How it was 09/02/1999 (1999)

The funeral of Stalin, 1953.

On March 5, 1953, after a serious illness, Josef Stalin died.

On March 7, access was opened to the Column Hall of the House of Unions for farewell to the leader.

Neither before nor after Moscow had not seen anything like it.

Hundreds of thousands of people sought to the prospectus of Marx to pay the last debt to "the genius of all times and peoples."

There were a lot of people who wanted to say goodbye.

Of all the cities, trains were going to Moscow.

A few hours later the solemn farewell began to turn into a mass pandemonium.

A crush broke out, the first victims appeared.

Neither the police nor the State Security could cope with the situation, the pressure of the crowd was so strong that even the horse police, along with the horses, fell down and trampled on.

In a spontaneously arising stampede a huge number of people died, the most terrible place was Trubnaya Square.

In the studio, eyewitnesses recall the events of those terrible days: member of the guard of honor Mikhail Chernenko, surgeon of the 1st Grad Hospital Galina Radygina, writer and poet Vladimir Kornilov, as well as some viewers who were in 1953 schoolchildren and students.

The program added fragments of an interview about the tragedy on Trubnaya Square: film director Savva Kulish, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, Alexander Lebedintsev.

Also included are fragments of the film "The Iron Curtain" (1994, directed by S. Ya.

Kulish) and the footage of the chronicle: the announcement of the death of IV Stalin, the farewell in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions, the body of the leader in the mausoleum.

In the final of the program, distributing the post number 1 Nikolai Berlev talks about the burial of the body of IV Stalin on October 31, 1961.