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!