Short man Stalin makes the papers!

I was startled to see Joseph Stalin (5ft 4ins) making an appearance in today's News of the World.

Entitled Curse of Stalin, the story attempts to pin the deaths of the Polish political elite on the famously short dictator. Everyone knows Stalin racked up an horrendously large death toll in his time, including many Poles, but to say he is still up to his usual tricks is going some.

The politicians were killed in a plane crash on their way to a memorial for officers killed in an atrocity ordered by Stalin. And so, in some quasi-Dan Brown fantasy cooked up by hack Philip Whiteside, the piece tacitly suggests that the only possible culprit for this tragic event is Stalin himself.

In the fetid imagination of the Screws hack that he must see a godlike Stalin reaching beyond his grave, grabbing the plane out of the sky and saying to the Poles: "There! That's what you get for rejecting Communism! Your democratic ideals make me sick!"

And promptly slamming the plane down to earth.

Hmmm. Or perhaps the plane was just caught in some fog. It's hard to tell which is more likely.