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.
The Death of Stalin
The Radio Moscow portion is a retelling of an apocryphal story first recorded in Solomon Volkov's book "Testimony". However, as told by Volkov, it was Maria Yudina who was woken up in the middle of the night to be brought in to record, and the recording brought Stalin to tears, moving him to pay Yudina 20,000 rubles in appreciation. The story subsequently served as the loose basis for the 1989 BBC radio play "The Stalin Sonata" written by David Zane Mairowitz.