Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Stalin, the second leader of the Soviet Union, spent his final hours completely alone. By the time anyone realized something was wrong, it was already too late. Word of his death set off national mourning, but the funeral crowds that flooded Moscow turned deadly for people who had only come to grieve. The men who ran his government afterward had watched each other for years, and some would turn on one another within months. This documentary follows the strange quiet before Stalin's death and the chaos his funeral caused in the streets. It also follows the uneasy scramble for power once his rule ended without a successor.

• 2. The Silence at Kuntsevo

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  Stalin's health started failing near the end of the Second World War, undermined by atherosclerosis from heavy smoking. He suffered a mild stroke around the time of the Victory Parade in May 1945. A severe heart attack followed in October 1945.

  Decades later, historian and former senior officer Dmitry Volkogonov reconstructed the final days from Soviet accounts. These included Pravda's official announcements and an English translation soon printed in The Current Digest of the Soviet Press.

  On the 28th of February 1953, Stalin gathered a small circle for an evening of food and drinking. The group included Lavrentiy Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and a few others. The guests dispersed around 5:00 a.m. on the 1st of March. Khrushchev recalled that Stalin had drunk heavily and seemed in good spirits before retiring to his private quarters.

  No sound came from his room all through Sunday, the 1st of March. The space was fitted with sensors meant to alert staff and guards to any movement. At about 11:00 p.m. that night, Stalin's housekeeper stepped in cautiously and found him lying on the floor. He wore pajama trousers and a shirt, unconscious and breathing heavily, incontinent and unresponsive to attempts to rouse him.

  At 7:00 a.m. on the 2nd of March, Beria arrived with a group of medical experts to examine him. Their examination found a blood pressure of 190/110 and paralysis on his right side. They diagnosed a hemorrhagic stroke in the left middle cerebral artery, consistent with his known history of uncontrolled hypertension. Over the next two days, doctors tried several treatments to lower his blood pressure, which had climbed to 210/120. Twice they applied eight leeches each to his neck and face.

  Despite the treatment, Stalin's condition kept worsening, and he died at 9:50 p.m. on the 5th of March 1953, at age 74. The announcement came the next day on Radio Moscow, read by Yuri Levitan.

  His body was taken to an undisclosed location for an autopsy, then embalmed for public display. The full report stayed out of reach until the 2010s. Pravda published its central findings in a special bulletin on the 7th of March 1953. The findings described a large hemorrhage beneath the surface of the brain's left side. They also noted a thickened left heart ventricle, further hemorrhages in the heart muscle and stomach lining, and hardened arteries tied to his hypertension. The bulletin said the hemorrhage made the outcome irreversible from the moment it struck. As it put it, "all treatment attempts could not have led to a favorable outcome and prevent a fatal end."

  That official account closed off one explanation, but not every question about the delay in getting Stalin help would be so easily settled.

• 3. Whispers of Poison

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  Lavrentiy Beria drew the most suspicion, partly for a remark he reportedly made to Molotov: that he had "took him out" at one point. Investigators also pointed to Beria's seemingly willful delay in getting Stalin medical treatment. Yet the physical evidence from the autopsy matched extracranial changes commonly seen in stroke victims, not signs of a plot.

  Sergo Beria, Lavrentiy's son, said his mother Nina warned her husband: "Your position now is even more precarious than when Stalin was alive." The warning proved accurate. In June 1953, Beria was arrested and charged with a range of crimes, though none of them concerned Stalin's death. The Supreme Court of the Soviet Union convicted him of treason, terrorism and counter-revolutionary activity on the 23rd of December 1953. He was executed that same day, shot by General Pavel Batitsky.

  Historians Vladimir Naumov and Jonathan Brent developed a different theory: that Stalin was poisoned with warfarin, most likely by Beria. Their case rests on mentions of stomach hemorrhaging that were excised from his autopsy record. No firm evidence has surfaced to confirm it, though the theory persists among some historians.

  Whatever the cause, the argument over how Stalin died would never fully settle, even as his body was prepared for public view.

• 4. Lying in State

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  Four men decided how the country would say goodbye to Stalin. Nikita Khrushchev led the Moscow branch of the Communist Party. Lavrentiy Beria ran the NKVD. Georgy Malenkov chaired the Presidium. Vyacheslav Molotov had formerly served as the Soviet Union's Minister of Foreign Affairs.

  On the 6th of March, Stalin's coffin went on display in the Hall of Columns at the House of the Unions. It stayed there for three days. On the 9th of March, the body moved to Red Square ahead of its interment in Lenin's Mausoleum. Khrushchev, Malenkov, Molotov and Beria each delivered speeches before pallbearers carried the coffin inside.

  As the body was lowered into the mausoleum, the whole country observed a moment of silence at noon Moscow time. The Kremlin Clock's bells struck the hour, sirens and horns sounded across the country, and a 21-gun salute fired from inside the Kremlin. Mongolia, China and North Korea held similar observances of their own. Once the silence ended, a military band played the Soviet State Anthem, and the Moscow Garrison paraded in Stalin's honor.

  Stalin's embalmed body would lie in Lenin's Mausoleum for eight years, until it was moved out to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in 1961.

• 5. Crushed by the Crowd

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  Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens converged on Moscow to pay their respects. Soldiers had parked Soviet Army trucks across side streets to control the crowds, and the barriers became death traps. Mourners were pressed against building walls and the trucks themselves, and some were trampled along with mounted police and their horses.

  The Soviet government did not report the disaster at the time, so the exact death toll went unrecorded in the moment. Khrushchev later put the toll at 109 dead, an estimate that remains the only figure historians have to work with.

  Despite the chaos in the streets, dignitaries from across the world had already gathered inside to witness Stalin's burial.

• 6. World Leaders Assemble

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  The dignitaries who traveled to Moscow, according to the magazine Ogoniok, included Czechoslovakia's Klement Gottwald, its president and party chairman. Poland sent Bolesław Bierut, its prime minister and secretary general of the Polish United Workers' Party. Bulgaria sent Valko Chervenkov, its prime minister and the general secretary of its Communist Party. France's Jacques Duclos came as interim general secretary of the French Communist Party. Romania sent Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, president of its State Council, prime minister, and first secretary of the Romanian Workers' Party. East Germany sent Otto Grotewohl, chairman of its Council of Ministers.

  Spain's Dolores Ibárruri, general secretary of its Communist Party, attended, and so did Finland's prime minister, Urho Kekkonen. Albania's vice-premier, Spiro Koleka, made the trip, alongside Austria's party chairman, Johann Koplenig. Italy sent two representatives: Pietro Nenni, secretary of the Italian Socialist Party, and Palmiro Togliatti, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party. Britain's Harry Pollitt, general secretary of its Communist Party, attended, as did Hungary's Mátyás Rákosi, chairman of its Council of Ministers. West Germany's Max Reimann came, along with Poland's defence minister, Konstantin Rokossovsky. Mongolia's prime minister, Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal, attended, and so did East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party. China's premier, Zhou Enlai, rounded out the list of foreign dignitaries that Ogoniok recorded.

  Gottwald did not make it home. He died on the 14th of March 1953, shortly after the funeral, when one of his arteries burst.

• 7. Words from Afar

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  Enver Hoxha, Albania's prime minister, stayed away from Stalin's funeral, worried that leaving the country might embolden rivals inside the Party of Labour of Albania. His deputy, Mehmet Shehu, made the same calculation and also remained in Albania. Instead, Hoxha pledged eternal allegiance to the dead Soviet leader from home.

  In Guatemala, officials serving under President Jacobo Árbenz called Stalin a "great statesman and leader... whose passing is mourned by all progressive men." Guatemala's Congress also observed a formal minute of silence in his honor. In Washington, President Eisenhower had Secretary of State John Foster Dulles send a message of condolence through the American Embassy to the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

  Patriarch Alexy I wrote a personal statement of condolence to the Soviet Council of Ministers, calling Stalin's death "a heavy grief for our Fatherland." He added that the Russian Orthodox Church would never forget Stalin's "benevolent attitude to Church needs." He promised "eternal memory to him with a special feeling of abiding love." Alexy I also delivered a eulogy on the day of the funeral, and fellow Orthodox official Nicholas Yarushevich attended and mourned alongside him.

  None of these tributes answered the question already forming inside the Kremlin: who would run the country now that Stalin was gone.

• 8. Power Without a Plan

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  Stalin died without naming a successor or leaving any process for a peaceful transfer of power. The Central Committee met on the very day he died. By its end, Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev had emerged as the party's dominant figures.

  Eight senior figures sat on the Presidium of the Central Committee: Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich and Anastas Mikoyan. The system of collective leadership was restored around them, with new measures meant to stop any single member from seizing autocratic control.

  Economic policy scaled back the mass construction projects, put new weight on house building, and eased taxes on the peasantry to encourage production. Doctors who had been imprisoned were released, and the anti-Semitic purges came to a stop. A mass amnesty for certain categories of convicts followed, cutting the country's prison population roughly in half. By April 1953, torture was formally banned as the state security and Gulag systems were reformed.

  Abroad, the new leadership also began softening Stalin's foreign policy, seeking rapprochement with Yugoslavia and a calmer relationship with the United States. That shift culminated in July 1953, when negotiators finally reached an agreement to end the Korean War.