On March 9, 1953, four days after Joseph Stalin’s death, 35,000 mourners gathered in Red Square to view his embalmed body. Officials placed the corpse alongside Vladimir Lenin’s in the Red Square mausoleum, where it remained until Oct. 31, 1961. On that day—with de-Stalinization in full swing and the government keen to wipe out Stalin’s cult of personality—police removed Stalin’s rigid corpse in the dead of night. TIME described Stalin’s subsequent burial as “the Kremlin equivalent of a third-class funeral.” Police buried his body behind the mausoleum in a cemetery reserved for “faintly dubious or dimly famous Red heroes.”
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