Where was Stalin buried? Secret operation to transfer the leader's body: where Stalin is buried. Placing the body in the mausoleum

Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953. On March 9 of the same year he was buried in the Mausoleum on Red Square. Soon after the 20th Party Congress (1956), at party and production meetings discussing the results of the congress, the opinion began to be increasingly heard that the presence of Stalin’s body in Lenin’s tomb was “incompatible with the lawlessness committed by Stalin.” In the fall of 1961, on the eve of the XXII Congress of the CPSU, workers of the Kirov and Nevsky machine-building plants proposed moving Stalin's ashes to another place. The same proposal was put forward by the workers of the Moscow plant named after Vladimir Ilyich. On October 30, 1961, speaking at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, the first secretary of the Leningrad regional party committee, Ivan Spiridonov, on behalf of the Leningrad party delegation and the city’s workers, submitted a workers’ proposal for consideration by the congress. The proposal of the Leningraders was supported by party delegations from Moscow, Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Altai Territory, Saratov Region and others. The XXII Congress decided: the Mausoleum on Red Square, created to perpetuate the memory of Lenin, will henceforth be called the Mausoleum of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. It was decided to rebury Stalin's ashes on Red Square behind the Mausoleum.

The country's leaders were undoubtedly aware that the decision to remove Stalin's body from the Mausoleum could provoke unrest in the country. Therefore, the action was carried out secretly and carefully prepared for it. Late in the evening of October 31, 1961, in an atmosphere of absolute secrecy, under the pretext of a rehearsal for the parade for November 7, Red Square was cordoned off. The entrance to the Mausoleum, as well as the dug grave, were covered with plywood shields. Only the funeral team, numerous security guards and the reburial commission were on site. According to the memoirs of the former commander of the Kremlin regiment, Konev, in the Mausoleum, the officers transferred Stalin’s body into a wooden coffin covered with black and red crepe. The body was covered with a dark veil, leaving the face and half of the chest exposed. Shanin, the head of the carpentry workshop, under whose leadership the coffin was made at the Arsenal, was given the command to close the coffin with a lid and nail it. Eight officers carried the coffin out of the Mausoleum, brought it to the grave, at the bottom of which a kind of sarcophagus was made of eight slabs, and placed it on wooden stands. After a short pause, the soldiers carefully lowered the coffin into the grave using ropes. According to Russian custom, some of those present threw in a handful of earth, and the soldiers buried the grave. Contrary to expectations, the country took the news of the removal of Stalin’s body from the Mausoleum quite calmly. In 1970, a monument by sculptor Nikolai Tomsky was erected at Stalin’s grave.

- Soviet politician. Stalin's real name is Dzhugashvili. Born December 9 (21), 1879 - died March 5, 1953 at 21:50. According to the medical report, the “leader’s” death was caused by a cerebral hemorrhage. Stalin's death was announced on the radio on March 6 at 6 am. In connection with this event, mourning was declared throughout the country. The funeral took place on March 9.

During the funeral, so many people gathered to say goodbye to Stalin that there was a stampede in the area of Trubnaya Square. As a result of this stampede, according to various estimates, from several hundred to three thousand people died. The exact number of those killed at the farewell ceremony for Stalin is still unknown. Initially, Stalin's body was placed in the Mausoleum on Red Square next to Lenin. Here he remained until 1961. On October 30, 1961, at the Twelfth Congress of the CPSU with the wording: “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” was It was decided to rebury Stalin.

On the night of November 1, 1961, Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum and buried in a grave near the Kremlin wall. After the grave was buried, a white marble slab was placed on top with the inscription: “STALIN JOSIF VISSARIONOVICH 1879−1953.” In 1970, a monument was erected over the grave - a bust by the Soviet sculptor Nikolai Vasilyevich Tomsky (1900-1984).

Burial at the Kremlin wall and a monument at Stalin’s grave

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Where is Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin buried? Author Tatyana Koroleva. Joseph Stalin is the greatest personality of the 20th century. He is called the “father of nations” and a traitor, a great ruler and a man who committed genocide of his people. Contemporaries and historians still cannot give an unambiguous assessment of the activities of this person. It is known that he died only because his subordinates were afraid to approach him at the right moment and provide help. Where is Stalin buried? What were the last days of his life like? You will find answers to all questions in this article.

Illness The first attack of illness overtook the leader of the people on March 1, 1953. He was found unconscious at his official residence - at the Kuntsevskaya dacha, where Stalin settled in the post-war years. The personal physician of the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars was so frightened that for a long time he could not admit that a high-ranking patient had suffered a stroke. However, the next day the doctor found the strength to make a diagnosis and determine the paralysis of the right side of the leader’s body. That day Stalin did not get up anymore. He only occasionally raised his active hand, as if asking for help. But she never came. Some historians believe that fear was not the only reason why the leader did not receive the necessary treatment on time. The fact is that the closest associates of the “father of nations” - Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov - were interested in his speedy death. Many people are interested in where Stalin is buried. After all, the story of his burial could turn out to be no less strange than the fact of his sudden death. Death According to official sources, the guards who discovered the leader's prostrate body on the floor in the dining room could not call a doctor without a special order from Beria. That night Lavrenty Pavlovich could not be found. Only ten hours later the necessary permission was received. Only after this the patient received medical care. And the next day he had another stroke. Beria knew from the evening that the “father of nations” was not well. Documentary sources testify to this. The story of Stalin is the fate of a man betrayed by his closest comrade at the most crucial moment. On March 5, 1953, the leader died. The entire huge country plunged into deep mourning. People came in an endless stream to say goodbye to the great leader and teacher. Everyone knows where Stalin was buried immediately after his death: on March 9, his body was placed in the Lenin Mausoleum. There it rested until 1961.

Anti-Stalinist sentiments Soon the long-awaited “thaw” came to the country. Anti-Stalinist sentiments began to develop. At the XXII Congress of the Communist Party, which took place on October 17-31, 1961, several fateful decisions were made at once. Just a day before the closing of the event, a proposal was made to remove the body of the deceased leader from the Mausoleum and rebury him in an ordinary grave. The speaker expressed the opinion that staying in the Kremlin tomb next to Lenin is incompatible with the lawlessness that Stalin committed during his reign. It is interesting that this proposal came from the mouth of the unremarkable head of the Leningrad Regional Committee, Ivan Spiridonov. Prominent party figures like Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Suslov, Frol Kozlov chose to remain silent. However, they decided to support Comrade Spiridonov’s initiative. So where is Stalin buried? Read about it below.

Reburial So, at the XXII Party Congress, a decision was made to rebury the leader on Red Square, near the walls of the Kremlin, behind the Mausoleum. The country's leadership was afraid of unrest in the country, so the removal of Stalin's body took place in the strictest secrecy. On October 31, late in the evening, under the pretext of another rehearsal for the solemn parade on November 7, Red Square was cordoned off. The dug grave and the entrance to the Mausoleum were covered with plywood shields. The only witnesses to the transfer of the body were numerous security guards, the reburial commission and the funeral team. At the tomb, the officers placed Stalin's body in a wooden coffin draped in red and black crepe. The leader's body was covered with a black veil, leaving only half of his chest and face exposed. The head of the carpentry workshop, Shanin, on command, closed the coffin with a lid and nailed it. With the help of eight officers, the leader's body was removed from the Mausoleum. The coffin was moved to the grave. At its bottom, a kind of sarcophagus of eight slabs was built. After a short pause, the coffin was carefully lowered into the grave. According to ancient Russian custom, those present threw a handful of earth onto the lid of the coffin. The soldiers then buried Stalin's body.

Consequences Contrary to expectations, the news that the “father of nations” was taken out of the Mausoleum was received calmly by the citizens of the country. They soon found out where Stalin was buried. But no riots followed. In 1970, a monument created by the sculptor Tomsky was erected at the leader’s grave. It is known that reburial near the Kremlin wall was not the only solution proposed at the congress of party leaders. For example, Nikita Khrushchev wanted to bury Joseph Vissarionovich not far from his daughter and wife, at the Novodevichy cemetery. However, this idea was abandoned. For some reason, the party feared that the leader’s body might be stolen from the grave and taken to Georgia. As a result, everyone at the congress voted for the initiative of the leader of Uzbekistan Nuritdin Mukhitdinov. He proposed burying the leader near the Kremlin, next to other important Soviet military leaders, politicians, and other government figures. Many people now know where Stalin is buried. You can see photographs of his grave in our article. New versions History does not stand still; many decades have passed since the death of the leader. Over the years, the question of where Joseph Stalin is buried began to acquire fantastic details. The information that the great leader rests in the center of the capital began to be questioned. For example, Canadian historian of Ukrainian origin Sinko Grega believes that one of Stalin’s doubles rests in the grave on Red Square. And Joseph Vissarionovich himself allegedly secretly moved to the Himalayas. They say that in his youth he was fond of Buddhist literature, so he hoped that local miracle workers would help him find health and eternal immortality. In the press, under headlines like “Secrets of the 20th Century,” suggestions periodically appear that the “father of nations” died much earlier from a serious illness. And his role was played for a long time by talented doubles, “dolls”, who replaced each other more than once. It's hard to take such fantasies seriously. However, the reign of Stalin is fraught with a lot of sinister secrets, many of which most of us will never know.

In the USSR, monuments to the party leader who died in 1953 continued to stand, but after 2-3 years the Soviet leadership came to their senses and gave the order to begin demolishing them. And they were different - from the simplest standard specimens to huge statues and bas-reliefs carved by prisoners on the rocky Kolyma shores. But the most important monument to the deceased tyrant was located in the capital, Moscow, in its very heart. Stalin in the Mausoleum lay next to the unshakable, indestructible and cornerstone shrine, the mummy of the creator of the world's first socialist state, where he himself placed it. For the champion of Leninist leadership standards, First Secretary N.S. Khrushchev, this proximity was unbearable.

Mausoleum and Lenin

In order to understand Soviet relic symbols, some retrospection to the beginning of 1924 is necessary; the events that followed the death of V.I. Lenin should be analyzed.

Since the leader of the Bolshevik Party was an atheist, he treated the ritual side of life accordingly, that is, almost nothing.

Of course, during the years of the Civil War, a certain set of rituals was formed that accompanied farewells to the fallen fighters for the people's happiness. The funeral procedure included, as a rule, the bowing of red banners, the performance by brass bands of the party anthem - “The Internationale”, speeches (sometimes politically illiterate) by various military (and not so) comrades (not always sober), accompanied by oaths of allegiance and promises of revenge on the “contra” .

In the case of such a majestic figure as Lenin, this was clearly not enough. And then a specialist with an incomplete seminary education, Comrade Stalin, became involved in organizing the funeral ceremony. In the Mausoleum, which was first knocked together from boards, a coffin was placed, and everyone could look at the deceased leader of all the proletarians of the world. Since there were a lot of them, the time for people to have access to the body was extended, and then a decision was made to preserve the corpse by embalming. This was done very late.

Mausoleum Science

During the time that Lenin's body was in the Mausoleum, Soviet science made a large-scale leap in a unique direction. And before this, there were cases of successful embalming of corpses; in some countries in ancient times, people sought to preserve the bodily shells of their rulers and prominent figures, but these skills, having reached the level of art, were kept secret, and partly for this reason they were lost.

In recent history, there is a known case involving embalming using a technology developed by the great surgeon Pirogov and applied to him after his death. However, this method, apparently, had many subtleties; it turned out to be difficult to reproduce. Therefore, Soviet anatomists had to invent their own method, which forcedly included not only an operation to preserve tissue, but also their partial restoration. Stalin lay in the Mausoleum for almost nine years, his corpse was also embalmed, and specialists working in a special laboratory involved in preservation issues reasonably assume that even today, after decades of lying in an ordinary grave, it is possible that the body of the second Soviet leader is in quite tolerable condition. form. Although with some reservations.

Relics forever?

The question of whether it is advisable to put a dead body on display for the general public today lies, rather, on a moral and ethical plane than on a political plane. The number of people for whom Lenin’s name remains sacred is not very large today, although it is also impossible to say that there are none at all.

An equally significant relic for many Soviet people was the body of Joseph Vissarionovich. From 1953 to 1962, they knew that both great rulers, comrades and revolutionaries Lenin and Stalin were in the Mausoleum. Photos of their bodies were almost never published, but anyone who came to Moscow and stood in a long line could look at them. It seemed that now it would always be like this.

Excesses

During the years of Stalin's rule, the “new man” necessary for the complete victory of communism was never created. But another type appeared, personifying a Soviet-type leader. This character always agreed with the opinion of the head of the party, and if he hesitated, then certainly along with the general line.

Ironically, it was Stalin’s methods of management that were applied when making the decision to exclude the corpse of the Secretary General, a violator of Leninist norms, from the list of official Soviet shrines. Not everyone who supported the Kirov plant workers internally agreed with him. When Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, some members of the reburial commission shed tears. Several handfuls of earth were thrown into the open mouth of the grave. It was brave, but it didn’t amount to a protest, much less a riot. The officers who were part of the funeral team behaved much more courageously. They refused to cut off the buttons made of gold from I.V. Stalin’s jacket, as the First himself insisted on, and were demoted. No other incidents occurred.

"Initiative from below"

The formal initiator of the removal of Stalin's body from the Mausoleum is considered to be the first secretary of the Leningrad regional party organization, Comrade. Spiridonov I.V. But he acted according to the usual scheme for the nomenklatura, according to which the communists simply supported the impulse of the working masses and, of course, led it.

A meeting of Kirov workers most likely took place, but the agenda and decision were, without a doubt, prepared in advance and approved “at the very top.” The historical background against which Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum is important.

The year 1961 was marked by many events in the life of the entire country. The next party congress, the XXII, was ending. Internal affairs were not going well, prices were rising. The broad masses of workers, willingly and unwillingly, compared Khrushchev's time with the previous era, in which, on the contrary, they were reduced. People remember the good better than the bad. Even the first manned flight into space and the testing of the most powerful hydrogen charge could only partially compensate for the lack of meat and sausage in stores.

Night and mystery

Stalin's removal from the Mausoleum took place immediately after the approving vote of the Congress. It took place simultaneously with the reburial near where the grave had already been dug in advance, under the light of spotlights directed at it.

Plywood shields were also installed ahead of time, fencing off the participants in the process, both living and dead, from prying eyes. The option of burial at the Novodevichy cemetery was rejected in order to avoid unpredictable consequences. Anything was possible, from a demonstrative pilgrimage to the theft of a coffin.

When Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, all the precious elements were removed from his uniform in the form of the golden shoulder straps of the Generalissimo, the star of the Hero of Socialist Labor and the notorious buttons, in place of which brass ones were hastily sewn on. History is silent about who did it.

The police explained that the few night passers-by were prohibited from entering Red Square by the fact that a parade was being prepared in honor of November 7th.

Last parade

On the night when Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, without knowing it, Soviet troops greeted him. The tracks of tanks rumbled along the paving stones, the engines of formidable combat vehicles roared, and the measured step of the infantrymen was reflected from the walls of the Kremlin. The rehearsal actually took place, but for the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, who died seven years ago, it was a real parade.

Meanwhile, the cladding above the entrance was already being removed, and in its place a still-preserved Stalinist inscription with one name was being prepared, but its installation took time, and the empty space was simply covered with a piece of cloth with the word “LENIN.” In the morning, the main tomb of the USSR was planned to be opened to the public. It was difficult to predict the reaction of the population, although the most influential Soviet organization, the KGB, tried to solve this problem.

Tombstone

There was no monument for a long time, only a heavy horizontal slab with laconically engraved letters and numbers, which also signified the dates of the boundaries of life. The tombstone in the form of a sculptural bust by N. Tomsky appeared almost a decade after Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum.

The year 1970 was difficult for Soviet-Chinese relations. In the PRC, the Brezhnev leadership was considered revisionist; the deceased leader was revered on a par with Mao and was outraged by the disrespectful attitude towards his memory. But in the USSR itself, by the end of the sixties, a critical attitude towards Stalin gave way to a “balanced” approach to history, expressed by the recognition that, of course, there was a cult, but there was also a personality.

Murmur

Fears that the people would have to be pacified after learning about the absence of Comrade Stalin’s ashes in the mausoleum turned out to be in vain. Unwanted conversations, of course, arose, but they did not go beyond the usual philistine murmur.

State security officers noted the appearance of political jokes, the essence of which boiled down to speculation about the future burial place of First Secretary Khrushchev. “It’s Nikita breaking in with his folding phone, Comrade Lenin,” Stalin allegedly said to Vladimir Ilyich with his famous Caucasian accent, having heard a crash at the back doors of the Mausoleum.

There were reasons for discontent; they led to many conflicts, the most famous of which was the Novocherkassk uprising, which happened soon, but these unrest had nothing to do with the movement of the dead body; the people perceived the change that took place on Red Square rather passively. Fans of hard methods, represented by the “hard-line” communists, laid flowers every year on March 5 and December 21 behind the mausoleum, where Stalin’s grave was surrounded by other graves of prominent party figures. The protests were limited to this.

Memory and history

From the point of view of an ordinary Russian citizen who has grown up in the last two decades, much of this story may be incomprehensible. For example, what is the fundamental difference between the two inhabitants of the tomb, which still stands today on Red Square?

In that year, when Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, the main idea that the party leadership tried (and not without success) to convey to the consciousness of the broad masses was the idea that Lenin planned everything correctly, but the leaders who came after him distorted his plan. And only now, when dear Nikita Sergeevich has finally come to power, will everything go as it should. Here he is, a real Leninist.

A modern person who knows and understands the nature of communism most often does not understand why Stalin was removed from the Mausoleum, but Lenin was not. The answer is simple, it’s all about culture and attitude to the history of your own country. It is simply necessary to respect the beliefs of those who, due to their advanced years, cannot and do not want to change them. Today there are very worthy people living in Russia and beyond its borders, who are nevertheless committed to communist ideals. And they must be taken into account if we want our descendants to respect us.