Russian communist party suggests Western spies killed Stalin
The Communists of Russia party has urged the FSB security service, the successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB, to investigate the possible involvement of Western intelligence agents in the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953.
Russia’s RIA news agency cited Sergei Malinkovich, the party’s chairman, as saying: “The party appealed to the prosecutor general’s office of the Russian Federation and the FSB with a request to check the possible involvement of Western intelligence services in the death of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.”
According to the report, Mr Malinkovich said: “Many testimonies from Stalin’s contemporaries speak of the possible poisoning of the leader of the Soviet nations by agents of Western influence.”
It was not immediately clear whether the FSB or the prosecutor general’s office had replied to the party’s request.
Tuesday marks the 71st anniversary of the death of Stalin, who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until the day he died. The cause of his death was a hemorrhagic stroke, Moscow said at the time.
Stalin oversaw Russia’s rapid industrialisation, but also the deaths of millions in famines, purges and in Gulag labour camps.
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Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, who casts himself as an heir to the tsars of the past, has offered a mixed assessment of Stalin, praising his war leadership while condemning his domestic policies as “totalitarian”.
The Communists of Russia party was registered in 2012. Its main rival on the Left of Russia’s political spectrum is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which considers itself the successor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Mr Malinkovich told RIA that representatives of his party would lay flowers at the bust of Stalin at the Kremlin Wall on Tuesday.
