How Every Soviet Leader DIED

Most men on this channel were killed by their enemies or by the people they ruled. The Soviet Union was different. It was the one system that kept turning on its own: an ice axe ordered from the Kremlin, a secret-police chief shot in a cellar by the men he had sat beside days earlier, a leader toppled by the protege he personally promoted. Then, once the killing slowed, a run of old men who simply died in office, one after another, so fast the funerals blurred together. This documentary walks through the deaths of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who buried the entire country he was handed, then outlived it by 31 years. It doubles as the secret history of the USSR, from the founder embalmed forever on Red Square to the last leader who died a private citizen. Every date and detail in this video is drawn from news archives and published histories. Purge and famine death tolls are given as "estimated" or "millions."