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
Censorship in the Soviet Union the war. Defeats of the Red Army in literature were forbidden, as were depictions of trepidation in Soviet military characters. Pressure from the "Pravda" prompted authors like Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev to redact a section in "The Young Guard" where a child reads in the eyes of a dying Russian sailor the words "We are crushed." Since Stalin regularly read "Pravda", which was itself censored by Glavlit, it was wise for an author to obey "Pravda"’s advice. Also, Joseph Stalin handpicked who received the Stalin Prize, further incentivizing an author’s pandering to Stalin’s tastes, besides the obvious risks involved with disregarding