March 5 marked the 71st anniversary of the controversial leader’s death
The Communists of Russia party (CPCR) has asked the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Prosecutor General’s Office to look into potential Western involvement in the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, party chairman Sergey Malinkovich told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.
The party requested that the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office and the FSB look into the potential “involvement of Western intelligence services in the death of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.” The CPCR is a Russian communist party registered in 2012.
“Many testimonies from Stalin’s contemporaries speak of the possible poisoning of the leader of the Soviet peoples by agents of Western influence,” Malinkovich told the news agency.
Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until the day of his death, May 5, 1953. The officially published autopsy determined that he died of a stroke that he suffered at his summer home.
His death came just four years into the nuclear arms race between the US and USSR, after the Soviets developed their own atomic bomb in 1949.
A controversial historical figure, he oversaw the rapid industrialization of the USSR in the 1930s and led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II. He also oversaw mass political purges in the 1930s and mass deportations in the years following the war.
“We remember the crimes committed by the regime against its own people and the horror of mass repressions,” Russian President Vladimir Putin once said regarding Stalin’s time in power.
Writer and biographer Isaac Deutscher described Stalin as the man who led the nation from the “epoch of the wooden plough” to that of the “nuclear stockpiles” – though the quote is often falsely attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Some historians believe the Soviet leader was eager for communism to sweep the continent after the end of World War II. “He was hopeful that the Americans would withdraw their troops from Europe, return to their prewar isolationist policies and allow him maximum room for maneuver,” Stanford historian Norman Naimark claimed.
While his legacy remains controversial, many in Russia still see Stalin as a great leader who led the Soviet Union to victory in the bloodiest war in human history, in which more than 27 million Soviet people died.
