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
Premier of the Soviet Union Council of People's Commissars published decrees and decisions that were binding throughout the USSR. During 1946, the Council of People's Commissars was transformed into the Council of Ministers (Sovmin) at both all-Union and Union Republic levels. After Khrushchev's ouster during 1964, a plenum of the Party's Central Committee (CC) forbade any single person to have the two most powerful jobs of the country (the office of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Premier) and Kosygin was in charge of economic administration in his role as Premier of the Council of Ministers of the