The event itself was quite banal — the dismal, solitary end of a life. Joseph Stalin, at the time unarguably the most powerful man in the world, died alone seventy years ago today in his dacha, Kuntsevo, in the woods outside of Moscow.

He had been carousing the night before with his closest comrades — Lavrentiy Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and a few others. They had watched a film and drunk quite a bit, and Stalin saw them off early in the morning in a very good mood.

He retired to his office, where he slept on a couch with instructions not to be disturbed. There on March 5, 1953, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. A long, slow final agony brought his sanguinary reign to an end.