Why Joseph Stalin ordered a hit on John Wayne in the 1950s
The defining concept of the 2020s is the parasocial relationship, the feeling that you know someone personally simply through their celebrity or their work in realms such as the film industry. On some level, we are all vulnerable to that feeling, whether we’re Joseph Everyman or Joseph Stalin.
The idea of the parasocial relationship has become something of a buzzword, a go-to phrase to explain why someone profoundly ill and profoundly lonely thinks Taylor Swift is in love with them, swearing blind that they’re meant to be because they once made eye contact with them at a concert. Not all parasocial relationships are like that, though.
The majority of them are perfectly harmless, like wanting to interject in your favourite podcast or wanting to go for a drink with your favourite rock star. They can be sources of great joy, but don’t confuse your parasocial relationship with actually knowing them. That’s when things start getting weird and intense, and you start feeling let down and betrayed by someone that, I really can’t stress this enough, you don’t know.
Most of us are not powerful enough to do anything about this, save for sending a few mean posts on X, but there are some people who can do absolutely anything they want – people like Joseph Stalin. He was an absolutely massive fan of cowboy movies, screening them well into the night and forcing several of his underlings to join him on these movie marathons. Stands to reason, then, that he was a huge fan of arguably the biggest figure in westerns, John Wayne.
Then, like many people since, he started listening not to what the characters that ‘The Duke’ played said, but what he himself had to say, and his affection for the man changed overnight.
You see, it was common in Hollywood to harbour Marxist or leftist sympathies. In the wonderful world that was the late 1940s and early ’50s, this might as well have meant you were red as blood and were a Soviet spy taking down the USA from the inside. One of the biggest voices supporting this viewpoint was Marion Robert Morrison, otherwise known as John Wayne. Once Stalin became aware of the actor’s pronounced hatred for all things commie, he plotted to get his revenge.
This was revenge in the form of a full-on assassination attempt. One that has gone down in history as one of the surefire signs that the Soviet premier was losing his marbles (and he very much was by the early ’50s), however, is it entirely true?
The source we have stating it as fact came from a book by Michael Munn, who was told about this by none other than Orson Welles. Munn knows how this sounds, but he also has no reason to doubt the man he was writing the memoirs of at the time.
However, Welles was nothing if not a storyteller. His relationship with the truth was tricky at the best of times. Though Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev did say to Wayne himself that Stalin had put the hit out on him, and that he personally had cancelled the contract on the actor’s life, however, that may have been the more Western-friendly Khrushchev trying to save face.
The truth is, we’ll never really know for sure, but knowing Stalin’s mental state at the end of his life, it’s entirely possible.