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Hands on the Tiller. Swiftly but quietly, the Soviet world put on mourning. The momentous news had come piece by piece over 48 hours, every word carefully prepared and timed to cushion the shock. Everything about it suggested that a fresh, firm hand had taken over the instant Joseph Stalin's had begun to falter.
The world awoke next day to learn that his successor already had stepped into office (see below), that Stalin's body was in the hands of the embalmers (the same who mummified Lenin). His funeral date had been set, and the Supreme Soviet had been summoned for an emergency session. The dictator was dead, but dictatorship continued; the efficiency of all this suggested to the outside world that Stalin may have been dead even before the first announcement of his illness.
On Friday afternoon, a motor hearse rolled to the ornate House of the Trade Unions. There, where Lenin lay in state in 1924, the neatly arrayed remains of Joseph Stalin were placed. In sallow, impassive dignity, Stalin's body lay in the glare of spotlights, the huge grey head resting on a silken pillow, the chest of his simple, military tunic adazzle with medals and ribbons; others glinted on a pillow laid at the foot of his bier. Through the great hall floated the sickish scent of massed flowers, from Peking and all the conquered capitals of Eastern Europe, from Communist Parties all over, from Stalingrad and Stalino and Stalinabad and Stalinogrosk.
The heirs themselves—Premier Georgy Malenkov, Lavrenty Beria, Vyacheslav Molotov, Marshal Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich—stood the first honor watch at the bier. Then the huge doors were thrown open. For 60 hours, the men, women & children of Moscow marched in to gaze, in awe, in curiosity, or in grief, at the powerful little man so few had seen in life.
Muffled Tread. In the freezing cold of Monday morning, March 9, the pageant of death was played out to its end. A silent 35,000 massed in the flower-banked vastness of Red Square. Thousands held black-bordered portraits of the dead man. A 750-piece band stood motionless. Tall, grey-coated guardsmen paced silently before the great red and black stone mausoleum Stalin had built for Lenin, and now is to share with him until the government builds a promised new Pantheon for Stalin, Lenin and all the lesser gods of Communism.
From the distance came the sound of funereal music and the muffle of treading feet. Then came the flower bearers from the Hall of Columns, hundreds of them. Soviet generals bore the Generalissimo's medals on red pillows. Next came a lone soldier on a jet black horse. Then eight more black horses pulling a gun carriage. There, framed in red for revolution and black for death, rode the coffin of Joseph Stalin, the dead man himself visible through its glass dome.