"JUST KIDDING..."

For obvious reasons, Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin found it prudent to surround himself with highly-trained bodyguards who followed him everywhere he went. Well, almost everywhere he went. He issued standing orders that his bedchambers were off-limits to his protectors and that they should never enter therein.

One day, the guards heard bloodcurdling shrieks behind Stalin's bedroom door. They, fearing that Stalin was being assassinated, rushed in only to find out that they were the targets of Stalin's playful sense of humor and that Stalin was screaming merely to find out if his bedroom-avoidance directive would be honored if his men thought that he was in mortal peril.

As a consequence of these loyal myrmidons being willing to take the initiative and disobey orders when they thought it was necessary to do so to save Stalin's life, he ordered them to be executed.

Stalin died in 1953 several days after suffering a stroke. Ironically, at the stroke's onset, he was in his bedroom. When he failed to request his normal morning tea, his guards suspected that something was drastically wrong, but, recalling what had happened to their predecessors, they delayed twelve hours before sending in one very courageous individual who found a urine-soaked Stalin collapsed on the floor. Even more ironically, Stalin had, in a fit of paranoia, recently purged his high-ranking physicians, and they had to dispense their medical advice for his treatment (which included the administration of leeches and the intake of nutrition via enemas) from behind the barbed wire of the Gulags.

It is suspected by many historians that Stalin's Security Chief, Lavrenti Beria, as well as Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, conspired with other Poliburo members to induce the stroke in Stalin by poisoning him with the blood thinner Warfarin. These officials were purportedly concerned that Stalin's megalomania, impulsiveness, and aforementioned paranoia would provoke him into launching a nuclear war with the United States. Or, maybe they were just fans of John Wayne.