Purim
There is a tale in the Hasidic Chabad movement that supposedly Joseph Stalin died as a result of some metaphysical intervention of the seventh Chabad leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, during the recitation of a discourse at a public Purim Farbrengen. Stalin was suddenly paralyzed on 1 March 1953, which corresponds to Purim 1953, and died 4 days later. Due to Stalin's death, nationwide pogroms against Jews throughout the Soviet Union were averted, as Stalin's infamous doctors' plot was halted.
Early life of Joseph Stalin
When Stalin was twelve, he was seriously injured after having been hit by a phaeton. He was hospitalised in Tiflis for several months, and sustained a lifelong disability to his left arm. His father subsequently kidnapped him and enrolled him as an apprentice cobbler in the factory; this would be Stalin's only experience as a worker. According to Stalin's biographer Robert Service, this was Stalin's "first experience with capitalism", and it was "raw, harsh and dispiriting". Several priests from Gori retrieved the boy, after which Beso cut all contact with his wife and son. In February 1892, Stalin's school teachers took him and the other pupils to witness the public hanging of several peasant bandits; Stalin and his friends sympathised with the condemned. The event left a deep and lasting impression on him. Stalin had decided that he wanted to become a local administrator so that he could deal with the problems of poverty that affected the population around Gori. Despite his Christian upbringing, he had become an atheist after contemplating the problem of evil and learning about evolution through Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species".