Stalin Poisoned?

Stalin is a good candidate for the most evil person in history–not without competitors, of course, Lenin for his seminal influence and Mao for sheer numbers–so I have always been offended by the fact that Stalin died a natural death. The New York Times reports on an about-to-be-released book titled “Stalin’s Last Crime,” which argues that Stalin was poisoned by his Politburo colleagues, Khrushchev, Beria and Molotov.
And the Independent remembers Stalin, noting how his influence lives on:
“Saddam Hussein became obsessed with Stalin’s political theories during his time in exile in Egypt in the early 1960s. After the 1968 revolution, Saddam embarked on the ‘Stalinization of Iraq’ by ruthlessly building a one-party state based on hierarchy, secrecy and discipline. He borrowed Stalin’s vicious tactic of staging show-trials, and began to discover ‘Zionist spy-rings’ across the country. Coughlin explains that ‘the only significant difference between Saddam’s purges and Stalin’s terror is that in Iraq there were no gulags; with a few exceptions, Saddam’s intended victims stood no chance of survival'”. Once again we see the alliance, if not fusion, of Communism and fascism.