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.
James Lewin
The last sign of life from James Lewin comes on 10 October 1936 when he attended a meeting of the Moscow Society of Neuropathology and Psychiatry. In the conference proceedings, there is a discussion remark Lewin was recorded to have made in an exchange with Arthur Kronfeld. After that, NKVD records indicate that James Lewin was a victim of the Stalinist purges (specifically, the so-called National Operations of the NKVD targeting Germans). On 8 September 1937 he was arrested, and at the end of October he confessed to alleged "anti-Soviet - counter revolutionary activities, spying for the Gestapo, and the planning of terrorist attacks" . Such confessions are well-known to be factually unreliable based on other examples in which similar confessions were extracted under torture. For instance, while details of Lewin's family are accurate in the records, the recorded minutes of the interrogation allege that Lewin - an exiled Jew - had operated an ornamental fish store in Paris that was used as cover for Gestapo meetings. He was also alleged to have been running a production laboratory for chemical and bacteriological weapons at his Moscow apartment. Lewin and his case were transferred to Chelyabinsk and, on 31 December 1937, he was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed the same day. He was probably buried in the mass grave with other victims of Stalinist oppression at Golden Mountain (Zlata Gora).