Kremlin Wall Necropolis

The Kremlin Wall Necropolis is the former national cemetery of the Soviet Union, located in Red Square in Moscow beside the Kremlin Wall. Burials there began in November 1917, when 240 pro-Bolsheviks who died during the Moscow Bolshevik Uprising were buried in mass graves. The improvised burial site gradually transformed into the centerpiece of military and civilian honor during the Second World War. It is centered on Lenin's Mausoleum, initially built in wood in 1924 and rebuilt in granite in 1929–30. After the last mass burial in Red Square in 1921, funerals there were usually conducted as state ceremonies and reserved as the final honor for highly venerated politicians, military leaders, cosmonauts, and scientists. In 1925–1927, burials in the ground were stopped; funerals were now conducted as burials of cremated ash in the Kremlin wall itself. Burials in the ground resumed with Mikhail Kalinin's funeral in 1946.
The Kremlin Wall was the de facto resting place of the Soviet Union's deceased national icons. Burial there was a status symbol among Soviet citizens. The practice of burying dignitaries at Red Square ended with the funeral of General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985. The Kremlin Wall Necropolis was designated a protected landmark in 1974. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, citizens of the Russian Federation and many other former post-Soviet states continue to pay their respects to the national heroes at the Kremlin Wall.
The eastern segment of the Kremlin wall, and Red Square behind it, emerged on its present site in the 15th century, during the reign of Ivan III; the wall and the square were separated with a wide defensive moat filled with water diverted from the Neglinnaya River. The moat was lined with a secondary fortress wall, and spanned by three bridges connecting the Kremlin to the posad. From 1707–08 Peter the Great, expecting a Swedish incursion deep into the Russian mainland, restored the moat around the Kremlin, cleared Red Square and built earthen fortifications around Nikolskaya and Spasskaya towers. From 1776 to 1787, Matvey Kazakov built the Kremlin Senate that today provides a backdrop for the present-day Necropolis.
Throughout the 18th century the unused, neglected fortifications deteriorated and were not properly repaired until the 1801 coronation of Alexander I. In one season the moat with bridges and adjacent buildings was replaced with a clean span of paved square. More reconstruction followed in the 19th century. The stretch of Kremlin wall south from Senate Tower was badly damaged in 1812 by the explosion at the Kremlin Arsenal set off by the retreating French troops. Nikolskaya tower lost its gothic crown which was erected in 1807–1808; Arsenalnaya tower developed deep cracks, leading to Joseph Bove proposing in 1813 the outright demolition of the towers to prevent the wall's imminent collapse. Eventually, the main structures of the towers were deemed sound enough to be left in place, and were topped with new tented roofs designed by Bove. Peter's bastions were razed (creating space for nearby Alexander Garden and Theatre Square), The Kremlin wall facing Red Square was rebuilt shallower than before, and acquired its present shape in the 1820s.
Between the 1917 October Revolution and June 1927, the area outside the Kremlin wall between the Senate and Nikolskaya towers was used for mass and individual burials of people who had to some extent contributed to the socialist revolution or the Bolshevik cause. This included ordinary soldiers killed in battle, victims of the Civil War, militia men fallen while fighting anti-Bolsheviks and noted Bolshevik politicians, as well as individuals associated with creating the new Soviet society. Burial plots of the 1917–1927 period are currently organized into 15 landscaped grave sites with the names of the buried inscribed on black marble tablets.
In July 1917, hundreds of soldiers of the Russian Northern Front were arrested for mutiny and desertion and locked up in Daugavpils (then Dvinsk) fortress. Later, 869 Dvinsk inmates were transported to Moscow. Here, the jailed soldiers launched a hunger strike; public support for them threatened to develop into a citywide riot. On 22 September, 593 inmates were released; the rest were left behind bars until the October Revolution. The released soldiers, collectively called Dvintsy, stayed in the city as a cohesive unit, based in Zamoskvorechye District and openly hostile to the ruling Provisional Government. Immediately after the October Revolution in Saint Petersburg, Dvintsy became the strike force of the Bolsheviks in Moscow. Late at night on 27–28 October, a detachment of approximately two hundred men marching north to Tverskaya Street confronted the loyalist forces near the State Historical Museum on Red Square. During the fighting, 70 of the Dvintsy, including their company commander, Sapunov, were killed at the barricades.
The following day, loyalists led by Colonel Konstantin Ryabtsev succeeded in taking over the Kremlin. They gunned down the surrendered Red soldiers at the Kremlin Arsenal wall. More Red soldiers were killed as the Bolsheviks stormed the Kremlin, finally taking control on the night of 2–3 November. Street fighting tapered off after claiming nearly a thousand lives, and on 4 November the new Bolshevik administration decreed their dead would be buried at Red Square next to the Kremlin Wall, where indeed most of them were killed.
A total of 238 dead were buried in the mass graves between Senate and Nikolskaya towers in a public funeral on November 10 (John Reed incorrectly mentions 500); two more victims were buried on the 14 and 17 of November. The youngest, Pavel Andreyev, was 14 years old. Of 240 pro-revolution martyrs of the October–November fighting, only 20, including 12 of the Dvintsy, are identified in the official listing of the Moscow Heritage Commission. As of March 2009, three Moscow streets are still named after these individual victims, as well as Dvintsev Street named after the Dvintsy force.
The loyalists secured a permit to publicly bury their dead on 13 November. This funeral started at the old Moscow State University building near Kremlin; thirty-seven dead were interred at the Vsekhsvyatskoye Cemetery (now demolished) in the then-suburban Sokol District.
Mass and individual burials in the ground under the Kremlin wall continued until the funeral of Pyotr Voykov in June 1927. In the first years of the Soviet regime, the honor of being buried on Red Square was extended to ordinary soldiers, Civil War victims, and Moscow militia men killed in clashes with anti-Bolsheviks (March–April 1918). In January 1918, the Red Guards buried the victims of a terrorist bombing in Dorogomilovo. In the same January White Guards fired on a pro-Bolshevik street rally; the eight victims were also buried under the Kremlin wall.
The largest single burial occurred in 1919. On 25 September, anarchists led by former socialist revolutionary Donat Cherepanov set off an explosion in a Communist Party school building in Leontyevsky Lane when Moscow party chief Vladimir Zagorsky was speaking to students. Twelve people, including Zagorsky, were killed and buried in a mass grave on Red Square.
Another unusual incident was the 24 July 1921 crash of the Aerowagon, an experimental (and not fully tested) high-speed railcar fitted with an aircraft engine and propeller traction. On the day of the crash, it delivered a group of Soviet and foreign communists led by Fyodor Sergeyev to the Tula collieries, but on the return trip to Moscow, the aerowagon derailed at high speed, killing 7 of the 22 people on board, including its inventor Valerian Abakovsky. This was the last mass burial in the ground of Red Square.
Yakov Sverdlov, who died in 1919, allegedly from the Spanish flu, was buried in an individual grave near the Senate tower. This area would later include eleven more individual graves of top-ranking Soviet leaders (see Individual tombs section). Sverdlov was followed by John Reed, Inessa Armand, Viktor Nogin and other notable Bolsheviks and their foreign allies. Interment in the Kremlin wall, apart from its location next to the seat of government, was also seen as a statement of atheism, while burial in the ground at a traditional cemetery next to a church was deemed inappropriate for a Bolshevik. For the same reason, cremation, then prohibited by the Russian Orthodox Church, was preferred to burial in a coffin and favored by Lenin and Trotsky – though Lenin expressed the wish to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg. The new government had sponsored the construction of crematoria since 1919, but the first burial of cremated remains in a niche in the wall did not take place until 1925.
Vladimir Lenin died of a stroke on 21 January 1924. While his body lay in state in the Pillar Hall of the House of the Unions, the Politburo discussed ways to preserve it, initially for forty days, despite objections from his widow and siblings. Joseph Stalin gave instructions to install a vault for Lenin's embalmed remains inside the Kremlin wall, and on 27 January, Lenin's casket was deposited in a temporary wooden vault built in a single day. The first proper Mausoleum was built of wood in March–July 1924 and officially opened on August 1 (foreign visitors were allowed inside on August 3). The contest to design and build a new, permanent, Mausoleum was announced in April 1926; construction of Alexey Shchusev's winning design began in July 1929 and was completed in sixteen months. The Mausoleum has since functioned as a government reviewing stand during public parades.
The glass sarcophagus of Lenin's tomb was twice vandalized by visitors, in 1959 and 1969, leading to installation of a bulletproof glass shell. It was bombed twice, in 1963, when the terrorist was the sole victim, and in 1973, when an explosion killed the terrorist and two bystanders.
The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia has petitioned Russia to dismantle the cult of personality and bury Lenin's body, seeking to "rid Red Square of the remains of the main persecutor and executioner of the 20th century," although the Russian Orthodox Church demurs.
As of 2022, Lenin's body remains in the Mausoleum, excluding the period of evacuation to Tyumen during 1941–1945.
Two days after Joseph Stalin's death, the Politburo decreed that his remains would be placed on display in the Mausoleum; it officially reopened in November 1953 with Lenin and Stalin side by side. Another plan decreed in March 1953, but never implemented, called for construction of a Pantheon in which the bodies of Lenin and Stalin would be eventually relocated. Eight years later, following the de-Stalinization of the Khrushchev Thaw, removal of Stalin's body from the Mausoleum was unanimously sanctioned by the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party. On 31 October 1961, the Mausoleum was quickly covered with plywood. Red Square itself was closed as a matter of routine, in preparation for the 7 November parade. Stalin's remains were quickly re-interred in a deep grave, lined with concrete blocks, behind the Mausoleum; the ceremony was attended only by the state commission led by Nikolay Shvernik. Harold Skilling, who visited the Mausoleum in November of the same year, noted that "everyone was so curious to see the new grave of Stalin... Unlike others, his [grave] was not yet graced by a bust and was marked only by a tablet with the name I.V. Stalin and dates of birth and death". The existing tomb of Stalin carved by Nikolai Tomsky was installed in June 1970.
The first person to be cremated and interred in an urn in the Kremlin wall, 45-year-old former People's Commissar of Finance Miron Vladimirov, died in Italy in March 1925. The procedure for dealing with human remains in an urn was still unfamiliar at the time, and Vladimirov's urn was carried to his grave in an ordinary coffin.
Between 1925 and the opening of the Donskoye Cemetery crematorium in October 1927, interments in the wall and burials in the ground coexisted together; the former was preferred for foreign dignitaries of the Comintern (Jenő Landler, Bill Haywood, Arthur MacManus, Charles Ruthenberg) while the latter was granted only to top Party executives (Mikhail Frunze, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Nariman Narimanov and Pyotr Voykov).
Initially, the bodies of the deceased were laid in state in the Kremlin's halls, but with the tightening of security in the late 1920s, the official farewell station was relocated to the House of the Unions' "Pillar Hall" on Okhotny Ryad (where Lenin lay in state in 1924) and remained there until the end of the Soviet state. Burials initially took place to the north of the Senate tower, switching to the south side in 1934 and returning to the north side in 1977 (with a few exceptions). Interments in the wall were strictly individual; spouses and children of those interred in the wall had to be buried elsewhere. There were only three instances of group burials: the three-man crew of the Osoaviakhim-1 high-altitude balloon in 1934, the crew of a MiG-15UTI crash in 1968 (Gagarin and Seryogin), and the three-man crew of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft in 1971. In total, the wall accommodates the graves of 107 men and 8 women. No remains interred in the wall were ever removed from it, including those of the people posthumously accused of "fascist conspiracy" (Sergei Kamenev) or political repressions (Andrey Vyshinsky).
Under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, the honor of interment in the Kremlin wall was awarded posthumously by the Politburo. When members of the Politburo were not available immediately, Mikhail Suslov had the first call. Brezhnev overruled Suslov's decision at least once, voting to bury Semyon Budenny in an individual grave. There were also at least two known cases when groups of professionals pressed the government to extend special honors to their deceased colleagues:
On 26 April 1967, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who had died in the crash of his Soyuz 1 space capsule, was given a state funeral in Moscow, and his ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Komarov was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin (for the second time) and the order of Hero of the Soviet Union.
The last person to be buried in the Kremlin wall was Minister of Defence Dmitriy Ustinov in December 1984.
The row of individual tombs behind the Mausoleum began to acquire its present shape after the end of World War II. Sergei Merkurov created the first five tombs, for the recently deceased Mikhail Kalinin and Andrey Zhdanov, as well as for Yakov Sverdlov, Mikhail Frunze and Felix Dzerzhinsky who had died decades earlier. Grey granite stands that separate Red Square from the wall were built in the same period. In 1947 Merkurov proposed rebuilding the Mausoleum into a sort of "Pergamon Altar" that would become a foreground to a statue of Stalin placed atop Senatskaya tower. Dmitry Chechulin, Vera Mukhina and others spoke against the proposal and it was soon dropped.
There are, in total, twelve individual tombs; all, including the four burials of the 1980s, are shaped similar to the canonical Merkurov's model. All twelve are considered to have died of natural causes, although some, such as Frunze, had unusual circumstances associated with their deaths. Konstantin Chernenko, who died in March 1985, became the last person to be buried on Red Square. Former head of state Andrei Gromyko, who died in July 1989, was offered burial in the Necropolis near his predecessors but was eventually buried at the Novodevichy cemetery at the request of his family.
The Kremlin wall and the stands erected in the 1940s were traditionally separated with a line of blue spruce (Picea pungens), a tree not occurring naturally in Russia. In August–September 2007 the aging trees, with few exceptions, were cut down and replaced with young trees. A Federal Protective Service spokesman explained that the previous generation of spruce, planted in the 1970s, suffered from the dryness of the urban landscape; 28 old but sound trees were handpicked for replanting inside the Kremlin. New trees were selected from the nurseries of Altai Mountains, Russian Far East and "some foreign countries". The FPS spokesman also mentioned that in Nikita Khrushchev's period there were plans to plant a fruit garden around the Mausoleum, but the proposal was rejected in fear of fruit flies.
Public discussion on closing the Mausoleum emerged shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, with opinions ranging from simply burying Lenin in Saint Petersburg as he had requested, to taking the mummy on a commercial world tour. After the climax of the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, President Boris Yeltsin removed the honor guard from the Mausoleum (former Post no.1, see Kremlin Regiment) and voiced his opinion that Lenin should eventually be buried in the ground. The decision was supported by the Public Committee of Democratic Organisations. By 1995, Yeltsin had "moved to the nationalist center", using the Mausoleum as a government stand like previous state leaders; in 1997, he reiterated the claim to bury Lenin.
Proposals to remove the Necropolis from Red Square altogether met with far more public opposition and did not come to fruition either. Despite the Russian government's efforts to relocate Lenin's tomb and Soviet monuments from the Kremlin, support of both Lenin and the Soviet Union remained steadfast among the Russian populace. Public opinion on preserving the remains of Lenin in their embalmed state was split but leaned towards burial. A late 2008 VTsIOM poll found that 66% of the respondents supported a funeral in a traditional cemetery, including 28% of those who believed that the funeral should be postponed until the communist generation passes away. 25% of the respondents thought the body should be preserved in the Mausoleum. In October 2005, 51% of respondents had expressed support for a funeral and 40% for preservation.