Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin amassed crowd. Khrushchev provided an estimate that 109 people died in the crowd. According to "Ogoniok", the mourners included the following foreign dignitaries: 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
History of the Soviet Union devastated much of the USSR with about one out of every three World War II deaths representing a citizen of the Soviet Union. After World War II the Soviet Union's armies occupied Central and Eastern Europe, where socialist governments took power. By 1949 the Cold War had started between the Western Bloc and the Eastern (Soviet) Bloc, with the Warsaw Pact pitched against NATO in Europe. After 1945 Stalin did not directly engage in any wars. Stalin continued his totalitarian rule until his death in 1953. In the USSR, the eleven-year period from the death of Joseph Stalin (1953) to