SOMETIME IN THE early hours of 9 November 1932—two days after the solemn celebrations of the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution—Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife, shot herself with a small pistol. She died instantly. A few hours later a doctor examined her corpse and declared the cause of death to be “an open wound to the heart.” Soon afterwards, after exchanging a few sharp words with Molotov and Kaganovich, the doctor changed his mind. On her death certificate he listed the cause of death as “acute appendicitis.” The politics behind this change would have been perfectly clear
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