Was Joseph Stalin Assassinated?

Born Svetlana Stalina, Stalin's daughter changed her name twice and lived in several countries after her famous defection.

Was Stalin Assassinated?

Was Joseph Stalin the victim of a political assassination plot hatched by the KGB and CIA?

In a TV documentary biography of Stalin, narrated by Mike Wallace, Stalin is shown addressing an assembly to whom he announced that he had uncovered a plot against him. Arrests were made and another purge had begun.

Shortly thereafter, on March 2, 1953, Stalin had died of “cerebral annumerism” – high blood pressure and a rupture of blood clots in the back of the head – a stroke.

Fifteen years later, an American intelligence operative – David Ferrie, died of the same cause, after writing two suicide notes, and Taylor Branch and George Crile, in an article in Esquire magazine, reported that there were rumors among the anti-Castro Cuban exiles that the CIA had a pill that when ingested, would kill the person with a cerebral annumerism that would appear to be a natural death.

Stalin’s daughter Svtlana Alliluyeva (Stalin) later defected to the United States where she stayed at the home of Priscilla Johnson, who translated her book “Letters to a Friend,” in which she recalled the day of her father’s death.

She remembered being taken out of school and sent to her father’s side as doctors were apparently trying to save his life. But she did not recognize any of the doctors attending her father, specifically mentioning his personal physician Vladimir Nikitch Vinogradov was not present and suspiciously absent. An asterick refered the reader to a note in the back of the book (p. 238), ostensibly not written by the author but added for historical interest. The footnote claimed that this doctor was one of nine physicians arrested in November 1952 for conspiring with British and American intelligence to murder Soviet leaders, citing one victim, Andre Zhdanov, who died in 1948.

Shortly after Stalin’s death, the doctors in custody were released.

Was Stalin another victim of the doctor’s conspiracy?

In December 1977, Pavel Litvinov gave a talk at Stockton College in New Jersey. As a Russian dissident living in the United States, and grandson of Stalin’s secretary of foreign affairs who negotiated the United States recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, Litvinov gave a lecture on suppression under Stalin. I asked him if it was generally recognized in the Soviet Union that Stalin was probably murdered – assassinated by his doctors in league with the KGB or the CIA and British intelligence, as Stalin himself alleged were plotting against him?


“Yes,” he replied, “but the KGB? Who cares who did it as long as he is gone.”

“Let the judging be done by those who come later, by men and women who didn’t know the times and the people we know...They will have their say and what they say will be something new and cogent. Instead of idle whining, they will read through this page in their country’s history with a feeling of pain, contrition and bewilderment, and they will be led by this feeling to live their lives differently.” - Alliluyev Stalin