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A common item of interest on social media is a rather gruesome anecdote attributed to Soviet leader Josef Stalin, which describes him purportedly plucking a live chicken in order to demonstrate how easy it is to govern stupid people: We found no sources for this anecdote that were contemporaneous with Stalin's life (he died in 1953), nor from the next few decades afterwards. The earliest recountings of it seem to date from the early 1990s or late 1980s, which is consistent with the following excerpt from a 1988 New Yorker article that attributes it to the mid-1980s writings of anti-Stalinist Soviet/Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov: Aitmatov appears to be the source of this tale, but as noted in the above New Yorker article and a 2008 Reuters obituary for Aitmatov, he wrote in elliptical, allegorical ways, and his works often interwove popular myths and folktales to create allegorical themes populated with down-to-earth characters. Aitmatov acknowledged that of himself as well, writing in the introduction to his novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years: Given that Aitmatov is the apparent source for this anecdote, that it did not first appear until some 30 years after Stalin's death, and that Aitmatov was known for his use of allegory, most likely the tale is not a literal account of something Stalin did, but rather an illustrative sketch that Aitmatov either invented himself or heard elsewhere and subsequently attributed to Stalin. We therefore rate this claim Legend.
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