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.
Joseph Stalin
Official records reveal 799,455 documented executions in the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1953; 681,692 of these were carried out between 1937 and 1938, the years of the Great Purge. However, according to Michael Ellman, the best modern estimate for the number of repression deaths during the Great Purge is 950,000–1.2 million, which includes executions, deaths in detention, or soon after their release. In addition, while archival data shows that 1,053,829 perished in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953, the current historical consensus is that of the 18 million people who passed through the Gulag system from 1930 to 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7 million died as a result of their incarceration. The historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft and Michael Ellman attribute roughly 3 million deaths to the Stalinist regime, including executions and deaths from criminal negligence. The estimates of famine deaths have varied from 5.5–6.5 million to 8.7 million. The American historian Timothy D. Snyder summarizes modern data, made after the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s, and concludes that Stalin was directly responsible for 6 million deaths along with three million indirect deaths. He notes that the estimate is far lower than the estimates of 20 million or above which were made before access to the archives. He also compares this number to the estimate of 11–12 million non-combatants killed by the Nazi regime, thereby negating claims that Stalin killed more than Hitler.