Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin On 5 March 1953, at 21:50 EET, Joseph Stalin, the second leader of the Soviet Union, died at the Kuntsevo Dacha aged 74 after suffering a stroke. After four days of national mourning, Stalin was given a state funeral and then buried in Lenin's Mausoleum on 9 March. Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrentiy Beria were in charge of organizing the funeral. On 6 March, the coffin with Stalin's body was displayed at the Hall of Columns in the House of the Unions and it stayed there for three days. On
Joseph Stalin been characterised as a totalitarian state, with Stalin its authoritarian leader. Various biographers have described him as a dictator, an autocrat, or accused him of practicing Caesarism. Montefiore argued that while Stalin initially ruled as part of a Communist Party oligarchy, in 1934 the Soviet government transformed from this oligarchy into a personal dictatorship, with Stalin only becoming "absolute dictator" between March and June 1937, when senior military and NKVD figures were eliminated. According to Kotkin, Stalin "built a personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship". In both the Soviet Union and elsewhere he came to be portrayed as an "Oriental