, Daria two years later - in Naples. But the family life of the young spouses did not work out. The writer Vladislav Khodasevich recalled: “Maxim was then about thirty years old, but by nature it was difficult to give him more than thirteen.”

In Italy, Nadezhda Alekseevna discovered her husband's strong addiction to strong drinks and women. However, here he followed in the footsteps of his father ...
The great writer was not shy in the same place, in Italy, to show all kinds of signs of attention to Varvara Sheikevich, the wife of Andrey Diderikhs. She was an amazing woman. After the break with Gorky, Varvara alternately became the wife of the publisher A. Tikhonov and the artist Z. Grzhebin. Gorky courted V. Sheikevich in the presence of his second wife, actress Maria Andreeva. Of course, my wife was crying. However, Alexei Maksimovich was also crying. In fact, he loved to cry. But in fact, Gorky's wife at that time was a well-known adventurer associated with the Chekists, Maria Benkendorf, who, after the writer left for her homeland, married another writer, Herbert Wells.

Maria Andreeva was not going to lag behind her husband - a "traitor". She made her lover Pyotr Kryuchkov, Gorky's assistant, who was 21 years her junior. In 1938, P. Kryuchkov, who was undoubtedly an agent of the OGPU, was accused of "villainous killing" of Gorky and shot.
Before Kryuchkov, Andreeva's lovers were a certain Yakov Lvovich Izrailevich. Upon learning of his unexpected resignation, he did not find anything better than to beat his opponent, driving him under the table. The situation that prevailed in the family is also evidenced by the following fact: the mother of M. Andreeva committed suicide, having previously gouged out the eyes of her granddaughter Katya in the portrait.
Gerling-Grudzinsky in the article “The Seven Deaths of Maxim Gorky” draws attention to the fact that “there is no reason to believe the indictment of the 1938 trial, which said that Yagoda decided - partly for political, partly for personal reasons (it was known that he was in love to Nadezhda) - to send Maxim Peshkov to the next world.
The daughter of Nadezhda Alekseevna - Marfa Maksimovna Peshkova - was a friend of the daughter of I.V. Stalin Svetlana and became the wife of Sergo Lavrentievich Beria (son of Lavrenty Pavlovich).
Well, Gorky and Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov knew each other from Nizhny Novgorod. In 1902, the son of Yakov Sverdlov, Zinovy, converted to Orthodoxy, Gorky was his godfather, and Zinovy ​​Mikhailovich Sverdlov became Zinovy ​​Alekseevich Peshkov, the adopted son of Maxim Gorky.
Subsequently, Gorky wrote in a letter to Peshkova: “This handsome boy has recently behaved surprisingly boorishly towards me, and my friendship with him is over. It's very sad and hard."
Fathers Sverdlov and Yagoda were cousins
Berries are gone. But the Chekists continued to influence the life of Nadezhda Peshkova. She had just gathered on the eve of the war to marry her longtime friend I. K. Lupol - one of the most educated people of his time, philosopher, historian, writer, director of the Institute of World Literature. Gorky, - how her chosen one ended up in the dungeons of the NKVD and died in the camp in 1943. After the war, Nadezhda Alekseevna married the architect Miron Merzhanov. Six months later, in 1946, her husband was arrested. Already after the death of Stalin, in 1953, N. A. Peshkova agreed to become the wife of engineer V. F. Popov ... The groom was arrested ...
Nadezhda Alekseevna carried the cross of the "untouchable" until the end of her days. As soon as a man appeared near her, who could have serious intentions, he disappeared. Most often - forever. All the years in the USSR, she lived under a magnifying glass, which was constantly held in her hands by the "organs" ... The daughter-in-law of Maxim Gorky was supposed to go to the grave as his daughter-in-law.
Gorky's son Maxim Alekseevich Peshkov. The monument of the sculptor Mukhina is so good, so similar to the original, that when Maxim's mother saw it, she had an attack. "You extended my meeting with my son," she said to Mukhina. For hours I sat near the monument. Now resting nearby.
Maxim Alekseevich's wife, Gorky's daughter-in-law - Nadezhda. She was a stunningly beautiful woman. She painted beautifully. Surrounded by Gorky, it was customary to give playful nicknames: his second common-law wife, actress of the Bolshoi Drama Theater in Petrograd, Maria Fedorovna Andreeva, had the nickname "Phenomenon", Maxim's son was called "The Singing Worm", the wife of Gorky's secretary Kryuchkov - "Tse-tse" ... Wife Maxim's son Nadezhda Gorky gave the nickname "Timosha". Why? For recalcitrant curls sticking out in all directions. First there was a scythe, with which it was possible to kill the spine of a teenage calf. Nadezhda secretly cut it off and at the hairdresser's (it was in Italy) they laid down what was left after the haircut. For the first half hour, it seemed to look good, but in the morning ... Gorky, seeing his son's wife, named her Timosha - in honor of the coachman Timofey, whose unkempt tufts always aroused general delight. However, Nadezhda-Timosha was so good that Genrikh Yagoda fell in love with her. (For the country's chief Chekist, by occupation, it seems that falling in love meant betraying the Motherland. Assess the risk of Yagoda - he openly gave Gorky's daughter-in-law orchids).
Maxim died early - at the age of 37. Died weird. His daughter Martha, sharing her memories with the poetess Larisa Vasilyeva, suspects poisoning. Maxim liked to drink (they even quarreled on this basis with the patient but proud Timosha). But on that ill-fated day (early May 1934) he did not take a sip. We were returning from the dacha Yagoda. Felt bad. Gorky's secretary, Kryuchkov, left Maxim on the bench - in one shirt, there was still snow in Gorki.

“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. The autopsy began ... Then they began to wash the insides. The incision was sewn up somehow with a simple twine. The brain was put 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 p.m. Alexei 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 hand, then on the other, pressed to his temple and leaning his elbow on chair handle.
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 is 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.
“And why is this one hanging around here? To not 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. Thinking of getting sick, get better soon. Or maybe there is wine in the house, we would drink a glass to your health.
They brought wine... Everyone 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 power 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 can't 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 either a frank conversation with Gorky, or a 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, on Yagoda's orders with Dr. Levin and Pletnev. 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, it was not about 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 the grave of her son by a collective decision of the Politburo ...

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 office), 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 delusional ideas or ideas play a large 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 „

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:

„

“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:

„

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 whole. Here is what Gorky says:

„

And fantasies and visions take possession of Gorky more and more:

To these extravagant antics of unbridled fantasy, to dream stupor, hallucinations, obsessive ideas, actions and deeds are sometimes added:

Reality, the world of real phenomena, ceases at times to exist completely for Gorky:

My soul hurt a lot. And if two years ago I had not been convinced by personal experience how humiliating the stupidity of suicide, I probably would have applied this method of treating 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.

„.

“And the butterfly is very useful for you.” .

I deliberately quote the entire passage where Gorky draws a psychiatrist, because of the historical value of 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, the main role in the development of mental illness, there was a view among Russian psychiatrists that sexual life takes the most active part in the formation of a healthy and sick psyche of a person, 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 partly by hard 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 an article in the Novaya Zhizn newspaper condemning the consequences of the Bolshevik coup in the country: “No, the proletariat is not generous and fair, but the revolution was supposed to establish possible justice in the country ... that Lenin had seized Milyukov's petty-bourgeois hair, and Milyukov would have ruffled Lenin's luxuriant curls... But it is not pans who fight, but serfs. people and, as if mocking themselves, shout: "Long live the world!"

The thirties in the Soviet Union passed under the sign of a sharp increase in the power of I.V. Stalin, accompanied by a departure from the principles of the world revolution and political repression, in the direction of building a strong state. Against this background, a number of well-known cultural figures, such as Maxim Gorky, who had great authority, both in the country and abroad, became deadly.

Cage for the "petrel" of the revolution

About how I.V. Stalin and his entourage fought against their political opponents is well known. It was more difficult with writers and poets who had great weight in society, and who earned the glory of true fighters for the happiness of the working people. Repressions against them were impossible for many objective reasons. It was also impossible to allow them to work, since they clearly understood what was happening in the country and could start working against the current government. M.A. was especially annoyed in this regard. Bitter. The writer repeatedly tried to read moralizing and call for humanism V.I. Lenin, and then I.V. Stalin. Moreover, the writer's friendship with Bukharin, Stalin's rival in the struggle for power, seemed to the latter very dangerous. Feeling himself the conscience of the revolution, M.A. Gorky actively campaigned for the creation of a new party, the Union of Intellectuals. Together with him, cultural and scientific figures, who were disillusioned with the Soviet regime, were to lead the new party. This could not be allowed. Gorky was supposed to disappear, preferably naturally. The authorities needed him as an icon, but in no way, not a living cultural figure. In order to reduce the activity of the writer, he was actually forcibly not let out of his dacha in the Crimea. The leaders of the state stopped responding to the writer's letters, and all incoming correspondence was carefully censored.

strange disease

Gorky was able to escape from his Crimean imprisonment only in May 1936, when two of his granddaughters, who lived in Moscow, unexpectedly fell ill with the flu. However, M.A. Gorky arrived in Moscow, when on June 1 he himself collapsed with the flu, which gradually turned into pneumonia and heart failure. At first glance, nothing strange. Climate change and the writer's advanced age allowed for a similar scenario. But the writer himself did not believe in the accident of his illness. He believed that his son, who had died two years earlier from a similar illness, had been poisoned. However, M.A. Gorky was transferred to Gorki, where V.I. had recently been treated. Lenin, and 17 best doctors were immediately assigned to him. However, the writer was getting worse and worse, despite the heroic efforts of the luminaries of Soviet medicine. Finally, on June 8, 1936, the doctors reported to the Kremlin that the patient was completely ill and that they should come to say goodbye to him. Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov immediately went to Gorki to see the patient. The doctors, thinking that everything had already been decided, left the patient without attention. At that moment, the midwife Chertkova, who was looking after Gorky, arbitrarily decided to inject the patient with a large dose of camphor, so that the writer would feel better and he could communicate normally with distinguished guests. At that moment, a miracle happened. Gorky felt so much better that he got out of bed. The visitors were amazed when they saw not a dying, but quite an active writer, who flatly refused to talk about his health, starting to take a keen interest in current affairs. Stalin even had to send for wine to drink to the great proletarian writer's recovery.

Work on mistakes

After the guests left, the health of M.A. Gorky went on the mend. By June 16, the doctors stated that the crisis was over. But the next day, the writer became sharply worse. Gorky began to choke, his pulse raced, his lips turned blue. A day later, on June 18, 1936, he died. Immediately, by order of Yagoda, all the rooms in Gorki were sealed, and the writer's papers were studied in detail by representatives of the NKVD. M.A. Gorky was cremated, and the urn was buried in the Kremlin wall. Nevertheless, rumors spread throughout the country that the writer had been poisoned. There really was a reason for the appearance of such conversations. Over the course of several years, many well-known figures of science and culture, who openly expressed dissatisfaction with the current government, fell ill in a strange way and died suddenly. It is noteworthy that a similar illness, like that of Gorky, was observed in several members of the attendants in Gorki, who could eat the same food as the writer. At the same time, a number of researchers point to the active work of the NKVD toxicological laboratory during these years, which, among other things, dealt with poisons. Heinrich Yagoda, who was well versed in pharmaceuticals, was a big fan of the use of poisons for operational purposes. Moreover, even when Gorky was in Gorki, in Moscow, they openly talked about his death as a fact that had actually happened. It is interesting to note that the secretary of the Writers' Union, Yudin, told his acquaintances that Gorky was mortally ill and would soon die on May 31, although the writer fell ill only on June 1. This and many other indirect facts suggest the malicious poisoning of the writer with poison. However, it is impossible to say anything for sure. If there was poisoning, then all the ends were carefully cleaned. Witnesses and documents are not left in such cases, and the body of the writer was cremated, excluding the possibility for its re-examination.