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.
Joseph Stalin
Official records reveal 799,455 documented executions in the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1953; 681,692 of these were carried out between 1937 and 1938, the years of the Great Purge. However, according to Michael Ellman, the best modern estimate for the number of repression deaths during the Great Purge is 950,000–1.2 million, which includes executions, deaths in detention, or soon after their release. In addition, while archival data shows that 1,053,829 perished in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953, the current historical consensus is that of the 18 million people who passed through the Gulag system from 1930 to 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7 million died as a result of their incarceration. The historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft and Michael Ellman attribute roughly 3 million deaths to the Stalinist regime, including executions and deaths from criminal negligence. The estimates of famine deaths have varied from 5.5–6.5 million to 8.7 million. The American historian Timothy D. Snyder summarizes modern data, made after the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s, and concludes that Stalin was directly responsible for 6 million deaths along with three million indirect deaths. He notes that the estimate is far lower than the estimates of 20 million or above which were made before access to the archives. He also compares this number to the estimate of 11–12 million non-combatants killed by the Nazi regime, thereby negating claims that Stalin killed more than Hitler.