ABSTRACT
Stalin’s health deteriorated in his final years and he has been described as not looking like his public portraits but like ‘an old small man with a face ravaged by the years’ [1]. His death was announced on 6 March 1953; apparently he had died six days earlier of a brain haemorrhage and a stroke which caused paralysis although he had long previously lost speech and consciousness. There have been various novels, the most recent in 1995 [2], with the denouement being the poisoning and/or shooting of Stalin. However, no post mortem results were ever published, if indeed an autopsy was in fact performed. Thus the poisoning theory remains a hypothesis.
