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.
Rise of Joseph Stalin
After Lenin's death, a struggle for power began. Here Stalin, through his office as General Secretary of the Central Committee could use the antagonism that already existed within the Bolshevik Party's leading. This included the Bolshevik Party's supreme organ, the Politburo, but was not limited to it. Also several People's Commissars (or Ministers in other countries) were involved in the party's internal personal as well as political struggles. Of the party's most well-known names, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev represented the intellectual "left wing" whilst Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky and Alexei Rykov represented the trade unionist "right wing". But the most prominent Bolshevik after Lenin's death was Leon Trotsky, who more or less completely comprised a group of his own. None of these persons would survive Stalin or die naturally.