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.
Karl Wilhelm Fricke
Looking back from more than half a century later, in 2013 Fricke opined that he had been fortunate not to have been kidnapped and interrogated by the Stasi a couple of years earlier than he was. Joseph Stalin had died in March 1953, and East Germany underwent its own (violently suppressed) popular revolt later the same year. Khrushchev delivered one of the world's best remembered secret speeches in February 1956. Although it was not always immediately apparent, the political temperature in the power hubs of East Berlin and Moscow did become less nervous as the 1950s progressed, and there was an accompanying diminution in the savagery with which the regime treated its identified enemies. Fricke was released in 1959 and ordered back to West Berlin: he was content to comply.