On this day in 1953, the strange death of Josef Stalin

[Bozita]

credit this to:
The Writers' Almanac
with Garrison Keillor

On this day in 1953, one of the most ruthless dictators of the twentieth century, Josef Stalin, died in Moscow. The leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until 1953, Stalin was responsible for the death and imprisonment of millions of his citizens during his many political purges. Near the end of his life, his behavior grew more and more bizarre. He held nightly banquets, requiring that his guests drink excessively, because he believed that drunk men didn't tell lies. After the banquets were over he would go to his garden with pruning sheers and chop off the heads of flowers, which his guards would pick up in the morning. He looked over lists of his government officials and put question marks next to the names of those he planned to execute. He began to cook up a conspiracy theory about a terrorist group of Jewish doctors who were planning to poison members of the government, and he put his own doctor on the list of conspirators. He filled the jails with men to be put on trial.

Then, on March 1, he was found unconscious on the floor of his room. According to Nikita Khrushchev, his guards were too terrified to do anything when they found him, because it had been so long since they'd acted without his orders. They left him lying on his floor for thirteen hours. When the doctors finally arrived, they were trembling with fear at the thought of doing something wrong. The doctor who removed his false teeth was shaking so much he dropped the teeth on the ground. They eventually determined that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage. He died four days later.

© Minnesota Public Radio, 2004.