I had always understood the story about the stroke, but that some of Stalin’s deputies (including Krushchev) would not permit anyone to enter his room for a long time...and, just by coincidence, many of them were likely to have been put up against a wall and shot.
Alternate reports have him being poisoned, to prevent mass executions among the Soviet leadership, with the same intentional delay for doctors to have access to him.
Any way you cut it, this guy was EVIL.
“Any way you cut it, this guy was EVIL.”
He was. But two of Martin Luther King’s closest advisors, Stanley Levison and Hunter O’Dell, felt no qualms about belonging to the CPUSA while Stalin was its defacto leader. And that’s why Kennedy wiretapped him. Just a little sidelight on how Stalin was intertwined with American events.