On March 1, 1953, the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union -- Joseph Stalin -- had a severe stroke. A doctor could not be called until the Central Committee had convened, voted, and agreed on which doctor to use, a task made more complex by the fact that Stalin had just ordered the deaths of many of the Soviet Union's leading physicians. And so began the bureaucratic merry-go-round that became the intense and underhanded struggle for control of a nation.