From the completion of the mausoleum until the end of the Soviet Union, this building was considered a central attraction and place of worship in the socialist world. During the military parades and marches on Red Square, heads of state appeared from the central stand on the roof of the mausoleum until the mid-1990s. In 1953 the body of the deceased Lenin successor Joseph Stalin was embalmed and laid out in the mausoleum. Eight years later, however, he was removed from the mausoleum in the course of the so called De-Stalinization and buried at the Kremlin wall.