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.
Anna Tieke
Joseph Stalin died in 1953 and his successors began, little by little, to identify and, between themselves, discuss some of the atrocities over which the dictator had presided. A cautious but perceptible political thaw ensued. Supported by the International Red Cross, Rudolf Tieke tried to find out what had happened to his wife and children. At the end of 1955 he got hold of an address for his daughter. He sought and obtained permission to leave the location of his internal exile and go to his daughter in Kazakhstan where, after eighteen years, father and daughter were reunited. By this time Ursula had acquired a husband of her own in the form of Meier Schwartz, a former Gulag inmate originally from Romania: the couple had two children. Rudolf Tieke also managed to re-establish contact with his younger son, Günter and received the (false) information from the security services on the circumstances surrounding the deaths of his wife and elder son.