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
Rise of Joseph Stalin Rise of Joseph Stalin Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. In the years following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Stalin rose to become the leader of the Soviet Union. After growing up in Georgia, Stalin conducted discreet activities for the Bolshevik Party for twelve years before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Following the October Revolution, Stalin took military positions in the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War. Stalin was one of the Bolsheviks' chief operatives in the Caucasus and grew