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.
James Lewin
The last sign of life from James Lewin comes on 10 October 1936 when he attended a meeting of the Moscow Society of Neuropathology and Psychiatry. In the conference proceedings, there is a discussion remark Lewin was recorded to have made in an exchange with Arthur Kronfeld. After that, NKVD records indicate that James Lewin was a victim of the Stalinist purges (specifically, the so-called National Operations of the NKVD targeting Germans). On 8 September 1937 he was arrested, and at the end of October he confessed to alleged "anti-Soviet - counter revolutionary activities, spying for the Gestapo, and the planning of terrorist attacks" . Such confessions are well-known to be factually unreliable based on other examples in which similar confessions were extracted under torture. For instance, while details of Lewin's family are accurate in the records, the recorded minutes of the interrogation allege that Lewin - an exiled Jew - had operated an ornamental fish store in Paris that was used as cover for Gestapo meetings. He was also alleged to have been running a production laboratory for chemical and bacteriological weapons at his Moscow apartment. Lewin and his case were transferred to Chelyabinsk and, on 31 December 1937, he was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed the same day. He was probably buried in the mass grave with other victims of Stalinist oppression at Golden Mountain (Zlata Gora).