The Plot To Kill Stalin

1958 · Playhouse 90

" The Plot to Kill Stalin " was an American television play broadcast on September 25, 1958, on the CBS television network . It was the first episode of the third season of the anthology television series Playhouse 90 . Delbert Mann was the director, and the cast included Melvyn Douglas as Joseph Stalin , Eli Wallach as Stalin's personal secretary, and Oskar Homolka as Nikita Khrushchev . It was nominated for two Sylvania Television Awards : as the outstanding telecast of 1958 and for Douglas as outstanding actor in a television program. The production, set during the final months of Stalin's life, received generally positive reviews in the American press, but the Soviet Union protested the depiction of Krushchev's alleged role in Stalin's death and retaliated by closing CBS's Moscow news bureau and ordering its Moscow correspondent to leave the country.