Joseph Stalin suffered a massive stroke in his bedroom in 1953, but his guards were so utterly terrified of being executed for disturbing him that they waited for hours to check on his well-being.

A closer look

Joseph Stalin suffered a massive stroke in his bedroom in 1953, but his guards were so utterly terrified of being executed for disturbing him that they waited for hours to check on his well-being. Even after they found him paralyzed in a puddle of his own urine, it took over a day to get medical help because Stalin had recently purged, imprisoned, or killed most of the competent doctors in Moscow. The physicians who did arrive were too frightened to touch him or prescribe anything, effectively letting the brutal dictator slowly suffocate from his own self-inflicted reign of terror. It is perhaps the most poetically just death in the history of totalitarianism, perfectly illustrating that when you build a regime entirely on mortal fear, the paranoia will inevitably come back to literally kill you