In recent years, much light has been shed on the 40-odd assassination attempts against Hitler.
We’ve even done a video on the topic. But what about his moustachioed counterpart?
Were there any attempts on the life of Stalin, and if not, why? In this video, we discuss the plots
to kill the Red Tsar, as well as a conspiracy that, to this day, has yet to be solved.
When Vladimir Lenin, the undisputed head of communism in Russia, died in 1924,
his party plunged into crisis. Government factions were becoming violently opposed to one another,
and the people demanded a strong leader. A quietly reserved, calculating,
and short man stepped forward to fill the vacuum. His name was Joseph Stalin.
Focussing on building his image for the younger party members, Stalin progressively
removed all his adversaries until he became Lenin’s successor. It wasn’t easy, and he’d
stabbed nearly all his friends in the back to get there, but by 1929, Stalin was firmly in power.
He wasn’t content, though. The one thing a usurper fears more than anything else is,
naturally, another usurper. So Stalin fell back to his old strategy. He couldn’t bribe
and backstab the entire population of the USSR, but he could win them over using his image.
From 1929, Comrade Stalin led one of the biggest PR campaigns in history. No longer would he be
the quiet five-foot-five-inch party leader. No, from his (supposed) 50th birthday in December
1929, tall statues and posters with the words "Great", "Beloved", "Bold", "Wise", "Inspirer",
and "Genius" appeared throughout Moscow. People marched into the streets waving banners
depicting Stalin’s face. Youth groups tried to out-do each other in their support
of the so-called "Father of the Nation." And it was a good idea too, as being seen
supporting the party was a great way to secure a well-paid job, which were scarce at the time.
Through the 1930s, Stalin’s cult of personality expanded.
In some places it even took on a quasi-religious significance. Some people wrote hymns about him,
like this “Hymn to Stalin” written by Avidenko: “Centuries will pass, and the generations still
to come will regard us as the happiest of mortals, … because we were privileged
to see Stalin, our inspired leader ... Everything belongs to him, chief of our great country.
And when the woman I love presents me with a child the first word it shall utter will be: Stalin.”
Yikes.
Very rapidly, Stalin was transformed from a faceless apparatchik to a fatherly figure
seemingly carrying the USSR on his shoulders. People genuinely believed he was indispensable,
and therefore, few tried to assassinate him. But there were some.
The first major attempt was in 1931, where a veteran from the counter-revolutionary White Army
named Ogarev tried to shoot Stalin as he walked down the street. Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD,
were on scene and tackled Ogarev after he missed his first shot. They executed the White Guardsman
a few days later, and Stalin, now paranoid, stopped walking the streets of his own city.
In 1935, another bullet meant for Stalin missed, this time in the Kremlin Library.
It was fired by an aristocrat connected to the Orlova-Pavlova family. The Kremlin guards
wrestled the young man to the ground before he could get off another shot, and Stalin escaped
unharmed. As usual, the would-be assassin was executed, but that’s not where this story ends.
The NKVD investigators tied this assassination attempt to their ongoing case against
prominent central committee member Avel Yenukidze, Kremlin Commandant Peterson,
and several Red Army officers. Called the “Klubok case,” roughly translating to “ball of thread,”
the NKVD charged Yenukidze, Peterson, and the officers with conspiracy to assassinate Stalin.
They were all executed. The records of this case, which was closed in 1935, remain classified today.
It’s still unclear whether the conspiracy was real, or if Stalin was cleaning house.
Records from the French intelligence archive state that, on March 11th 1938,
another assassin attempted to kill Stalin.
Dressed in a Kremlin guard’s uniform, Lieutenant Danilov of the Tula garrison used forged documents
to enter the Kremlin. Armed with a pistol, he then went hunting for Stalin. Minutes later,
the NKVD realised the documents were fakes and chased Danilov down. He planned to kill Stalin
out of revenge for the execution of visionary military strategist Marshal Tukhachevsky.
Danilov was executed, but both he and the dead Marshal were vindicated when the Wehrmacht used
Tukhachevsky’s deep battle and combined operations doctrines against Stalin in Operation Barbarossa.
Up to this point, those trying to assassinate Stalin had done so for domestic reasons,
but this all changed in December 1938, when the Japanese decided they’d have a red hot go.
In June, a man named Genrikh Lyushkov jumped the border from the USSR
into Japanese-administered Manchukuo.
Usually, this sort of thing was no big deal; not in this case, though. Lyushkov wasn’t just
a soldier or even a low-level party official; he was the chief of the NKVD in the Russian Far East.
A bag of top-secret Red Army documents bought Lyushkov a position in the Japanese intelligence
service, and he could finally breathe a sigh of relief. Why? Lyushkov had been at Stalin’s side
during the Great Purges and personally signed off on thousands of executions.
He had intimate knowledge of how high-ranking officials were killed.
So when Lyushkov’s friends at the NKVD started disappearing and he got a summons from Stalin,
he knew what was in store. Like any sane man, Lyushkov got out as fast as he could.
This story and the gift of top-secret documents won over the Japanese, who were looking for
ways to knock the Soviet Union down a few pegs. The best way to do that? Kill Stalin.
Lyushkov informed the Japanese that, in December, Stalin would travel to Sochi to bathe in the
Matsesta River. He knew how the guard detail would be organised, and knew how to get around it.
Six Russian agents on the Japanese payroll were sent over the Turkish
border into Russia for the mission. But the minute they stepped over the border, the NKVD
gunned them down. Three agents managed to escape, but were hunted down and ultimately shot.
The NKVD knew about the plan from the get-go and had set an ambush. They were tipped off by the
master spy Richard Sorge, who we’ve incidentally done a video on before. Sorge was king of spycraft
and had connections throughout the German embassy and Japanese intelligence service. He made sure
Comrade Stalin knew about the plot to assassinate him the minute Lyushkov started planning it.
Each of these failed assassinations has a common theme:
the NKVD mercilessly executing Stalin's would-be assassins.
On the flip side of Stalin’s cult of personality was the terror of his secret police.
Life during the purges was terrifying. Friends or family members could disappear into an NKVD truck
at night, only to reappear in the newspaper weeks later as confessed traitors. Confessions were what
the NKVD was after, and people were tortured for however long was necessary to extract them.
If a defendant changed their plea in court, back into an NKVD cell they went,
only to emerge later with broken bones, dislocated joints, and missing fingernails.
People regularly died before confessing, and were recorded as traitors anyway.
In a society where simply telling a joke about Stalin could have you torn out of bed in the
middle of the night, locked up, then beaten until you confessed to conspiring with foreign powers,
even thinking about harming the Red Tsar would have seemed dangerous.
But there were some that even the NKVD dared not to touch unless given specific orders from the
big man himself: Stalin’s inner circle. These men saw right through Stalin’s cult of personality.
This raises a tantalising question: did they assassinate Stalin? It might seem crazy,
but it’s within the realm of possibility.
In the months preceding Stalin’s death, the wheels of the great communist killing machine
started turning again. It was clear from his actions during the 1952 Communist Party Congress
that Stalin was gearing up for another set of Great Purges. The last time he did this,
during the 1930s, he had wiped out a huge proportion of the party leadership.
Stalin’s four closest advisors, Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, and Bulganin
all knew they could verily easily be next, but, conveniently, Stalin died on March 5th
1953, before any more of his infamous kill-lists could be signed off. The cause of death was
reportedly a stroke, which Stalin suffered sometime on the morning of February 28th.
The night before, the four men had attended a dinner party at Stalin’s Dacha,
where they drank until 5 or 6 AM. After seeing them off, Stalin drank some diluted wine,
as he customarily did, then went to bed. He later collapsed and went into a critical condition.
After slipping in and out of consciousness for five days, he died. What was kept out
of the official history until 2013 was that Stalin suffered a stomach hemorrhage and vomited copious
amounts of blood prior to his death. The doctors who attended him in his final days were also
watched 24/7 by the four men who, at this point, were effectively in charge of the Soviet Union.
It would have been all too easy for either Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, or Bulganin to
slip poison into Stalin’s wine then threaten the doctor to ensure the death was ruled as natural.
Each of these men had the most to gain if Stalin died and the most to lose if he lived. They had
motive, means, and ample opportunity. Was Stalin assassinated by his closest friends in 1953?
We’ll never know for sure.
THAT was the conspiratorial tale of the plots to assassinate Joseph
Stalin. But what do YOU think? Why do YOU think Stalin’s cult of personality was so successful?
Do YOU think the NKVD managed to cover up any other attempts? And do YOU think that
Stalin was finished off by one, or all, of his closest friends? Let us know in the comments!