Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin

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Joseph Stalin, second leader of the Soviet Union, died on 5 March 1953 at his Kuntsevo Dacha after suffering a stroke, at age 74. He was given a state funeral in Moscow on 9 March, with four days of national mourning declared. On the day of the funeral, of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens visiting the capital to pay their respects, at least 109 were later acknowledged to have died in a crowd crush. Stalin's body was embalmed and interred in Lenin's Mausoleum until 1961, when it was moved to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The members of Stalin's inner circle in charge of organizing his funeral were Nikita Khrushchev, then-head of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party; Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD; Georgy Malenkov, the chairman of the Presidium; and Vyacheslav Molotov, previously the Soviet Union's Minister of Foreign Affairs.

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