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
Racism in the Soviet Union Those who knew Stalin, such as Khrushchev, suggest that Stalin had long harboured negative sentiments toward Jews that had manifested themselves before the 1917 Revolution. Antisemitism in the Soviet Union commenced openly as a campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitan" (a supposed euphemism for "Jew"). In his speech entitled "On Several Reasons for the Lag in Soviet Dramaturgy" at a plenary session of the board of the Soviet Writers' Union in December 1948, Alexander Fadeyev equated the cosmopolitans with the Jews. In this campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitan", many leading Jewish writers and artists were killed. The Soviet press accused the