Headline : ‘Stalin is dead’: the story behind the scoop

Read more from the original article on here at correspondent.afp.com.

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Word began to leak out after World War II that Joseph Stalin was not a well man. Rumours – which were impossible to verify –  had it that “the man of steel” was so worried about his failing health that he was seeing doctors morning and night. They were also injecting him with a “super serum” to stop him ageing.

The Georgian-born Soviet leader was seen less and less from the early 1950s, spending most of his time in his dacha at Kuntsevo in the Moscow suburbs. His last public appearance was in October 1952 when he closed the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR.

Such was the stranglehold of Soviet censorship, that getting news out quickly from AFP’s Moscow bureau would be well-nigh impossible. So the agency had a team of Russian-speaking journalists in Paris listening in on Radio Moscow’s internal programmes day and night for any hint of Stalin’s health, as well as keeping a sharp eye on the news ticker from the Soviet press agency TASS.

Some were eminent Russian emigres like Arkady Stolypin, the son of Tsar Nicholas II’s prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, who was assassinated at the opera in Kyiv in 1911, having survived 10 other plots on his life.

Read more from the original article on here at correspondent.afp.com.

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