Stalin's funeral and other terrible stampedes in the USSR. How Stalin was buried. The main Soviet funerals of the twentieth century What happened during Stalin's funeral

National state mourning was declared for four days in the Soviet Union. In fact, all departments, ministries, departments, plants, factories stopped working these days. Everyone was waiting for the main day - the funeral, scheduled for March 9th. For three days in a row, a living, many-kilometer human river, meandering through the streets of Moscow, headed towards Pushkinskaya Street (now Bolshaya Dmitrovka) and along it to the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions.

There, on a dais, covered in flowers, a coffin containing the body of the deceased was placed. Among those who wanted to say goodbye to the leader there were many visitors, but the first to go through the special entrance were, naturally, foreign delegations. Ordinary Muscovites and residents of other cities of the Union who arrived to say goodbye - everyone stood in a huge queue. Of the seven million residents of the Soviet capital, at least two million people wanted to see the deceased leader with their own eyes.

Their cries were to be broadcast on the radio. It had been broadcasting only tragic pieces of music for four days. The mood of the Soviet people these days was depressed. Many experienced heart attacks, illness, exhaustion nervous system. The increase in mortality among the population has increased noticeably, although no one has really recorded it.

Everyone wanted to get into the Column Hall of the House of Unions to get at least a glimpse of the man who had already become a monument during his lifetime. The city seemed deserted. And if it was still possible to maintain order on Pushkinskaya Street and in nearby alleys, then in more remote places, due to the crowd of thousands of people, a crush formed.

And it was simply impossible to break free from such a suffocating pandemonium - there were troops and trucks everywhere. The cordon did not allow the crowd to disperse. And only on one side the streets were free, precisely from where the crowd was pressing. Everyone wanted to join the living human river and get to Pushkinskaya Street. Nobody knew how to approach. So people poked around on different streets and came out to the military.

No information, just rumors. According to rumors, it was possible to get to Pushkinskaya Street from Trubnaya Square. This is where the main flow of people headed. But not everyone managed to get there. Many died far away on the approaches. How many were killed? Hundreds, thousands? Most likely, we will never know about this. According to eyewitnesses, all the crushed bodies were put on trucks and taken out of the city, where they were all buried in one common grave.

But the worst thing was that among the crushed there were those who came to their senses and asked for help. They could still be saved. But " ambulance“It practically didn’t work - on those days of mourning it was forbidden to drive along the central streets. Nobody was interested in the wounded. Their fate was sealed. Nothing should have overshadowed Stalin's funeral.

This is what Dmitry Volkogonov wrote about those days in his work “Triumph and Tragedy.” “The deceased leader remained true to himself: even dead, he could not allow the altar to be empty. The crowd of people was so great that in several places on the streets of Moscow there were terrible crushes, which took away a lot of people. human lives" It's very stingy. Extremely. Almost nothing. Real tragedies played out on many streets.

The crush was so strong that people were simply pushed into the walls of houses. Fences collapsed, gates were broken, shop windows were broken. People climbed onto iron lampposts and, unable to resist, fell from there, never to rise again. Some rose above the crowd and crawled over their heads, as they did during the Khodynka stampede, some in desperation, on the contrary, tried to crawl under the trucks, but they were not allowed there, they fell exhausted onto the asphalt and could no longer rise. Those pressing from behind trampled on them. The crowd swayed in waves, first one way, then the other.

Biologist I.B. Zbarsky, who for many years dealt with the embalming of Lenin’s body, wrote in his book of memoirs “Under the Roof of the Mausoleum” that on the day of farewell to Stalin, he and his wife were literally sucked in by the crowd and squeezed out onto Trubnaya Square. He and his wife managed to get out alive. He wrote that in this stampede not only people died, but also the horses on which the police were sitting.

Of course, today we do not have accurate information about how many people died in the mad pandemonium. It was forbidden to even talk about this at that time. And only a few years later, already during the years of exposing the cult of personality, evidence of participants in those events began to appear. But no one seriously studied this issue.

Here is what the famous poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who later made the film “The Death of Stalin,” said about this: “I carried within me all these years the memory that I was there, inside this crowd, this monstrous crush. This crowd is gigantic, multifaceted... In the end, it had one common face - the face of a monster. This can be seen even now - when thousands of people gathered together, perhaps each individually nice, become a monster, uncontrollable, cruel, when people's faces are distorted... I remember this, and it was an apocalyptic spectacle...

After all, what happened then? The city commandant's office and the Ministry of State Security ordered to fence Trubnaya Square with military trucks, and from Sretenka, from the descent, a human Niagara poured out, people were forced to crush each other, climb through houses, apartments, they died, there were cases when children died. It was like when the crowd rushes to football or boxing. Those who had never seen Stalin alive wanted to see him at least dead, but they never saw him. I didn’t see it either... People didn’t cry. They cried when they heard the news of the leader’s death, in the kitchens, on the streets. Here everything turned into a struggle for survival, a struggle for life. People died, squeezed into this artificial square of trucks. They shouted to the cordon: “Remove the trucks!” I remember one officer, he cried, and while crying, saving children, he only said: “I can’t, there are no instructions...”

How many people died in that stampede?

We will never know about this. At that time everything was done secretly, secretly. After the stampede, the bodies of all the dead were thrown onto the same trucks and taken away in an unknown direction. It is difficult to say whether there were more deaths than during the Khodynka disaster. But, most likely, there were much more than one and a half thousand. Millions wanted to take part in the funeral of their beloved leader.

More about Stalin's death

Farewell to the leader
The funeral of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, who died on March 5, 1953, took place four days later, on March 9

Died March 5, 1953 Joseph Stalin. Thousands of people came to say goodbye to the leader, whose body was first in the House of Unions and then in the Mausoleum. What the newspapers wrote about and how witnesses of the events remember the farewell days - in the Kommersant photo gallery. On this topic:

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Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet people, died on the evening of March 5, 1953. The coffin with his remains remained in the House of Unions for three days, and on March 9 it was transferred to the Mausoleum. Between these two dates, hundreds of thousands of people passed by Stalin’s body. Stalin ruled for so long that the country felt orphaned rather than liberated. The poet Tvardovsky called these days “the hour of greatest sadness.” The grief and excitement at Stalin's funeral led to hundreds [exact data classified] dying in the stampede on the way to the Hall of Columns. Pravda newspaper March 6, 1953: “ Dear comrades and friends! The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, with a feeling of great sorrow, inform the party and all workers of the Soviet Union that on March 5 at 9 o'clock. For 50 minutes in the evening, the heart of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, a comrade-in-arms and a brilliant successor of Lenin’s work, the wise leader and teacher of the Communist Party and the Soviet people, stopped beating. The immortal name of Stalin will always live in the hearts of the Soviet people and all progressive humanity."

Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR dated March 6, 1953: “In order to perpetuate the memory of the great leaders Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, as well as prominent figures Communist Party and Soviet state, buried on Red Square near the Kremlin wall, to build a monumental building in Moscow - the Pantheon - a monument to the eternal glory of the great people of the Soviet country. Upon completion of the construction of the Pantheon, transfer into it the sarcophagus with the body of V. I. Lenin and the sarcophagus with the body of I. V. Stalin, as well as the remains of outstanding figures of the Communist Party and the Soviet state buried at the Kremlin wall, and open access to the Pantheon to the broad masses of working people " They planned to build the Pantheon either on the site of the historical GUM, or on a wide highway from Moscow University to the Palace of the Soviets, but they never realized their plan. Stalin's remains were buried near the Kremlin wall.

3. Photo: Oleg Knorring

Stalin's death was marked by hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths in the stampede on the way to the Hall of Columns. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko recalled how as a young man he found himself in this terrible crowd: “In some places on Trubnaya Square you had to raise your legs high - you were walking on meat.”

Yuri Borko, born in 1929, student of the history department of Moscow State University: “I will refrain from talking about how different people perceived Stalin’s death; all this came to light later. And on March 6, the main and lasting impression from what he saw was the insanity of thousands and thousands of Muscovites who rushed into the streets to join the queue and see a dead man who, with more justification than Louis XIV himself, could say about himself: “The State is me.” ". “I” turned to dust, and this was perceived by millions of Soviet citizens almost as the collapse of the universe. I was shocked too. All my critical reflections that had accumulated over several years seemed to be erased.”

Newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” March 7, 1953: “A grave misfortune has befallen our country, our people. The cities and villages of our beloved Motherland dressed in mourning. As soon as the message was broadcast on the radio that the coffin with the body of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was installed in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions, an unstoppable stream of people rushed to the center from all over the capital, from its outskirts, from its outposts. People walked in groups alone, walked in families, holding hands, or with large garlands of flowers and very small modest wreaths. They walked in silence, sternly knitting their eyebrows, looking at the half-mast flags with black borders hung on the gables of the buildings. Thousands of people moved towards the House of Unions, but such silence reigned as if there was no such huge stream of people, united in immeasurable and deepest sorrow. Everyone understood at these moments: together it’s easier.”

Speech by Patriarch Alexy I on the day of the funeral: “We, having gathered to pray for him, cannot pass in silence his always benevolent, sympathetic attitude towards our church needs. The memory of him is unforgettable for us, and our Russian Orthodox Church, mourning his departure from us, accompanies him on his last journey, “on the path of the whole earth,” with fervent prayer. We prayed for him when the news of his serious illness came. And now we pray for the peace of his immortal soul. We believe that our prayer for the deceased will be heard by the Lord. And to our beloved and unforgettable Joseph Vissarionovich we prayerfully proclaim eternal memory with deep, ardent love.”

Maya Nusinova, born in 1927, school teacher: “Many people later told me, and now there are so many memories, how happy they were when they learned about Stalin’s death, how they repeated: dead, dead. I don't know, I only remember horror. The doctors' case was going on, they said that the process would end with a public execution, and the rest of the Jews would be loaded into wagons, like the kulaks once were, and taken out, and that the barracks were already ready somewhere in Siberia. There was a teacher at my school, her husband worked somewhere in the Central Committee, so after Timashuk’s article she shouted in the teacher’s room: think, the children of these nonhumans studied together with ours! Yes, I thought that without Stalin this hatred would spill out, that only he could control it, and now they would start killing us. It was naive, of course, but that’s how it seemed to me at the time.”

Sergei Agadzhanyan, born in 1929, student of Stankin: “We approached the coffin. I had a wild thought: I’ve never seen Stalin, but now I will. A few steps away. There were no members of the Politburo there at that moment, only simple people. But I didn’t notice any crying people in the Hall of Columns either. People were scared - by death, by the crowd - maybe they didn’t cry out of fear? Fear mixed with curiosity, loss, but not melancholy, not mourning.”

Oleg Basilashvili, born in 1934, student at the Moscow Art Theater studio: “I lived on Pokrovka and walked to school - along Pokrovka, along Maroseyka, then along Teatralny Proezd, then along Pushkinskaya Street (B. Dmitrovka - editor's note) , up Kamergersky - and came to the Moscow Art Theater studio. In order to get into the studio, in those days I had to cross two lines that went for days to see Stalin. Some major was standing there, and I showed him my student ID and said that I needed to be let through, that I had to get to the studio. But as a result, I joined the queue and very soon found myself in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. There was no honor guard at the coffin, at least I didn’t pay attention. I was amazed that there was no particular mournful atmosphere in the hall. It was very light, very dusty, and there were a huge number of wreaths along the walls. Stalin was lying in his uniform with shiny buttons. His face, which was always so kind in photographs, seemed deadly evil to me.”

10.

The New York Times: “Moscow is moving. Buses scurried back and forth. On the streets one could increasingly see mustard-colored convoy trucks. I was puzzled. It seemed to me that a coup was being prepared.”

11.

Elena Orlovskaya, born in 1940, schoolgirl: “During recess, everyone walked quietly, too, and at the beginning of the second lesson, the teacher came in, pointed her finger at one girl and at me: and you come with me. We arrived at the assembly hall. On the right there are two windows, between them there is an opening, in the opening the Generalissimo always hung, about five meters high, in parade, at full height, wearing a tunic. There is such a little red step and the flowers are definitely alive. The teacher says: take the honor guard. People were walking around, running around, no one had lessons, then gradually everyone left, silence fell, and we stood in line with our hands at our sides. We stand for an hour - the clock hangs opposite, we stand for two... I am overwhelmed with thoughts: what will I say at home? How can I confess to my dad that I was on the honor guard? It was torture."

12.

Lyudmila Dashevskaya, born in 1930, senior laboratory engineer at the Krasnaya Zvezda plant: “And just like that, I was all crumpled and all beaten up, and I went out - just to Stoleshnikov Lane. And there was cleanliness, emptiness, and there were trash cans. And I was so exhausted that I sat down on one of these urns and rested. And I walked first along Stoleshnikov, then along Petrovka, then went along Likhov Lane to Sadovoe. Silence, lights were on everywhere, as if in a room, everything was illuminated. And what struck me: all the posters (they used to be stuck on wooden boards) - all the posters were covered with white paper. Therefore, from time to time these white spots appeared on the empty street. And there were no people there.”

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The newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” March 8, 1953: “The Moscow depot of the October Railway has been borne by the name of the great Stalin for more than a quarter of a century. 26 years ago, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin gave a speech at a meeting of workers here. The funeral meeting begins. The workers listen with deep excitement to the Appeal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to all party members, to all working people of the Soviet Union. The floor is given to the driver, Hero of Socialist Labor, V.I. Vyshegradtsev. He says:

The one who was our father, teacher and friend, who, together with the great Lenin, created our powerful party, our socialist state, who showed us the path to communism, has left us. The great Stalin, the creator of our happiness, has died!”

14.

Andrey Zaliznyak, born in 1935, student of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University: “It became known that some distant acquaintances died, mostly boys and girls. In many places people died, on Trubnaya it was the worst, and on Dmitrovka too - there quite a lot of people were simply crushed against the walls. Some protrusion of the wall was enough... corpses lay almost all over the entire length. My friend at the time turned out to be unusually clever, a heroic person, and he considered it his duty to visit there without fail. He said that he managed to walk past Stalin's coffin three times - maybe he exaggerated his exploits a little. Then it became clear that it was a fatal number.”

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Formally, Stalin was buried twice. The second time on the night of October 31 to November 1, 1961, at the Kremlin wall, covering the burial site with plywood shields. Red Square was cordoned off by the military all night. Stalin had already been exposed by the congress, and there were no people left in the country who did not understand what was happening.

17.

Former director of the Mausoleum laboratory, Professor Sergei Debov, about the autopsy of Stalin in a special gentle way, so that it would be easier to preserve the embalmed body later: “On the night of March 5-6, 1953, first of all, they made a cast of his hands and face. Then they began the autopsy and temporary embalming. There was a surprise there. We never saw Stalin during his lifetime. In portraits he was always handsome and youthful. But it turned out that the face had severe pockmarks and age spots. They especially appear after death. It is impossible to display such a face for farewell in the Hall of Columns. We did a great job removing the stains. But then, after installing the coffin, everything had to be masked with light. Otherwise everything was as usual. We are always afraid of body contact with metal, especially copper. Therefore, everything for Stalin was made of gold - buttons, shoulder straps. The order block was made of platinum.”

When the leader of the Soviet people and the world proletariat, Joseph Stalin, died at his dacha in Kuntsevo on the morning of March 5, the whole country froze in anticipation. What will happen now? Who will replace the genius of all times? Another question arose - they had to prepare a funeral that had never been arranged for any political figure in the world.
National state mourning was declared for four days in the Soviet Union. In fact, all departments, ministries, departments, plants, factories stopped working these days. Everyone was waiting for the main day - the funeral, scheduled for March 9. For three days in a row, a living, many-kilometer human river, meandering through the streets of Moscow, headed towards Pushkinskaya Street (now Bolshaya Dmitrovka) and along it to the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. There, on a dais, covered in flowers, a coffin containing the body of the deceased was placed. Among those who wanted to say goodbye to the leader there were many visitors, but the first to go through the special entrance were, naturally, foreign delegations. Ordinary Muscovites and residents of other cities of the Union who arrived to say goodbye - everyone stood in a huge queue. Of the seven million residents of the Soviet capital, at least two million people wanted to see the deceased leader with their own eyes.

Special mourners arrived from Georgia for the historic funeral. They said there were several thousand of them - women dressed all in black. On the funeral day, they had to follow the funeral procession and cry bitterly, as loudly as possible. Their cries were to be broadcast on the radio. It had been broadcasting only tragic pieces of music for four days. The mood of the Soviet people these days was depressed. Many experienced heart attacks, malaise, and exhaustion of the nervous system. The increase in mortality among the population has increased noticeably, although no one has really recorded it.
Everyone wanted to get into the Column Hall of the House of Unions to get at least a glimpse of the man who had already become a monument during his lifetime. The city seemed deserted. And if it was still possible to maintain order on Pushkinskaya Street and in nearby alleys, then in more remote places, crowds formed due to crowds of thousands of people. And it was simply impossible to break free from such a suffocating pandemonium: there were troops and trucks everywhere. The cordon did not allow the crowd to disperse. And only on one side the streets were free, precisely on the side from which the crowd was pressing. Everyone wanted to join the living human river and get to Pushkinskaya Street. Nobody knew how to do this. So people poked around on different streets and came out to the military.
There is no information, only rumors, according to which it was possible to get to Pushkinskaya Street from Trubnaya Square. This is where the main flow of people headed. But not everyone managed to get there. Many died far away on the approaches. How many were killed? Hundreds, thousands? Most likely, we will never know about this. According to eyewitnesses, all the crushed bodies were put on trucks and taken out of the city, where they were buried in one common grave. But the worst thing was that among the crushed there were those who came to their senses and asked for help. They could still be saved. But the ambulance health care practically did not work - in those days of mourning it was forbidden to drive along the central streets. Nobody was interested in the wounded. Their fate was sealed. Nothing should have overshadowed Stalin's funeral.
This is what Dmitry Volkogonov wrote about those days in his work “Triumph and Tragedy”: “The deceased leader remained true to himself: even dead he could not allow the altar to be empty. The crowd of people was so great that in several places on the streets of Moscow there were terrible stampedes that claimed many lives.” It's very stingy. Extremely. Almost nothing. Real tragedies played out on many streets. The crush was so strong that people were simply pushed into the walls of houses. Fences collapsed, gates were broken, shop windows were broken. People climbed onto iron lampposts and, unable to resist, fell from there, never to rise again. Some rose above the crowd and crawled over their heads, as they did during the Khodynka stampede, some in desperation, on the contrary, tried to crawl under the trucks, but they were not allowed there, they fell exhausted onto the asphalt and could no longer rise. Those pressing from behind trampled on them. The crowd swayed in waves, first one way, then the other.
Teaching biologist I.B. Zbarsky, who for many years dealt with the embalming of Lenin’s body, wrote in his book of memoirs “Under the Roof of the Mausoleum” that on the day of farewell to Stalin, he and his wife were literally sucked in by the crowd and squeezed out onto Trubnaya Square. They managed to get out alive. He wrote that in this stampede not only people died, but also the horses on which the police were sitting.
Of course, today we do not have accurate information about how many people died in the mad pandemonium. It was forbidden to even talk about this at that time. And only a few years later, already during the years of exposing the cult of personality, evidence of participants in those events began to appear. But no one seriously studied this issue.
Here is what the famous poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said about this: “All these years I carried within me the memory that I was there, inside this crowd, this monstrous crush. This crowd is gigantic, multifaceted... In the end, it had one common face - the face of a monster. This can be seen even now - when thousands of people gathered together, perhaps each individually nice, become a monster, uncontrollable, cruel, when people’s faces contort... I remember this, and it was an apocalyptic spectacle...
After all, what happened then? The city commandant's office and the Ministry of State Security ordered to fence Trubnaya Square with military trucks, and from Sretenka, from the descent, a human Niagara poured out, people were forced to crush each other, climb through houses, apartments, they died, there were cases when children died. It was like when the crowd rushes to football or boxing. Those who had never seen Stalin alive wanted to see him at least dead, but they never saw him. I didn’t see it either... People didn’t cry. They cried when they heard the news of the leader’s death, in the kitchens, on the streets. Here everything turned into a struggle for survival, a struggle for life. People died, squeezed into this artificial square of trucks. They shouted to the cordon: “Remove the trucks!” I remember one officer, he cried, and while crying, saving children, he only said: “I can’t, there are no instructions...”
How many people died in that stampede? We will never know about this. At that time everything was done secretly, secretly. It is difficult to say whether there were more deaths than during the Khodynka disaster. But most likely there were much more than one and a half thousand...

The stampede at Stalin's funeral still raises many questions: how many dead were there, and why did this happen? Could the tragedy have been avoided, or was it intended to be this way? Lovers of mysticism say that Stalin could not leave without reaping the next “harvest.”
On March 6, 1953, in the morning it was announced on the radio that the leader of the world proletariat had died. For many it was a shock. To some, Stalin seemed like a terrible demon, to others he was a deity, but his death came as a shock to both. People couldn't believe he was gone.
In the USSR, mourning and farewell to the leader were declared. Plants, factories, all departments and shops, everything was closed due to mourning.
Entry into Moscow was prohibited, but people walked to get at least a glimpse of Stalin. Someone wanted to make sure that the “mustachioed shoe polisher” had passed away, someone was sincerely grieving, and someone was just walking, because everyone was walking.
Stalin's funeral: how many people died in the stampede?
Stalin's body was exhibited for farewell in the Column Hall of the House of Unions on Pushkinskaya. All police units, cadets and military units were urgently raised, but the organizers did not expect that there would be so many people who wanted to say goodbye to the leader.
A dense ring of cadets and trucks was organized around Trubnaya Square, and this cordon was supposed to streamline and direct the flow of people in the right direction.
But the crowd is scary. Distraught people pushed and crushed each other, climbed over their heads, losing shoes and clothes along the way. The cadets pulled out gasping people right from the sides of the trucks, trying to save them. Having rested, some again rushed into the crowd to reach the House of Unions.
Thousands of people were looking for a way out to the blocked area, the flows of people crossed, changed direction, fear, despair and panic forced them to stubbornly move forward, and many survivors now cannot explain what it was.
The crushed bodies were thrown onto a truck and taken away. Someone said that they were taken out of town and simply dumped in a common grave, and no one kept count of them. And now there is no official data on how many died at Stalin’s funeral in the stampede.
For many days after Stalin's funeral, people were looking for their relatives who had not returned home. Most often they were in hospitals or morgues. Sometimes it was possible to identify a person only by clothing, but the death certificate indicated completely different causes of death.
During the days of mourning throughout the country, many died from heart attacks, strokes and nervous shocks. People were shocked to the core, and Stalin's death was the end of the world for them.
According to unofficial data, the stampede at Stalin's funeral killed between 2 and 3 thousand people. These are terrible numbers also because no one counted the people. At that time, the authorities were only thinking about who would take Stalin’s place, and the people as such were not interested.
Photos from that time have survived to this day, but they do not reflect the scale of the tragedy. They show only the people who say goodbye to the father of nations, how the country mourns, and how many wreaths the grateful people brought to their beloved leader.

1961 was the high point in his career Nikita Khrushchev. The party leader was triumphant - the pace economic development The USSR was high, the Land of the Soviets had achieved human flight into outer space, and citizens' confidence in the future grew stronger.

In October 1961, the XXII Congress of the CPSU took place, at which Khrushchev announced a new party program, which proclaimed the task of building the foundations of a communist society by 1980.

After the flight Gagarin Even such a plan did not seem incredible to Soviet citizens. On the wave of general euphoria, Nikita Khrushchev decided to put an end to the posthumous overthrow of his predecessor - Joseph Stalin.

The debunking of Stalin's "cult of personality" was the basis of Khrushchev's political course in the 1950s. Now the new leader has decided to get rid of not only Stalin’s legacy, but also his body.

On March 9, 1953, the sarcophagus with Stalin’s body was placed in the Mausoleum, which from that moment began to be called the “Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin.”

In March 1953, a Decree was adopted by the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR on the creation of the Pantheon - “a monument to the eternal glory of the great people of the Soviet country,” where all burials from Red Square were to be transferred, but this project did not reach the stage of practical implementation. Stalin remained lying in the Mausoleum.

On October 30, 1961, after Khrushchev delivered a keynote speech on building communism, he asked to speak on an extraordinary issue First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee Ivan Spiridonov. He made a proposal to remove Stalin from the Mausoleum. An old underground woman, a party member since 1902, supported the initiative. Dora Abramovna Lazurkina. A Bolshevik who went through the Gulag said: “Yesterday I consulted with Ilyich, as if he stood before me as if alive and said: I don’t like being around Stalin, who brought so much trouble to the party.”

To thunderous applause, the congress approved a resolution that stated: “To recognize as inappropriate the further preservation of the sarcophagus with the coffin of I.V. in the Mausoleum. Stalin, since Stalin’s serious violations of Lenin’s covenants, abuse of power, mass repressions against honest Soviet people and other actions during the period of the cult of personality make it impossible to leave the coffin with his body in the Mausoleum of V.I. Lenin".

Of course, the “impromptu” was prepared by Nikita Khrushchev himself. As for the general approval, it was only formal - the leader knew that among the delegates of the congress there were many who did not approve of such a categorical assessment of Stalin’s activities. And among the people, reverence for the figure of the leader remained. Therefore, Nikita Sergeevich decided not to delay the implementation of the decision of the congress and to carry out the reburial as soon as possible.

Mausoleum of Lenin and Stalin, 1957. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Manfred&Barbara Aulbach

They wanted to “exile” the leader to Novodevichye

On October 31, Khrushchev was summoned Head of the 9th Directorate of the KGB (protection of senior officials of the state) General Nikolai Zakharov And Kremlin Commandant General Andrei Vedenin.

Khrushchev warned that on this day a decision would be made on Stalin’s reburial, which would need to be carried out immediately. The Plenum of the Central Committee had to give final approval for this operation. To carry out the procedure, a party commission of five people was organized, headed by Head of the Party Control Committee Nikolai Shvernik.

Direct management of the operation was entrusted to Zakharov's deputy Colonel Vladimir Chekalov. He was called to commander of a separate regiment special purpose Commandant's Office of the Moscow Kremlin Fyodor Konev, who was given the order to prepare a company of soldiers for Stalin’s funeral at the Novodevichy cemetery.

But while Konev was selecting his subordinates, Chekalov called him and said: the burial place is changing - everything will take place near the Kremlin wall.

At the last moment, the party leaders wavered, fearing that the remains would be stolen from the Novodevichy cemetery. On Red Square it was easier to control the grave of the “demoted” leader.

Brass instead of gold

The head of the economic department of the Kremlin commandant's office, Colonel Tarasov, was responsible for camouflage. The mausoleum was covered with plywood so that the work could not be seen from either side. At the same time in the arsenal workshop artist Savinov made a wide white ribbon with the letters “LENIN”. It had to be used to cover the inscription “LENIN STALIN” on the Mausoleum until the letters were laid out in marble.

At 18:00, servicemen began digging a grave for burial. By that time, a coffin had been made from good dry wood, which was covered with black and red crepe.

While the final preparations for the reburial were underway, rehearsals for the military parade for the November 7 holiday began on Red Square. The rehearsal with the participation of military equipment was also part of the disguise of Stalin's second funeral.

At about 21:00, eight officers removed Stalin’s sarcophagus from the pedestal and carried it to the laboratory of the Mausoleum. In the presence of members of the commission and scientific workers of the Mausoleum, Stalin's body was transferred to a prepared coffin.

By order of Nikolai Shvernik, the Gold Star of the Hero of Socialist Labor was removed from Stalin’s uniform and the gold buttons were cut off. The commandant of the Mausoleum placed the removed rarities in the Security Room, where the awards of all those buried in the Kremlin necropolis are kept.

The gold buttons of the uniform were replaced with brass ones. General Vedenin interrupted the pause that followed, noting: it was time to close the coffin and carry it to the grave.

At that moment, Nikolai Shvernik’s nerves gave way and he burst into tears. A bodyguard led him to the grave.

Monument to Joseph Stalin at the Kremlin wall. Photo: RIA Novosti / Oleg Lastochkin

Reinforced concrete grave

At 22:15, the same eight officers carried the coffin out of the Mausoleum and placed it on stands near the grave.

By this time, reinforced concrete slabs had been placed in the grave itself, which were supposed to cover the burial on all sides. But at the last moment Head of the Mausoleum's maintenance department Colonel Tarasov convinced the commission members not to put the slabs on top. “As if they didn’t get lost,” the officer remarked. The faces of those gathered were long - the thought that the coffin with the leader would simply be crushed was frankly frightening. We decided to do without it.

The coffin was carefully lowered into the grave. Some of the military present threw in a handful of earth, after which the soldiers began burying the grave. When this was finished, a granite slab with the inscription “Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich 1879 - 1953” was placed on top. The slab was replaced in 1970 by a monument to the work sculptor Nikolai Tomsky.

Relatives were not notified

None of Stalin’s relatives attended the funeral; they were not notified of the reburial. After the end of the ceremony, an act was drawn up in the Kremlin, which was signed by the participants in the operation.

Lenin's sarcophagus was moved to the central place, where it stood until 1953.

Access to the Mausoleum for citizens was opened the very next day, November 1, 1961. Stalin’s reburial did not cause mass unrest; everything was limited to conversations in kitchens.

The triumph of Nikita Khrushchev was short-lived - three years later, in October 1964, he, having lost popularity among the people and authority among his comrades, was removed from power. After Khrushchev’s death in 1971, he was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery - where the debunker of the “cult of personality” never decided to send Joseph Stalin.