Wake Up With A Did You Know: Stalin Tried To Have John Wayne Murdered

That there is John Wayne. Some of you younger stoolies might not know who he is, but he was one of the biggest actors in the world for a period of time. He became a meme for what it meant to be an American man for a generation. I know who he is because when I was little I would visit my grandpa who was suffering from Alzheimers and he'd always make me watch "The Longest Day" on VHS with him because he didn't remember that we had watched it the weekend before. Anyways, he was HUGE icon in his time and he was VERY anti-communist. If you're thinking "Chief, this was the Cold War. Wasn't everyone in America anti-communist". No, Timmy, they weren't. Many in Hollywood were communist sympathizers for a period of time. They thought a world with equality for everyone enforced by the state sounded very nice. This was before the "Gulag Archipelago" was widely published in the West and before people learned that Stalin and killed 30 million of his own people and when the Soviets collectivized the farms in Ukraine there were 6 million Ukranians that starved to death. 

So anywho, John Wayne was this big American actor who fucking hated the Soviets and communism and that was bad for business especially because Joseph Stalin LOVED movies. Loved it AND realized how important it was. He was from the Lenin coaching tree and this is was Lenin said about movies

"Of all the arts, for us, cinema is the most important"--Vlad Lenin

Not uncommon for evil dictators to be obsessed with the movies. Hitler and Goebbels were big into cinematic propaganda. Kim Jong Il fancied himself a movie director. and Muammar Gaddafi had a channel on tv that just played his personal favorite movie on loop 24 hours a day. Stalin was no different. He had a private movie theater built in each of his houses while he was in power and he was familiar with movies coming out of the West. Every time he'd turn on his TV he'd see John Wayne up there talking shit about what about bad guy he was and the evils of communism and eventually Stalin snapped and decided to have John Wayne murdered. 

Stalin had an entire division of the KGB dedicated to assassinations called the 13th Department and they set their sights on John Wayne. Wayne was tipped off about the threat to his life and he reportedly replied "no god damn commie is going to scare me" just as you would expect. The FBI eventually found out about this plot to kill Wayne and they showed up on his movie set to tell him as well and John Wayne, allegedly, said to let them come find him and he would deal with the commie assassins himself which is...pretty bad ass. 

When push came to shove though the FBI actually got involved. The KGB came to John Wayne's office, pretending to be FBI agents in an attempt to kidnap and then murder John Wayne. When they arrived in the office, the real FBI burst in and arrested the Soviet KGB agents. This is a real story, confirmed by the declassified documents and how it hasn't been made into a movie yet I have NO idea. Incredible story. Fucking wild time. 

Have a good day. Here is John Wayne saying the Pledge of Allegiance