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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.
After World War II, the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in a “cold” war: an ideological conflict that was waged through political rhetoric, military posturing, espionage, and an arms race. Would it lead to WWIII? It didn’t, but at the time, people weren’t so sure. Here’s an incredible story from that era.
THE PEACE CONFERENCE
In the late 1940s, Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union, ordered a prominent Russian film director named Sergei Gerasimov to go to New York to attend a left-wing gathering called the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace.
Gerasimov dutifully attended the conference, and that’s pretty much all there was to the story for the next 50 years. Then in 2003, British film critic Michael Munn wrote a book entitled John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, in which he tells a more sinister tale of Gerasimov’s trip to the United States and its aftermath. Munn says he got the story from actor/director Orson Welles, who heard it through contacts in the Soviet film industry.
MARKED MAN
According to Munn, while Gerasimov was in New York he learned of the leadership role that John Wayne, one of America’s biggest movie stars, was playing in driving communists out of Hollywood. Wayne was the president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a right-wing group dedicated to compiling a “blacklist” of communists working in the film industry. The blacklist was used to destroy the careers of hundreds of actors, screenwriters, and directors, either because of alleged communist sympathies or simply because they refused to testify before Congressional investigating committees.
When Gerasimov returned home and reported the havoc that Wayne was wreaking on communist efforts to infiltrate the film industry, Munn’s story goes, Staling became so angry that he dispatched a team of KGB hit men to California. Their orders: kill John Wayne.
BACKLOT JUSTICE
The KGB killers really did come to California, Munn writes, and they even made it onto the Warner Brothers lot, where “Duke” Wayne had an office. Disguised as FBI agents, they checked in at the front gate and were given directions to Wayne’s office. (This part of the story, says Munn, was told to him by Yakina Canutt, a Hollywood stuntman and one of Wayne’s closest friends.)
Luckily for the Duke, FBI informants had already learned of the plot. As the fake FBI agents made their way across the studio lot, real FBI agents hid in the back rooms of Wayne’s office whle he and a screenwriter named James Grant sat in the front room, pretending to be working. When the hit men entered, the FBI agents pounced, disarming and handcuffing the killers before they could harm Wayne.
Those G-men must have been big John Wayne fans, because they let him deal with the killers his own way: at Wayne’s direction, the FBI men loaded the KGB agents into cars and drove them to a secluded beach north of Los Angeles. At the beach the KGB men, still handcuffed, were marched down to the surf and were made to kneel in wet sand. Then as the FBI agents looked on approvingly, Wayne and Grant drew pistols and aimed them at the heads of the KGB men. “On the count of three,” Wayne told Grant. “One…two…THREE!”
more …
The New York Times has a slideshow of famous faked photographs, including Abraham Lincoln’s head on John Calhoun’s body and Stalin’s erasure of his enemies. Shown above is the before and after photo manipulation where Nikolai Yezhov, a one-time head of Soviet’s secret police NKVD and a central player in Stalin’s Great Purge was himself purged – from life and this photograph.
Link via Instapundit
The story of how Felix Dadaev came to be Stalin’s body double is somewhat similar to the plotline of the movie “Dave,” except set in Soviet Russia and with a larger dose of paranoia. According to the Daily Mail:
Felix Dadaev, a dancer and juggler who, amid the desperate defence against Hitler’s invading armies, was ordered to the Kremlin to work as Stalin’s body double. For more than half a century, Dadaev remained silent, fearing a death sentence should he dare to open his mouth.
But at the age of 88, and with the apparent approval of the Putin regime, he has finally come forward to tell a quite remarkable story. It takes him from the ruined streets of Grozny all the way to Yalta on the Black Sea coast for the historic three-powers showdown, where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt fought to determine the shape of post-war Europe. Dadaev’s new autobiography explains that he was one of four men employed to impersonate the supreme leader, taking his place in motorcades, at rallies, on newsreel footage and wherever – as at Yalta – Stalin feared he was in particular danger.
Hit the Link to read up on the details.
