/2913626527_9d8e6d4bf8[1].jpg)
Location: Krasnaya Ploshchad or Red Square
Tel. (495) 623 5527
Subway: Ploshchad Revolyutsii, Okhotnyy Ryad
Open: 10am- 1pm Tue-
Thu, Sat, Sun
The Mausoleum of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1953-1961, Mausoleum of
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin) is a
monumental tomb in Red Square near the Kremlin walls in Moscow,
where Vladimir Lenin's body has been kept in a clear sarcophagus
since 1924 The first wooden mausoleum was built in 1924.
The
first wooden mausoleum was built in January 1924, shortly after the
leader's death; the second wooden mausoleum was built in May 1924.
The stone mausoleum was built by October 1930.
Since 1924,
the mausoleum has housed a laboratory for the preservation of
Lenin's body, where the bodies of prominent statesmen from various
countries were embalmed]. From 1953 to 1961, a sarcophagus
containing the body of Joseph Stalin was placed in the mausoleum; on
October 30, 1961, the 22nd Congress of the CPSU decided that it was
impossible to continue finding Stalin's body in the mausoleum, and
the body was subsequently buried in the necropolis near the Kremlin
wall. The remains were then buried in a necropolis near the Kremlin
wall.
From 1989 to the present, controversy has persisted
over Lenin's reburial and the closure of the mausoleum.
The
mausoleum is under the control of the Moscow Kremlin General
Directorate.
/imagesCA0XZXDW.jpg)
On August 30, 1918, Lenin miraculously survived an
assassination attempt by socialist revolutionary Fanny Kaplan. On that
day he delivered a speech at the Moscow factory of Michelson in
Moscow.After 1921, Lenin suffered from arteriosclerosis and his health
deteriorated rapidly; during an examination in 1922, doctors were unable
to find organic vascular lesions in Lenin because the medicine of the
time lacked the necessary diagnostic capabilities. His health continued
to deteriorate, and Lenin moved to the Gorki residence to improve his
health. he suffered his first stroke at the end of May, but his function
was partially restored, and Lenin returned to work in October of that
year. on December 16, 1922, as a result of a stroke (cerebral
hemorrhage), Lenin was partially paralyzed in his right arm and right
leg. As a result of a stroke (cerebral hemorrhage), Lenin became
partially paralyzed in his right arm and leg. After partially
recovering, Lenin returned to the Kremlin and began work on his last
article. 9 March 1923, a third hemorrhage occurred, resulting in loss of
speech. Lenin was again transferred to Gorky, where his health improved
regularly, but the disease progressed; on January 21, 1924, a fourth
cerebral hemorrhage occurred, and death was recorded at 18 hours and 50
minutes.
In the fall of 1923, at a meeting of the Politburo
(composed of Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Kalinin, Kamenev, and Likov),
Stalin stated that Lenin's health had deteriorated so much that fatal
death was possible. In this regard, Stalin announced that in the event
of Lenin's death, a proposal had been made by "some comrades from the
provinces" to embalm his body:
As I know, this issue is of great
interest to some comrades from the provinces. It is necessary to embalm
Lenin's body.
Trotsky vehemently opposed this idea. According to
him.
"When Comrade Stalin finished his speech, it dawned on me for
the first time where the initially incomprehensible arguments and
instructions that Lenin was a Russian and that he should be buried in
Russian were directed. In Russian, the saint was to be canonized
according to the doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church. Apparently,
we, the parties of revolutionary Marxism, are encouraged to go in the
same direction of preserving the body of Lenin. Previously there were
the relics of Sergius of Radnezh and Seraphim of Sarov, but now they are
trying to replace them with the relics of Vladimir Ilyich. I would very
much like to know who these local comrades are who, according to Stalin,
are using modern science to embalm the remains of Lenin and are trying
to make relics from them. I would tell them that they have nothing in
common with Marxist science."
Bukharin (who considered the idea
of embalming to be "the exaltation of the ashes") and Kamenev also
vehemently disagreed. He declared that "this idea is nothing but a
genuine theocracy, and Lenin himself would have condemned and rejected
it."
On January 22, 1924, the day after Lenin's death, scholar
Alexei Abrikosov embalmed his body. A mixture of water, formalin, ethyl
alcohol, zinc chloride, and glycerin was used for embalming. The
embalming solution was effective for six days, allowing as many people
as possible to say goodbye to Lenin. Once the treatment was complete,
Alexei Abrikosov conducted an autopsy to determine the exact cause of
death in the presence of the doctors who had treated Lenin, the
professors, and People's Commissioner for Health Nikolai Semashko.
During the autopsy, he severed arteries and large blood vessels, which
he would later regret. The autopsy report was published in the capital's
newspaper.
"Based on the autopsy data and medical history, the
only basis for the illness of the late Vladimir Ilyich was extensive and
pronounced long-standing sclerosis of the cerebral vessels, which was
the result of overactivity of the brain due to hereditary sclerosis
predisposition. The narrowing of the lumen of the arteries of the brain
and the nutritional violation dependent on inadequate blood flow
resulted in progressive local softening of the brain tissue, which
explained all previous manifestations of the disease (paralysis, speech
impediment). The direct cause of death was increased circulatory
disturbance of the brain and hemorrhage in the extremities.
On January 21, 1924, at 7:00 p.m., Maria Ulyanova
called the Kremlin and informed Joseph Stalin of Lenin's death. Stalin,
Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and Mikhail Kalinin went to Gorki. At
10:00 p.m., in the Kremlin, the Special Committee outlined the first
preparations for organizing the funeral, and at 2:15 a.m. an emergency
meeting of the Party Central Committee was held. At 3:30 a.m., a meeting
of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR was held
at which the members of the committee organizing Lenin's funeral were
elected. Present at this meeting were Klim Voloshilov, Vladimir
Bonch-Bruevich, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, who was
appointed chairman of the committee.
The next day the first
meeting of the committee was held, and it was decided that Lenin's body
would be transported by special train from Gorky to Moscow's Saratov
station (Paveletsky) by 1 p.m. on January 23. The special editions of
Izvestia and Pravda reported that Lenin's body would be laid to rest in
a columned hall before the funeral service; beginning at 19:00 on
January 23, citizens were allowed to enter the coffin of the deceased to
bid him farewell. On the same day, the USSR Central Executive Committee
decided to build a crypt near the Kremlin wall to preserve Lenin's body
"in the mass grave of the fighters of the October Revolution" and open
it to the public. At the same time, a committee was formed to develop
the catacombs, and architect Alexei Shchusev was instructed to draw up
plans for the mausoleum.
At 9:30 a.m. on January 23, Lenin's body
was placed in a red coffin and carried several kilometers from Gorky to
the Gerasimovka train station. From the station the coffin was sent by
train to Moscow, where it arrived at the station at 1:00 p.m. The coffin
was moved and laid to rest in a trade union house with honor guards who
changed every 10 minutes. Over the next three days, more than 9,000
people stood in the guard of honor and about one million people passed
by the casket to say goodbye. The funeral committee received thousands
of letters and telegrams asking that the funeral be postponed and that
Vladimir Lenin's body be preserved. The steam locomotive that carried
the funeral train was preserved and is now housed in the museum of the
Moscow Railways.
According to official Soviet historiography, the
decision to preserve Lenin's body came after numerous letters from
workers calling for his body to be left undecomposed, preserved for
centuries, and made a symbol of the new era of communism. In fact,
however, letters and telegrams from party cells all over the country
reached the Central Executive Committee and the Dzerzhinskiy Committee.
However, they mainly dealt with perpetuating Lenin's memory in buildings
and monuments, or contained specific requests that delegations from
certain counties, districts, and cities be allowed to come to Moscow to
bid Lenin farewell. Numerous petitions and statements are preserved at
the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Modern
History (RTsKhIDNI). As for the embalming and long-term preservation of
Lenin's body, no letters containing such proposals were found in the
archives.
On February 16, 1924, Timofey Sapronov, chairman of the
Sub-Council of the People's Commissariat of the Russian Federation,
stated in his report that the idea of preserving Lenin's body did not
appear immediately, not from the funeral committee. Vladimir Obukh,
Lenin's physician, proposed the idea soon after his death. He asked
those present at the farewell ceremony for the leader to support the
idea of building an crypt and to announce it at the next meeting of the
committee, and by the evening of January 23, a resolution was passed by
the factory wishing to build the crypt and preserve Lenin's body. This
is confirmed by the minutes of the meeting. On January 22, the committee
discussed the issue of Lenin's grave and decided to dig a grave in front
of Yakov Sverdlov's grave in Red Square and to bury Lenin in a zinc
coffin. The crypt was discussed at the January 23 meeting. Options for
the coffin to be open or covered with bricks were discussed.
Felix Dzerzhinsky, Vyacheslav Molotov, Leonid Krasin, and Nikolai
Murarov advocated preservation. Lenin's relatives, Varlam Avanesov and
Klim Voloshilov (who later changed his mind) advocated against it.
Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich also weighed in: "I was completely convinced
that Vladimir Ilyich himself would react to this and would speak in the
negative, and he would oppose such treatment of himself or anyone else.
Leon Trotsky remained adamantly opposed. He later wrote in his
memoirs:
My attitude toward Lenin as a revolutionary leader was
replaced by my attitude toward Lenin as the head of the church
hierarchy. At my protest, an offensive mausoleum was erected in Red
Square, unworthy of the revolutionary consciousness. The official book
on Lenin became the same mausoleum. Lenin's ideas were cut up into
quotations for fake sermons. Embalmed corpses fought the living Lenin".
On January 24, Nadezhda Krupskaya agreed to extend her farewell to
Lenin for one month, but reserved the right to discuss the issue at the
end of the period because she was against embalming the body and placing
it in a sarcophagus. She wrote to Inna Alman: "When we planned to bury
V.I. in the Kremlin, I was terribly upset.
Please don't let your
grief for Ilyich be directed at the outward adoration of his
personality. Please don't let your grief for Ilijti be directed at the
outward worship of his personality. - Ili'ichi placed little importance
on such things during his lifetime and was weary of such things.
Remember that there is still much poverty and disorder in our country.
Nadezhda Krupskaya
According to other documents in the RTSKhIDNI,
the decision to preserve Lenin's body was made shortly after his death.
After much debate, the idea of preserving Lenin's body as long as
possible was recognized as a necessity for the proletariat. Academician
Sergei Debov wrote, "It would be irresponsible to name a specific date.
We will exert every effort and skill to ensure that such a time is as
long as possible, calculated in centuries.
After this decision
was made, Soviet newspapers began printing letters and telegrams written
on behalf of groups of workers and peasants demanding that Lenin's body
be embalmed. on January 25, 1924, the weekly newspaper Rabochaya Moskva
published an article entitled "Lenin's Body Must Be Preserved." It
published three such letters under the headline. One of the letters
stated:
"For us it is never impossible to bury the body of a
leader as great and dearly loved as Ilyich. Ilijti will always be with
us."
Another letter pointed out that future generations need to
see the body of the man who started the world revolution. All of these
letters contained a single request that Lenin be preserved and placed
under glass for all to see.
On January 25, 1924, the Presidium of
the Central Executive Committee of the USSR decided to build an
underground cemetery near the Kremlin wall, within the mass grave, and
open it to the public. The following day, at the Second All-Union
Congress of the Soviet Union, this resolution was approved. By order of
Nikolai Mularov, head of the Moscow garrison, an official guard of honor
was established at Lenin's coffin. Delegates of the 11th Congress of the
USSR and cadets of the Kremlin School of the All-Russian Central
Executive Committee of the USSR stood on the cortege. Later, every year
on April 22, veterans of the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War went
to work.
On January 26, 1924, at exactly midnight, access to
Lenin's coffin was prohibited.
On the night of January 24, 1924, architect Alexei
Shchusev was ordered by the government to urgently design and construct
a temporary mausoleum for Lenin. At the same time, it had to be majestic
yet concise and in harmony with the architecture of Kremlin Square. The
mausoleum was to allow all who wished to bid farewell to approach
Lenin's body. Shchusev designed the building in a few hours.
He
said, "I only had time to bring the necessary tools from my workshop.
The next morning I had to start tearing down the stands and build the
foundation and basement. Before starting on the sketches, I invited
Leonid Vesnin and the architect Antipov to a meeting about the
principles of architecture.<.> I expressed my opinion that the
silhouette of the mausoleum should be stepped, not high-rise. I
suggested that the mausoleum be inscribed with a simple inscription."
Alexey Shchusev
By morning, the Government Committee approved the
finished sketch, and Alexei Shchusev began construction of the wooden
mausoleum near the Senate Tower in the Kremlin. The building poles and
planks were made from Arkhangelsk pine in the Sokolniki lumber depot.
Architect G.I. Grigoriev said, "The leader's tomb was built by more than
100 people from the Sokolniki construction office and the Moscow Public
Utilities Department. Every day many volunteer workers came to the site
to take part in the construction of Lenin's Mausoleum.
Prior to
the construction of the crypt, more than 50 m³ of earth had to be
excavated. The 1.5 meter layer of frozen soil would not yield to the
power of shovels and crowbars, and could barely be warmed by a campfire.
The work site had a complex and heterogeneous geological structure,
including an old cemetery, public gardens, and a backfilled Alevizov
trench. During the work, they encountered underground power lines and
ancient buildings, which forced them to reduce the size of the tunnels
and abandon the construction of the tomb pillars. In parallel with the
excavation work, an underground tomb was assembled in the plaza to be
placed in the dug hole. The work was completed by the day of the
funeral. Small cubic vestibules were installed on both sides of the
crypt for ingress and egress, but due to tight deadlines, the exit on
the right side remained decorative.
The mausoleum was constructed
in two and a half days and became the center of the necropolis. Its
shape was a dark gray cube three meters high with a three-tiered pyramid
at the top and "Lenin" inscribed in black bars on the facade. For
durability, all wooden parts were coated with oil varnish. The columns
and doors are made of black oak. Forged nails with large designs were
used to fasten the facade. Along the edges of the mausoleum were two
extensions for entry and exit. A staircase on the right led down three
meters to a funeral hall illuminated by two frosted glass chandeliers.
The walls of the hall were covered with red cloth, with black stripes in
the shape of pilasters. The ceiling was painted with sickles and hammers
against a background of red and black folds. The interior was designed
according to a drawing by painter Ignatius Nivinsky.
At 8:27 a.m.
on January 27, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Kalinin, and Leningrad workers
stood as guard of honor. At 9:20 a.m. the coffin was removed from the
trade union house with mournful music and taken to Red Square. At 9:43
a.m., the coffin was placed on a raised platform in the center of the
hall. The top half of the coffin lid was inset with glasses. The
platform on which the coffin was placed was surrounded on three sides by
railings. Immediately after the coffin was laid to rest, the appeal of
the Second All-Union Congress of the Soviet Union, adopted the previous
day, on the need to continue the "great liberation struggle" despite
Lenin's death, was read to the people.
At 4:00 p.m., amid gunfire
and factory horns, the coffin was taken to the mausoleum, placed on a
pedestal, and covered with the flags of the Comintern and the Central
Committee of the Russian Communist Party.
The shortcomings of the
mausoleum soon became apparent. The narrow staircase and small funeral
hall did not allow anyone wishing to say goodbye to Lenin to enter.
While the public passed through, the temperature in the hall rose, which
could adversely affect the condition of the body. on January 30, 1924,
the mausoleum was closed for two weeks for renovation. on February 4,
Leonid Krasin, the Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Trade, decided
to build a glass sarcophagus over the casket. The plan was to have
cooled air constantly circulating in it. Krasin ordered special
equipment from Germany and did the preparatory work to place and install
a refrigeration unit outside the mausoleum.
On February 26, 1924,
a medical commission was established to "monitor the state of embalming
of the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and to take necessary measures in a
timely manner" because the initial embalming had not preserved Lenin's
body for a long time. Anatomy professor Vladimir Volovyov and biochemist
Boris Zvarsky proposed a long-term embalming method. To implement this
plan, the mausoleum was closed again, and on March 26, 1924, a
laboratory was set up in the mausoleum; on July 26, the Committee for
Perpetuating the Memory of Lenin of the USSR Central Executive Committee
recognized the success of the new embalming process. It granted the
right to expect the preservation of the remains for decades.
On March 26, 1924, shortly after the mausoleum was
closed for the mortuary, the government ordered the catacombs to be
rebuilt in a more monumental fashion.
The temporary structures
erected on Red Square during the brief, unforgettable few days following
the leader's death could, of course, exist only long enough for the
construction of a permanent tomb.
Leonid Krasin.
New
structures proposed included a memorial palace, a huge statue, and a
tall tower with a rotating globe. These options were rejected as not in
keeping with the general architectural appearance of Red Square, and the
design of the mausoleum was again left to Alexei Shchusev. The new
building was to be both a tomb and a monument, a platform that spoke to
the people. Alexei Shchusev applied the compositional techniques and
simplified forms of custom architecture. He kept the staircase
configuration but increased the size and added porticos and tribunes;
the second wooden mausoleum became more like a modern granite mausoleum.
The miniature models are now housed in the V.I. Lenin Museum and the
Shchusev Architectural Museum.
I was looking for parallels
throughout the architectural history. The shape of the pyramid in the
mausoleum on Red Square seemed out of place. Lenin is dead, but his work
lives on. Based on this, I came up with the configuration of a stepped
monument.
Alexei Shchusev
On March 14, 1924, the Commission
approved the project of a crystal sarcophagus created by architect
Konstantin Melnikov; by May 1, all major work on the construction of the
olive-painted mausoleum was completed and a "small square surrounded by
a cast-iron grid" was laid out around it. Construction was completed by
the end of the month. Because of the ongoing embalming work, the
mausoleum remained closed until August 1. On that day, it was opened at
18:00 with the sound of a funeral march. The second mausoleum functioned
until 1929.
The tomb was surrounded by a hexagonal square with a
low iron fence. The oak planks of the lower tier of the mausoleum were
strictly vertical and lined like an indestructible wall. Nail caps, like
rivets in armor, protruded above the wood, discreetly but expressively
reiterating the monumentality of the building. The staircase of the
tomb, conversely, was covered with horizontal planks, giving the
building a lightness. The poles, doors, and columns of the crowned
portico were black oak, the color of which expressed mourning and grief.
On August 1, 1924, the Paris Communist flag was solemnly transferred
to the mausoleum and later to the permanent exhibition of the Central
Lenin Museum.
In January 1925, the Presidium of the Central
Executive Committee of the USSR announced an international competition
for the design of Lenin's stone tomb. The committee received 117
proposals and sketches. Various options were presented, including the
"October" ship carrying Lenin's figure, a circular mausoleum in the
shape of a globe, a resemblance of an Egyptian pyramid, and a mausoleum
in the shape of a five-pointed star. However, after reviewing the
proposed projects, the committee decided to keep the image of a wooden
mausoleum. Architect Shchusev drew several new drawings based on old
sketches and created a granite model, and his project was approved. It
was decided that the new building would be clad in red granite and black
and gray Labrador.
Construction was carried out by the
state-owned construction trust "Mostroy. Nikita Kuzmich Fomenkov, a
bricklayer from the Belarusian village of Grabovka, wrote "Comrade
Lenin, you will always live" before he began laying the first brick
covered with wax. It was decided that the "Lenin" inscription would be
made of red granite on black Labrador. A suitable size of the mineral
was found in the Golovinsky quarry in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine.
The first block of Labrador exploded during mining, so a second block
weighing 60 tons was transported to Moscow. A cart weighing 16.5 tons
with 60-centimeter-wide wheels was built especially for the transport in
Moscow. During the transportation of the stones, the track reached a
depth of 50 centimeters; using two tractors, the 16 kilometers from the
quarry to the Golbasi station was covered in eight days. For
transporting the stone by rail, a special 16-wheeled platform was used,
which carried submarines during World War I. The monolith arrived at the
Kiev railroad station in Moscow, from where it was transported to the
Leningradsky station, where it was brought to Red Square in two hours at
night; of the 60 tons of stone, only 48 tons remained after processing,
making this the largest monolith used in the construction of the
mausoleum. They carved the inscription on this stone, lifted it with
powerful railroad jacks, and placed it over the entrance.
The
pedestal under the sarcophagus weighed 20 tons, was set on a thick layer
of sand, and stakes were driven around the sarcophagus. Other monoliths
weighed between 1 and 10 tons. In total, 2,900 m² of polished granite
was required, with an average of three days of work per m². The red
Karelian quartzite upper slab was placed on granite columns of various
rock types that were specially transported to Moscow from all the
republics of the Soviet Union.
The stone mausoleum was completed
in 16 months, by October 1930. Compared to the wooden building, the new
building was built 3 meters higher, with an external volume of 5800 m³
(4.5 times larger) and an internal volume of 2400 m³ (12 times larger).
The total weight of the building is approximately 10,000 tons. The
mausoleum occupied the highest point of the Red Square.
Under the
leadership of Isidore Franzese, the mausoleum and necropolis were
combined into one architectural design during construction. Diverse
tombstones and monuments were removed, individual and collective burials
in the Nikoliskaya and Spasskaya towers were integrated, and fences were
redesigned and installed. Seating for 10,000 people was installed on
both sides of the mausoleum.
The mausoleum has a vestibule, a funeral hall, and two
staircases. Across from the entrance is the coat of arms of the Soviet
Union as it was in 1923, carved into a huge block of granite in 1930 by
sculptor Ivan Shadle, who made a model of the coat of arms from plaster,
and granite craftsman A. Bunegin, who carved it from gray labradorite.
Labradorite is a difficult material to work with, and one stone was
broken during the creation of the coat of arms. The six ribbons of the
coat of arms are three-dimensionally drawn, each engraved in a different
language with the phrase "Proletarians of all nations, unite! is
inscribed on each in a different language.
Two staircases descend
from the lobby. The left staircase is three meters wide and leads
visitors down to the funeral hall. The walls of the landing are paved
with gray labradorite, with staircase-like panels of gabbronolite and
black labradorite. The funeral hall is in the form of a 10-meter cube
with a projecting ceiling. A black band of labradorite extends
throughout the hall, topped by a red porphyry pilaster. A zigzag stripe
is laid next to the pilaster made of bright red smalut, and to the right
of the smalut is again a stripe of black labradorite. This combination
creates the effect of flames and flags dancing in the wind. V. A.
Frolov, famous for his mosaic of the "Savior on Spilled Blood" in St.
Petersburg, was invited to create this mosaic. In the center of the hall
is a black pedestal on which the sarcophagus is placed. Lenin's body is
shown in a dark suit, snow-white collar, and black tie decorated with
pale diamonds. His head rests on a red pillow covered with crepe, and
his hands are also placed on transparent black crepe.
The stepped
slab at the top of the sarcophagus is supported by four inconspicuous
metal pillars, giving the impression that the slab is floating in
midair. The lower stone slab is made of reddish orskaja jasper. The
sarcophagus is composed of two sloping cones of glass, held together by
a bronze frame. The upper part of the frame is fitted with an
illumination and filter to produce a bright pink color and reduce heat.
On either side of the sarcophagus are bronze banners of battle and
labor, which appear satin because of the special lighting. The Soviet
coat of arms, framed by oak trees and laurel branches, is at the head of
the headboard. At the feet are branches with ribbons entwined around
them.
Exit the funeral hall to the stairs on the right leading to
the Red Square.
In the 11 years since 1933, the institute's team had
built dozens of mock-ups of the sarcophagus in response to the doctor's
strict demands. His challenge was to keep the temperature constant, so
he began using filters that absorb thermal energy in the lighting
fixtures.
One drawback of the first sarcophagi was that visitors
could see reflections through the glass. To solve this drawback, in 1939
the All-Union Electrotechnical Institute began work on a new model of
the sarcophagus. The project was led by Alexey Shchusev and sculptor
Boris Yakovlev. Another problem was the light bulb, which was very hot
and had to be turned off periodically.
The new sarcophagus is in
the shape of an inverted trapezoid, and the reflective angle was chosen
so that the glass would be invisible to the viewer. Mirror lamps and
light optics were installed in the upper slab of the sarcophagus to
better illuminate the remains. The sarcophagus was installed in the
mausoleum at the end of the Great Patriotic War in 1945.
The initial staff of the mausoleum consisted of a
commandant, a senior electrician and three electricians on duty. After
1935, there were already thirty people with strictly fixed job
responsibilities, among whom were specialists in lighting, cooling and
other highly specialized employees. Before carrying out various events,
the mausoleum was carefully checked by a special security team.
In January 1934, the government set up a commission to inspect the
condition of Lenin's body. The scientists included in the commission
came to the conclusion that the conservation task was completed in full.
The exceptional merits of professors Vladimir Vorobyov and Boris Zbarsky
in the search and application of new methods of long-term embalming were
noted.
The scientific laboratory was engaged in observing the
temperature regime and maintaining the necessary air humidity in the
sarcophagus, whose employees monitored the condition of the skin,
monitored the composition of special solutions for impregnation of the
body, regularly photographed the body to fix and determine changes in
the volume of the relief of the hands and face, examined body tissues
for processes destruction and performed many other tasks.
On July 3, 1941, the body of Vladimir Lenin, under the
guise of a secret facility, was evacuated one and a half thousand
kilometers to the east, to Tyumen. Initially, it was supposed to
transfer the body to a special Moscow shelter, but this plan was changed
due to German air raids and the rapid approach of German troops to
Moscow. Tyumen was chosen by Stalin's personal order as a sparsely
populated rear city that had no strategic importance for the enemy.
The carriage for transportation was equipped with special shock
absorbers to reduce the vibration of the carriage, as well as
installations to provide the necessary microclimate. The car was
equipped within 24 hours and sent to Tyumen late in the evening. The
train arrived in the city on July 7, the body was not injured as a
result of the move. The Tyumen authorities found out what the “secret
object” was only after the train arrived at the final stop.
The
temporary mausoleum was the building of an agricultural technical
school, the territory of which was surrounded by a cast-iron-brick
lattice. The funeral hall is located in a small room on the second floor
in the left wing of the building. The windows in the room were bricked
up, plastered and painted over to avoid temperature fluctuations from
sunlight. A laboratory was located in the neighboring premises, whose
employees arrived in the second echelon and brought additional
equipment, and the entire organizational period took one month. In the
late 1980s, a sign was hung on the wall of the building of the Tyumen
Agricultural Academy that during the war years the body of Lenin was in
it. Now the academy museum is located in the former Funeral Hall.
Lenin's body stayed in Tyumen for three years and nine months, and
his presence in the city was kept secret. In 1944, a commission arrived
from Moscow with a check. Based on its results, it was concluded that
“the body of Vladimir Ilyich has not changed in twenty years. It
preserves the image of Vladimir Ilyich, as he was preserved in the
memory of the Soviet people ... ". Boris Zbarsky proposed to the
commission to open the "Siberian Mausoleum", but this idea was rejected.
At the beginning of 1945, it was decided to return Lenin's body to
Moscow, for this Boris Zbarsky left for Tyumen in February. The order to
return Lenin's body to Moscow on March 23 was issued by the commandant
of the Kremlin, Nikolai Spiridonov. This time the transportation took
place without haste and with thorough preparation, preparation for the
return trip took about a month. All laboratory workers were on a
business trip from July 3, 1941 to March 25, 1945. A special train
arrived in Tyumen for the body, and on March 26 it was brought to the
Moscow mausoleum.
In 1941, on the orders of Adolf Hitler, a sapper team
was created to blow up the Kremlin and the mausoleum. During the Great
Patriotic War, access to the mausoleum was terminated, and it was also
required to disguise it from enemy aircraft.
We were faced with
the task: how to protect the Mausoleum from fascist bombs? Cover it with
sandbags? Anyway, with a direct hit, this will not save ... On the
advice of artists and architects, led by Fedor Fedorovsky and Boris
Iofan, we resorted to disguise. We got 1500 meters of a harsh canvas. In
two or three days, they cut and sewed a “house”, painted windows and
doors on it, and then pulled the fabric over a frame erected around and
above the tomb of Vladimir Ilyich. The frame was made of metal
prefabricated pipes to reduce damage from a possible fire from lighters.
At the same time, the stars on the Kremlin towers were extinguished and
sheathed; covered with resistant paints the golden domes of churches and
cathedrals; painted windows and doors on the Kremlin wall, on Red and
Ivanovskaya squares. A catchy landmark - the bend of the Moscow River -
the camouflage service of the Moscow City Council filled with barges and
rafts with complex structures and covered them with camouflage nets.
From above, the area began to seem like a heap of old small buildings.
The Kremlin and the Mausoleum seem to have merged with the surrounding
buildings.
Commandant of the Kremlin Lieutenant General Nikolai
Spiridonov
On November 6, 1941, 21 German aircraft were shot down
in the battles near Moscow. On the night of November 7, 1941, the
disguise was removed from the mausoleum and the Kremlin stars, and the
commanders of the Moscow units leaving for the front were ordered to
arrive on Red Square in the morning to participate in the military
parade. The parade started at 8 am. At the same time, 550 fighters were
put on alert at airfields near Moscow in case German aircraft appeared.
A telephone line was brought to the podium of the mausoleum to
communicate with the air defense command post. A medical evacuation
point was placed in GUM. The commander at any time could give the order:
“Stop the parade. Get into the fight now!" Parade participants went
directly from the mausoleum to the front. During the war, German troops
dropped hundreds of incendiary and a dozen high-explosive bombs in the
Kremlin area.
While Lenin's body was in Tyumen, a significant
reconstruction was carried out in the mausoleum, a new sarcophagus was
installed, as well as air conditioners that maintained the air
temperature at 16 ° C and humidity at 72%. Statements that the central
tribune of the Mausoleum was built in 1944 or 1945 do not correspond to
reality. It was erected in the first half of 1939. After the return of
Lenin's body in the tomb, preparations were made for several months to
open it for visiting.
On January 24, 1944, the Decree of the
Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On awarding orders to
scientists of the laboratory of the Mausoleum of V.I. unchanged and
great scientific achievements in this matter. The Order of Lenin was
awarded to the head of the laboratory Boris Ilyich Zbarsky and
researcher Sergei Rufovich Mardashev.
On June 24, 1945, the Victory Parade took place on Red
Square, during which columns of soldiers threw German banners and
standards to the foot of the mausoleum. Among the two hundred banners
was the personal standard of Adolf Hitler. And on August 12 of the same
year, on the Day of the Athlete, a parade was held on Red Square, during
which Stalin made an unprecedented invitation to the podium of the
mausoleum of foreigners - three members of the American diplomatic
corps: General Dwight Eisenhower, Ambassador William Harriman and
General John Dean.
On September 16, 1945, after a thorough
reconstruction, the mausoleum was opened to visitors. According to
statistics, since this year, about a million people a year have visited
it, on weekdays - 3-5 thousand people, and on weekends - from 9 to 15
thousand.
The body of Joseph Stalin after his death on March 5,
1953 was transported to the laboratory and the tissues were fixed for
the time of farewell in the Hall of Columns, after which they continued
the three-month embalming. On March 9, the sarcophagus with the body of
Stalin was installed next to the sarcophagus of Lenin's body[5]. On
March 6, 1953, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of
Ministers of the USSR decided to build the Pantheon, but the project
remained unrealized.
In order to perpetuate the memory of the
great leaders Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, as
well as prominent figures of the Communist Party and the Soviet state
buried in Red Square near the Kremlin wall, to build in Moscow a
monumental building - 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 to 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 prominent figures of the Communist Party and the
Soviet state buried near the Kremlin wall, and open access to the
Pantheon for the broad masses of workers .
Since the replacement
of a multi-ton monolith with the inscription "Lenin" with a new one
could not be done in a short time, it was covered with pink resin, then
a layer of black paint with blue specks was applied, imitating a real
Labrador, and two surnames were written in crimson paint - "Lenin",
"Stalin ". The method turned out to be unreliable: in winter, when the
stone was covered with frost, the original inscription “Lenin” appeared.
The monolith was replaced with a new one only in 1960. The block with
the surname "Lenin" was planned to be sawn into monuments for the
Golovinsky cemetery, but the commandant of the mausoleum, Colonel K.A.
save the monolith.
In 1956, at the XX Party Congress, Nikita
Khrushchev condemned Stalin's personality cult, after which they started
talking in the country about the inadmissibility of Stalin's body in the
mausoleum.
In the fall of 1961, a meeting of members of the
Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU was held regarding the
burial place of the body of the former General Secretary. It was
proposed to give him a place in the Novodevichy cemetery or in the
Kremlin necropolis. In the end, the land near the Kremlin wall was
chosen.
On October 30, 1961, from the rostrum of the XXII
Congress of the CPSU, on the penultimate day of its work, an old
Bolshevik and a victim of Stalinist repressions, Dora Lazurkina, spoke
in support of the proposal of the first secretary of the Leningrad
Regional Committee of the CPSU, Ivan Spiridonov, to remove Stalin's body
from the mausoleum, telling to thunderous applause that she " dreamed"
Lenin, who said that he did not want to lie next to him:
I always
carry Ilyich in my heart and always, comrades, in the most difficult
moments, I survived only because I had Ilyich in my heart and I
consulted with him what to do. Yesterday I consulted with Ilyich, as if
he stood before me as if alive and said: it is unpleasant for me to be
next to Stalin, who brought so much trouble to the party.
On the
evening of October 31, 1961, the entrance to Red Square was blocked, the
site of the future grave was surrounded by plywood, and work began under
the spotlights. After excavation of the earth, a sarcophagus was made of
eight reinforced concrete slabs. Exactly at 21:00, members of the
commission for the reburial of Stalin entered the mausoleum. To
disassemble the sarcophagus, it was necessary to call the workers who
initially carried out its installation. Stalin's body was transferred to
a coffin, the gold medal of the Hero of Socialist Labor "Hammer and
Sickle" was removed from his uniform, covered with a veil and closed
with a lid. At 10:10 p.m., eight officers carried the coffin out of the
mausoleum and carried it to the grave, then lowered it on ropes, and
placed a granite slab on top. Stalin turned out to be the only figure
buried in the necropolis without speeches and farewell fireworks, but
his burial took place during the evening rehearsal of the parade to the
sounds of an orchestra and the roar of military equipment.
During
the night, the block with the names "Lenin" and "Stalin" was replaced
with the original one, brought from Vodniki. On November 1, 1961, notes
appeared in the press: “In pursuance of the decision of the XXII
Congress of the CPSU, the coffin with the body of I. V. Stalin was
transferred from the Mausoleum of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to the Kremlin
wall.”
The remains of Stalin were buried near the Kremlin wall in
the light of searchlights. The inscription on the pediment "Lenin -
Stalin" was removed, leaving only one name - "Lenin". There was no
noticeable public reaction the next morning.
Chairman of the KGB of
the USSR Vladimir Semichastny
During work from 1968 to 1972, scientists once again
improved Lenin's sarcophagus and its lamp control system so that the
illumination of the hands and face was carried out through glass light
guides from an isolated light source. The decoration of the sarcophagus
was also simplified. By the centenary of Vladimir Lenin in 1970, the
mausoleum was reconstructed. Collapsing marble blocks were replaced, and
modern equipment was purchased for the laboratory.
On December 4,
1974, the historical monuments Lenin's Mausoleum and the necropolis near
the Kremlin wall were taken under state protection. In 1983-1984, a
covered escalator was added to the back of the Mausoleum to take elderly
members of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to the podium. The extension
was made in the style of a mausoleum and is invisible from the outside.
Even in the first days after Lenin's death, there were rumors that
the body on display was not real, and that a wax mummy lay in the
coffin. The rumors turned out to be persistent: they were spread in the
foreign press, and in the USSR they appeared even in the late 1930s. In
the mid-1930s, journalists from Western media were invited to the
mausoleum to refute. The American journalist Louis Fisher wrote that
Boris Zbarsky opened the sarcophagus in his presence and turned Lenin's
head left and right, proving that it was not a wax figure in front of
those present. In the late 1980s, rumors reappeared that instead of
Lenin's body, his double or even a doll was kept in the mausoleum, since
the body could not be preserved during his evacuation to Tyumen in 1941.
At the end of the 20th century, a version appeared about the use of
doubles, which periodically replace the body of the leader. Then the
leading expert of the laboratory, Professor Yuri Romakov, said that
Lenin's body is real and does not need such substitutions. The rumors
had a real basis, but the reason for their appearance was the lack of
the necessary information in the public domain: in order to maintain the
body in a flexible state, unique procedures were carried out on it and
biological materials were gradually replaced with artificial ones. The
special commissions that checked the condition of the body believed that
it had even improved, but ordinary visitors saw only the hands and head
of Vladimir Lenin and could not assess the veracity of the statements of
the members of the commissions.
In 1990, the Lenin Mausoleum and
the necropolis near the Kremlin wall were included in the UNESCO World
Cultural Heritage List, and since 1995 they have received the status of
objects of historical and cultural heritage of federal significance.
Sometimes visitors left letters with requests and complaints. The
commandant's office of the Kremlin registered letters and sent them to
the appropriate organizations to study the issue and solve problems. One
letter helped arrest corrupt Uzbek SSR officials.
On May 9, 1995, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, for
the first time after the collapse of the USSR, ascended the podium of
the mausoleum. At the same time, the word "Lenin" was covered with a
garland of artificial flowers. This outraged many residents of the
country, and in 1996, during the next speech, the surname was no longer
closed. However, the negative attitude of democratic authorities towards
communist symbols did not decrease, and during the parade on May 9,
1997, Yeltsin did not stand on the mausoleum, but on a wooden platform
in front of it.
Since 2005, on the occasion of Victory Day and
other public events on Red Square, the Lenin Mausoleum has been draped
with plywood shields.
In the fall of 2012, the Lenin Mausoleum
was closed for restoration and reconstruction. The work had to be
carried out due to problems with the ground: the Alevizov moat, which
was filled in 1812 and separated the Kremlin wall from the square,
floated under the weight of the foundation. The slabs have shifted and
broken the waterproofing. In December 2012, the mausoleum was covered
with a white support-inflatable dome to ensure positive temperatures
during the work of the builders. After that, there were rumors that the
tomb under the dome would be dismantled.
On April 29, 2013, the
renovation was officially completed. During the work, the foundation was
strengthened: more than 350 wells, about 20 meters deep, were drilled
along its perimeter and filled with concrete. This stabilized the
reinforced concrete slab at the base of the mausoleum. The exterior
seams were sealed, the historic lighting was restored, and granite slabs
were laid on the walkways around it. The body of Lenin was not taken out
of the tomb during the repair. The mausoleum was opened to visitors on
May 15, 2013.
The second stage of repair is planned for the
facility, during which an extension behind with an escalator for
climbing to the stands will be dismantled as unnecessary. Exact dates
have not been set due to the UNESCO protected status - a survey and
approval from the Ministry of Culture is required for dismantling.
In 2013, a bricked up empty columbarium with niches for burying
ashes was discovered in the mausoleum: at the entrance, to the left of
the carved Coat of Arms of the USSR, there is an opening with a
copper-studded door, behind which there is a narrow room made of a
polished black labrador with lamps on the walls. One of the walls has
four large niches that can hold up to 56 urns. Judging by the uniform
design with the rest of the premises, the columbarium was designed by
Alexei Shchusev, but there are no documents confirming this in the
public domain. Presumably, Stalin might not have liked the fact that the
columbarium is located directly above the Funeral Hall and people below
him in rank should not rest above Lenin.
In 2017, the Lenin
Mausoleum was open to the public from Tuesday to Thursday and on
Saturday from 10:00 to 13:00. Twice a year it is closed for two months
for preventive maintenance. In February 2016, specialists from the
institute (former laboratory) checked the condition of Vladimir Lenin's
body, and also carried out maintenance of equipment that maintains light
and temperature conditions.
Maintaining the preservation of the
image of Lenin was entrusted to the Educational and Methodological
Center for Biomedical Technologies, which is part of the All-Russian
Research Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants. Every year and a
half, employees lower the body into a bath with a special solution. To
check the condition of tissues, special devices and stereophoto
installations are used. Over the past 20 years, no body changes have
been registered. In 2017, the procedure was carried out from February 16
to April 16, the mausoleum was closed to the public at that time.
The commandant's office of the Lenin Mausoleum was
established in 1969 and belonged to the commandant's office of the
Moscow Kremlin. As of 2018, the commandant's office of the mausoleum is
a subdivision of the FSO, employees, together with the police, are
responsible for a large area. It is impossible to carry out urgent
service in the commandant's office, only contract soldiers are accepted
there, officers also serve.
Notable commandants
Colonel K. A.
Moshkov, who preserved the block with the inscription "Lenin" after
dismantling in 1960.
Lieutenant General Sergei Semyonovich Shornikov,
commandant from 1967 to 1986, received the State Prize in 1978 for the
reconstruction of the Kremlin and its security system.
Major General
Gennady Dementievich Bashkin from 1986 to 1992, began his service in the
commandant's office of the Kremlin with the rank of private.
Lieutenant Colonel V.P. Kamennykh, began his service in 1993, a doctor
by training.
Colonel Alexander Gorbunov, commandant from 2006 to the
present, served at the mausoleum from the rank of private, in 1993 led
the last guard of Post No. 1 away from the tomb.
Since March 26, 1924, there has been a laboratory at
the mausoleum for the preservation of Lenin's body. Professor of anatomy
Vladimir Vorobyov and biochemist Boris Zbarsky proposed a method for
long-term embalming. To carry out the plan, the mausoleum was closed and
an experimental laboratory was set up in it. The research laboratory was
opened at the mausoleum in 1939. She was part of the USSR Ministry of
Health. Initially, the leaders of the laboratory were Academicians
Vorobyov and Zbarsky. After Vorobyov's death, from 1934 to 1952, Zbarsky
headed the laboratory.
In February 1945, back in Tyumen,
laboratory scientists conducted an experiment to preserve the body, as a
result of which a small area of skin was damaged on the left foot. Upon
returning to Moscow, the laboratory was expanded and a special bank with
experimental bodies was created - these were unknown dead or dead, whom
no one was looking for, significant balsamic experiments were carried
out on them. In the same year, the laboratory was provided with the
building of the former school on Sadovo-Kudrinskaya Street. At the same
time, the range of tasks was increased for her. Every five years, a
special commission examined Lenin's body. With the help of many years of
experience, scientists have achieved tissue stabilization - changes have
become almost imperceptible with modern methods of control.
The
laboratory was engaged in embalming the bodies of important political
figures in other countries: in 1949, the body of Georgy Dimitrov,
General Secretary of the BKP Central Committee, was processed, in 1952,
the body of the chairman of the People's Council of Ministers of the
MPR, Khorlogiyin Choibalsan (but his embalming was partial, on the
orders of Joseph Stalin, the process was interrupted, Choibalsan was
buried in a closed sarcophagus in Ulaanbaatar), in 1953 - the body of
the head of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald (his
body was in the mausoleum for nine years, until 1962).
In 1952,
Boris Zbarsky was arrested in the case of "killer doctors", but released
a few months after Stalin's death. With his arrest, Sergei Mardashev
became the director of the laboratory. From 1962 to 1967 the laboratory
was headed by Boris Uskov, and from 1967 to 1995 Sergey Debov was the
director. Since 1964, to maintain stable conditions for the preservation
of Lenin's body, they began to use automation and electronics, and the
staff grew and by 1960-1970 already numbered about 200 people. For this
reason, in 1976, the laboratory moved to a new building on Krasina
Street, house number 2, and from that moment it has become a modern
high-tech institute with departments of anatomy, histology, biochemistry
and maintenance.
In 1969, laboratory staff embalmed the body of
Ho Chi Minh, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of
Vietnam, and his functioning mausoleum was opened in Vietnam after the
end of the war with the United States in 1975. In 1979, laboratory staff
embalmed the body of the President of the People's Republic of Angola,
Agostinho Neto; it was in the mausoleum of Angola from 1980 to 1992. In
1985, the body of the President of Guyana, Lyndon Forbes Burnham, was
buried in a closed sarcophagus in Georgetown.
During perestroika,
funding for the laboratory began to be reduced. In 1989, employees over
the age of 70 were released from leading administrative work, and in
1991 the government stopped allocating funds for maintenance work in the
mausoleum. In 1992, the laboratory became part of the All-Union
Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (VILAR) and changed its name
to the Research and Educational Center for Biomedical Technologies.
In 1995, the body of North Korean President Kim Il Sung was
embalmed, which is on display in the current Pyongyang mausoleum. In
2011, the body of the Great Leader of Korea Kim Jong Il was embalmed,
his body is placed next to the body of Kim Il Sung.
The
technologies created in the laboratory are in demand and are supported
by countries with functioning mausoleums. Today, the Center for
Biomedical Technologies specializes not only in experimental work with
embalmed bodies, but also in the conservation of archaeological finds:
the body of an Altai princess found in the 1990s. On March 5, 2013,
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died. The country's authorities were
negotiating with the laboratory about the possibility of embalming the
body, but the time to start work was lost, in addition, it would have
been necessary to take Hugo Chavez's body to Russia for eight months.
Chavez was buried in a marble sarcophagus, which was installed in the
building of the capital's Museum of the Revolution in Caracas.
From 1995 to the present, the laboratory has been headed by Valery Bykov
Bykov is not mentioned in Kostyleva's publication. At the beginning of
2018, the laboratory has about 40 employees.
Attempts to desecrate the Lenin Mausoleum and the
Kremlin wall have been recorded since the 1930s: hooligans threw Molotov
cocktails, ink, ink, engaged in other types of vandalism. The
sarcophagus of Vladimir Lenin was repeatedly tried to smash and shoot
through, as well as blow it up.
From 1924 to 1991, the
commandant's office of the mausoleum, the outfit of the Red Banner
Kremlin Regiment and the Police Department for the protection of public
order on Red Square of the Moscow Police Department were engaged in
security. In the commandant's office of the Kremlin there was a small
museum of items that were secretly brought to Red Square and the
mausoleum: knives, pipes, weapons, explosives and much more.
In
March 1934, Mitrofan Nikitin, a worker at one of the state farms in the
Moscow region, intended to shoot at Lenin's body, but was stopped by
security officers. Nikitin shot himself on the spot. After a search,
they found a letter for the government and the party:
This spring
of 1934, again, a lot of people will die because of hunger, filth, from
epidemic diseases ... Can't our rulers, who have settled in the Kremlin,
see that the people do not want such a life, that it is impossible to
live like this, that there is not enough strength and will ...
Attempts to desecrate or destroy the sarcophagus were made almost every
year: in November 1957, a resident of Moscow, A.N. Romanov, threw a
bottle of ink into the mausoleum, in March 1959, a visitor broke the
glass of the sarcophagus by throwing a hammer. On June 14, 1960, a
resident of the city of Frunze, R. D. Minibaev, broke the glass with his
foot, jumping onto the barrier, as a result of which the skin of the
embalmed body was damaged. Later it turned out that Minibaev had been
planning to destroy the sarcophagus since 1949. The mausoleum was then
closed for restoration work until August 15. In 1961, L. A. Smirnova
spat into the sarcophagus and broke the glass by throwing a stone at it.
A stone was thrown into the sarcophagus in April 1962 by A. A. Lyutikov,
a resident of the city of Pavlovsky Posad. On March 29, 1966, a resident
of the Labinsk district of the Krasnodar Territory, G.V. Vatintsev,
threw a sledgehammer into the sarcophagus.
In 1967, Krysanov, a
resident of Kaunas, detonated an improvised explosive device at the
entrance to the mausoleum, several people died in the explosion,
including Krysanov himself. After that, the latest devices and equipment
for managing engineering systems were installed in the mausoleum, and
about 12,000 marble blocks were replaced and the structures were
strengthened. Designer N. A. Mytin and sculptor N. V. Tomsky developed
an improved sarcophagus, in the creation of which the Moscow factories
"Znamya Truda" and "Red Proletarian" took part. The new sarcophagus had
powerful metal fasteners, and the angles of the bulletproof glass
provided protection from bullets and explosives. The sarcophagus was
installed in April 1973, but already on September 1, another improvised
device was blown up in the mausoleum. The sarcophagus remained intact,
but the explosion killed and seriously injured several visitors, as well
as employees of the mausoleum and soldiers of the Kremlin regiment.
Later, there were several more attempts to blow up the sarcophagus, so a
special bulletproof glass was created for it.
In April 1990, an
arsonist threw two three-liter Molotov cocktails onto the parapet of the
tomb. The vandal was arrested. In addition to direct damage to the
mausoleum, there were attempts to spoil other objects. So, on March 17,
1991, the monument to Joseph Stalin was struck several times with a
metal rod, the monument was restored by the next morning. There were
also self-immolation attempts on Red Square, so the mausoleum kept funds
to quickly extinguish the flames and help the victim, and the employees
took first aid courses.
On August 19, 1991, during the State
Emergency Committee, the protection of the mausoleum was strengthened.
It was assumed that the raging crowd could destroy the tomb, although
all this time the mausoleum was open to visitors.
On March 15,
2010, a resident of the Moscow region, Sergei Krapetsov, climbed onto
the podium of the mausoleum and began to call for it to be destroyed and
Lenin's body to be buried. During the arrest, he offered armed
resistance with a traumatic pistol. After the arrest, Karpetsov
explained the act with dislike for the “mummy of the Antichrist” and a
desire to draw attention to the demolition of the mausoleum. He admitted
that he initially wanted to shoot the sarcophagus with a machine gun. A
case was opened against Krapetsov for assaulting a government official,
later it turned out that he was wanted for a robbery.
Some acts
of vandalism were curious: on November 27, 2010, an intruder threw a
brochure "Practical advice to the owner and hostess" and a roll of
toilet paper into the mausoleum. He was arrested and admitted to a
psychiatric hospital. And on January 19, 2015, two men shouting “Get up
and go!” sprinkled the mausoleum with holy water.
The first proposal to rebury Lenin's body was made in
1989. At the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, deputy Yuri
Karyakin stated that Lenin wanted to be buried in the cemetery next to
his mother's grave. But the RTSKhIDNI did not find a single document in
which Lenin's relatives mentioned his "last will." According to Olga
Ulyanova, Karyakin's statements are fictitious, neither relatives nor
Lenin's associates raised the question of the leader's burial.
The reburial movement grew. There were claims that Lenin was not buried
in a Christian way (although Lenin was a staunch atheist), but the
mausoleum was “an ominous ziggurat through which Lenin feeds on the
energy of the Russian people,” and that the use of mausoleums is
characteristic exclusively of wild cultures. At the same time,
supporters of the latter myth ignore the fact that in France the remains
of Napoleon are stored in the mausoleum, in Estonia - the embalmed body
of Field Marshal Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, in the mausoleum of New York
- the body of General and US President Ulysses Grant, in the Krakow
Cathedral Marshal Józef Piłsudski rests in the sarcophagus. There was
also an idea to burn the body, and flood the container with the ashes in
the Mariana Trench. The main motive of those wishing to rebury Lenin's
body is that he is a war criminal, Leninism is a totalitarian ideology,
and the mausoleum is a manifestation of Leninism. The Russian poet Igor
Talkov has repeatedly spoken out about the need to demolish the
mausoleum from Red Square and dispose of the graves in the Kremlin wall
and the necropolis in front of it (in addition to his interviews, he
reflected the removal of Lenin's body from the mausoleum and Soviet
graves from the Kremlin wall as a marker of de-Sovietization in his
songs "Mr President "and" Stop! I think to myself ... [Something is
wrong here ...]"). Talkov's works show Soviet mysticism - the stars, the
hammer and sickle, the mausoleum, which is associated with hell. As
Nikita Dzhigurda later recalled, two weeks before his death, Talkov sent
an ultimatum letter to Yeltsin: “If you call yourself a democrat, why
hasn’t Lenin been taken out of the mausoleum yet?”
On April 21,
1989, Mark Zakharov, on the air of the Vzglyad program, said that it was
time to forgive Lenin and bury him humanly. He later called Lenin a
state criminal who needed to be tried.
On September 5, 1991, with
the approval of Mikhail Gorbachev, an attempt to bury Lenin was made by
Anatoly Sobchak. He spoke at a meeting of deputies with a proposal based
on Lenin's non-existent will with a desire to be buried at the
Volkovskoye cemetery in Leningrad. Sobchak was supported by Moscow Mayor
Gavriil Popov. Laudatory articles appeared in the democratic press about
the merits of the Volkovsky cemetery and the indispensable mention of
the imminent reburial of Lenin's body in the cemetery. The Kremlin
received a flood of telegrams and letters of protest. In September 1991,
the Moscow City Council raised the issue of removing Lenin's body from
the Mausoleum and burying it.
On September 11, 1991, at a meeting
in the Central Lenin Museum, a public committee "In defense of Lenin"
was formed. On September 12, there were rumors that at night the body
would be secretly taken out of the mausoleum, so picketers went to Red
Square and formed a people's squad to protect Lenin's body. On October
10 of the same year, a demonstration of Moscow workers took place near
the building of the Moscow City Council. The participants made a
collective appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev demanding that Lenin's body be
protected from attacks. In November, Forbes magazine reported on the
desire of the Soviet government to sell the sarcophagus with the body of
Lenin at auction with an initial bid of $15 million, but later the
journalists admitted to the draw.
According to foreign journalists, people passing by
the mausoleum experienced awkwardness and bewilderment, because the
historical cycle of communism ended and this ideology is dead.
Therefore, Vladimir Lenin should be buried next to his relatives, and
the Lenin Mausoleum should be turned into a memorial to the victims of
the revolution.
In October 1993, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov
presented a draft presidential decree "On the restoration of the
historical appearance of Red Square in Moscow", the appendix to the
project stated:
The events that took place in Moscow on October 2-4
force us to turn to Yeltsin B.N. with a request to resolve the issue of
reburial of the body of V.I. Lenin and over 400 people resting near the
Kremlin wall.
In 1993, the President of Kalmykia, Kirsan
Ilyumzhinov, proposed moving the mausoleum to the capital of the
republic, Elista, and was ready to allocate a million dollars for this.
On April 22, 1994, deputy Valeria Novodvorskaya organized a picket
under the slogan "Let's bury the cause and body of Lenin." She was
detained and made a statement that she would sue the police officers for
"resurrecting Stalin's methods of maintaining order." And in 1996, one
of the main ideologists of perestroika, Alexander Yakovlev, published a
pamphlet on the need to hold a trial of Bolshevism at his own expense.
Why is such a court necessary? Yes, because Lenin is still revered in
the Mausoleum, the whole country is dotted with monuments to him. But he
is a criminal. The ideology of violence, the ideology of the lumpen did
not die. It is difficult to move forward with such a load. I am not
saying that everyone and everyone should repent, fall on their knees.
No. We just need to realize, understand what we have left. On November
7, we all still celebrate the holiday, we renamed it the Day of Accord
and Reconciliation. I suggested renaming it the Day of Sorrow and
Repentance. On this day, families should not go to demonstrations, it's
better to sit at home. This day is needed so that citizens remember
those of their relatives who died due to wars and repressions. And just
drank a glass for them. And nothing more is needed.
On March 14,
1997, Boris Yeltsin proposed to bury Lenin "... as he bequeathed, next
to his mother in St. Petersburg", despite the absence of such a will. On
March 17, 1997, at a meeting of the State Duma, Yeltsin's statements
about the reburial were called unlawful and equated to vandalism. On
June 6 of the same year, Boris Yeltsin repeated the idea at a meeting of
the Council for Culture and Art in St. Petersburg. On June 11, the
Pravda newspaper published a refutation by RTSKhIDNI of the existence of
Lenin's will, mentioning the burial in the cemetery next to his
relatives.
On June 4, 1997, the State Duma adopted the law "On
the status of the Red Square of the city of Moscow." The document
forbade the reconstruction of existing facilities on Red Square and the
construction of new ones that violate the historical appearance of the
square. On June 11, the Federation Council rejected the law. On December
11, 1997, a second attempt was made to pass the law, but the Council
again rejected it.
On June 6, Boris Yeltsin again announced
Lenin's will and desire to be buried in St. Petersburg. There was also
an idea of simultaneous reburial of the remains of the family of
Nicholas II. Later, a version was voiced that the idea of reburial was
supposed to divert people's attention from Yeltsin's health - he was
facing a difficult operation, and because of the 1998 crisis, the body
transfer action had to be canceled.
On May 24, 1999, Patriarch
Alexy II spoke in favor of reburial of the remains:
I hope that
someday some kind of pantheon or burial place will be created, where the
remains of the revolutionaries who are on Red Square will be
transferred. It is immoral when rock performances, rock concerts next to
the graveyard are combined on Red Square.
However, in September
2000, the patriarch simply proposed to ban concerts on Red Square due to
the fact that powerful equipment makes St. Basil's Cathedral vibrate,
and drunken youth arrange toilets and gatherings on the territory of the
cathedral and churches in Zaryadye after concerts.
On September
15, 1999, the Ministry of Culture announced the inadmissibility of
liquidating the necropolis. On May 22, 2000, the Association of
Relatives of Persons Buried in the Honorary Necropolis near the Kremlin
Wall was registered. The association planned to protect the rights of
relatives to the inviolability of burials and the protection of the
necropolis and the Mausoleum as monuments of history and culture,
included in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List and which are
objects of historical heritage of all-Russian significance. On December
15, 2000, the Association sent an open letter to President Vladimir
Putin. The letter stated that the attempts to destroy the mausoleum and
the necropolis, as well as the proposal of the SPS party to create a
complex of victims of political repressions in the mausoleum, are a
desecration of the historical memory of the people. The letter was
published by Sovetskaya Rossiya, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Parlamentskaya
Gazeta.
On July 24, 2001, Vladimir Putin stated that he was
against the reburial of Lenin's body:
Our country lived under the
conditions of the monopoly power of the CPSU for 70 years. During this
time, this is the lifetime of a whole generation. Many people associate
their own lives with the name of Lenin. For them, the burial of Lenin
means the following: for them, it will mean that they worshiped false
values, that they set false goals for themselves, and that their life
was lived in vain. I think that actions of this kind can lead to such a
destructive state that we have already experienced.
In November
2005, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation began an indefinite
action to collect signatures on a petition demanding that Lenin's body
be left in the mausoleum. The reason was the next calls for reburial, as
well as the words of Valentina Matvienko that Russia is not Egypt and
there is no place for mummies in it. In 2006, according to VTsIOM, 22%
of the respondents opposed the reburial of Lenin's body. In early April
2006, Vladimir Lavrov, director of the Institute of Russian History,
wrote an official letter stating that Russia would not be able to
develop democratically until it parted ways with the symbols of
communist utopia and red terror, since Lenin and Stalin were personally
responsible for the repressions, the Gulag and the national genocide.
Also, according to Vladimir Lavrov, the maintenance of Lenin's body
should not be at the expense of taxpayers, and the necropolis on Red
Square should be liquidated. Yuri Osipov, President of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, spoke out in defense of the mausoleum. He believes
that it is unacceptable to burn history so easily: "If each new
generation settles scores with the previous one, nothing good will come
of it."
On April 22, 2006, Mikhail Gorbachev said that Lenin's
body should be buried in the future, when the current serious problems
of the state are resolved, and at present there is no need to aggravate
the situation. Minister of Culture and Mass Communications Alexander
Sokolov also said that the reburial could take place in the indefinite
future. Andrei Isaev, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Labor and
Social Policy, noted that the issue should be resolved soon, with the
indispensable participation of representatives of the Communist Party of
the Russian Federation and Lenin's heirs, and if they agree, rebury
Lenin after everyone has said goodbye to him. Isaev called the period
after the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2007 and 2008 a
convenient time for transferring the body. Grigory Yavlinsky said that
it would be right to bury Lenin in the cemetery and remove Stalin's
grave from Red Square, but this must be done without splitting society
and without causing new conflicts. According to Vladimir Lukin, the next
generation of Russians will be able to solve this issue, although he
does not object to the existence of the mausoleum building as a
historical monument.
According to a 2009 VTsIOM poll, 41% of
respondents considered the preservation of Lenin's body to be wrong, 15%
believed that Lenin's body was rightfully located in the mausoleum, 66%
of respondents were in favor of reburial of Lenin's body, of which 28%
suggested this was a matter of a distant future, and 38% % were in favor
of immediate reburial. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the number of those
who agree with the reburial is more than the average percentage in
Russia - 48%.
Lyubov Sliska, Nikita Mikhalkov and Georgy
Poltavchenko spoke out for the reburial. Against - Lenin's niece Olga
Ulyanova, she was supported by Gennady Zyuganov, stating that this
project is a provocation and a manifestation of liberal fascism.
On September 6, 2010, Vladimir Putin, at a meeting with members of the
Valdai Club, said that the Russian people would decide the question of
Lenin's reburial in due time, since "history is such a thing that does
not require fuss."
In 2009, Vladimir Medinsky, being a State Duma
deputy from United Russia, noted that there was no point in keeping
Lenin's body in the mausoleum:
Finding an ideological artifact in the
center of the capital is an immoral act, senseless from the point of
view of budgetary spending, harmful from an ideological point of view
and cruel both in relation to Lenin's relatives and in relation to
people who do not share communist ideology.
On January 20, 2011,
Medinsky said that Lenin was an extremely controversial political figure
and his presence in the necropolis was utter absurdity. He believed that
no more than 10% of the body survived: “I believe that every year we
should raise the same issue of removing the remains of Lenin's body from
the mausoleum. This is some kind of ridiculous, pagan-necrophilic
mission we have on Red Square ... It's time to end this perversion.
Medinsky's statement about the remains was checked by the Vlast weekly.
Journalists calculated what was removed and replaced during embalming,
and came to the conclusion that 23% of Lenin's body remained.
Vladimir Medinsky was supported by a member of the State Duma Committee
on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications
Robert Schlegel. The head of the Presidential Council for Human Rights,
Mikhail Fedotov, proposed giving the mausoleum the status of a museum:
“The mausoleum is our history. Lenin is our history, no matter how
tragic it may be. People could freely visit the mausoleum, understanding
that they are visiting the museum, not the cemetery. As an example, I
can cite the tomb of Napoleon in the Palais des Invalides in Paris.” A
similar position is taken by Sergei Mitrokhin, speaking about the
memorial to the victims of communism: “Why exactly the Lenin Museum,
let's better make a memorial to the victims of the Gulag or the victims
of Bolshevism in this place. And the mausoleum as an architectural
building can be left.” The publicist and theologian Andrei Kuraev noted
that the annual study of public opinion on this issue for twenty years
has already bothered and it is time for the leaders of the country to
decide and clearly and clearly express their position.
On January
25, 2011, the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of the Russian Federation, Sergei Obukhov, stated: “Lenin has already
been buried, as he rests in a sarcophagus at a depth of three meters
underground.” Yury Denisov-Nikolsky, Deputy Director of the Educational
and Methodological Center for Biomedical Technologies, Academician of
the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, is sure that Lenin's body can
be kept in excellent condition for more than a hundred years, while the
annual costs will not exceed several tens of millions of rubles. The
burial of the body in this case will interrupt a unique biochemical
experiment lasting 90 years, the results of which are of great
importance for science. Chemist-journalist Pyotr Obraztsov published an
article in which he questioned the value and uniqueness of the
experiment with the preservation of Lenin's body. According to
Obraztsov, the embalming method used has been known for hundreds of
years, and a two-headed calf has been kept in a jar of formalin for two
centuries in the Kunstkamera of St. Petersburg. The only difference from
Lenin's body is that the calf is completely immersed in formalin, while
Lenin's body is saturated with it.
On March 30, 2011, the
President of the Russian Cultural and Educational Foundation named after
St. Basil the Great, Vasily Boyko-Veliky, and lawyer A.A. Averyanov
wrote a statement to the Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, which refers to
the preparation for the commission of a crime falling under Article 244
of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Vasily Boyko-Veliky
called the preventive work on the body of Lenin, carried out by
specialists every year and a half, as the specified crime, and indicated
the criminal - "Regional Charitable Public Organization for the
Preservation of the Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin." The object of the crime
is “public morality in the sphere of respect for the memory of the
dead”, the objective side of the crime is desecration of the body of the
deceased Lenin, since “there are no fundamental and applied values of
the study of the“ remains of the body ”of V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) who died
86 years ago cannot matter." Vasily Boyko-Veliky asks “to initiate a
criminal case against the persons indicated by him on the basis of
Article 42 of the Federal Law of the Russian Federation “On Public
Associations”, to submit to the governing body of the indicated public
organization a submission about these violations of the law and set a
deadline for their elimination ... Otherwise ... make a decision on
suspension of the activities of the Regional Charitable Public
Organization for the Preservation of the Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin for a
period of up to six months, or its liquidation.
In July 2013,
Metropolitan Hilarion said: until the corpse of Lenin is taken out of
Red Square, the country will not begin to develop.
In January
2016, Vladimir Putin urged not to take steps that divide society, and to
approach the issue of reburial of Vladimir Lenin carefully.
On
March 12, 2017, ROCOR issued a call to remove Lenin's body from Red
Square. And the next day, Ivan Sukharev, a deputy from the LDPR party,
sent a request to the speaker of the Federation Council Valentina
Matvienko with a request to dismantle the mausoleum
The Bolshevik
coup was, in fact, a crime against the state. Now we live in a
completely different country, but the symbols, the dead, continue to be
in the center of the capital. It is necessary once and for all to put an
end to this matter and reconcile the Reds and Whites by burying the
Bolshevik leaders according to the Orthodox rite. Moreover, the Church
has voiced its position on this matter.
On April 1 of the same
year, a publication appeared about the decision of the State Duma to
rebury Lenin's body in Mytishchi. Sources reported that they managed to
convince all the opponents of the reburial, including the most
irreconcilable ones. The consensus was reached after it was announced
that Lenin's body would remain in the tomb. On April 20, deputies from
the Liberal Democratic Party and United Russia proposed for
consideration a bill on the reburial of Lenin's body, which proposed
establishing a procedure for the reburial of historical figures. At the
same time, the very fact of the need for reburial was considered
established, but specific dates were not named:
In order to consider
the issues of reburial of the remains of historical figures whose
activities influenced the course and outcome of major historical events,
in order to perpetuate their memory, the government of the Russian
Federation forms interdepartmental commissions in accordance with the
procedure established by it ... the remains of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
(Lenin) are subject to reburial ... Procedure, timing and the place of
reburial of the remains of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) is determined
by the government of the Russian Federation, taking into account the
proposals of the interdepartmental commission.
The absence of
specific deadlines would have made it possible to apply the bill during
the peak of the next public readiness to bury Lenin's body. The last
peak was in the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the
1990s. After discussing and criticizing the bill, the United Russia
deputies withdrew the signatures. The government did not support the
bill. The provisions of the bill allow reburials without taking into
account the will of the deceased and at the expense of the federal
budget, but the sources of funding are not defined, which makes it
difficult to assess the financial consequences of the adoption of this
law.
According to VTsIOM, as of April 21, 2017, 39% of Russian
citizens considered the Lenin Mausoleum a tourist attraction, 38%
believed that the presence of Lenin's body on Red Square was wrong and
unnatural, 18% believed that the body lies in the mausoleum by right. At
the same time, 63% spoke in favor of burying Lenin's body: 32% believe
that this should be done immediately, 31% - after some time.
In
June 2017, conferences on the topic “October Revolution. Myths and
Reality. The conferences also discussed issues related to the mausoleum:
"What is the Mausoleum - an ominous ziggurat or a sacred symbol of our
history?"
On October 27, 2017, Ksenia Sobchak, during a meeting
with voters in Yekaterinburg, announced that her first presidential
decree would be to rebury Lenin's body, since the very fact of his stay
in the mausoleum "is the Middle Ages." On November 2, the head of the
Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, supported the idea of reburial and
stated that it was "reasonable and humane." Kadyrov clarified that this
issue should be decided by the President of Russia]. This position was
shared by State Duma deputy Natalya Poklonskaya: “I support Ramzan
Akhmatovich and also believe that looking at a corpse in the center of
the capital is at least not humane and not humane. If the decision on
the burial is made, it means that a new stage in the development of our
Motherland will come with a turned page of the past and a willingness to
move on, remembering the lessons of history.” On November 13, Vladimir
Zhirinovsky proposed to bury Lenin's body and use the mausoleum as a
tribune for public speaking: “The inscription “Lenin” is removed and
“State tribune” is written. And at all celebrations they rise there ...
Let the mausoleum as a building stand: at the top there is a magnificent
tribune, we are used to it. Let it be preserved." The government said
that the topic of Lenin's burial is recognized as quite resonant, but is
not on the agenda.
According to Vladimir Putin, when Lenin was
buried, the Soviet authorities started from the tradition of Christian
veneration of relics.
Lenin was placed in the Mausoleum - how does
this differ from the relics of saints for the Orthodox, but just for
Christians? They tell me: “No, there is no such tradition in the
Christian world.” How not? Go to Athos, look, there are relics of the
saints, and here, too, the holy relics of Sergius and Herman. That is,
in fact, the then authorities did not come up with anything new, they
simply adapted to their ideology what mankind had long invented.
— V.
V. Putin
In 1998, in the Moscow Gallery of Naive Art "Dar", artists Yuri Shabelnikov and Yuri Fesenko held an art project "Mausoleum: a ritual model". For the project, a cake weighing 80 kg was made in the form of Lenin's body, which was eaten during the action. According to gallery owner Sergei Tarabarov, the artists, not evaluating Lenin's activities from the point of view of morality, tried to demonstrate the loss of his relevance, the transition of the leader's personality into the category of art history. Realizing the radical nature of the idea, the gallery owner first consulted with art historians, philosophers and two priests. The performance caused a scandal, the public reaction was negative.
Approximately in the same place where the mausoleum is now located, between the Spassky and Nikolsky gates of the Kremlin wall, at the beginning of the 18th century there was a Comedy temple - the first public state theater in Russia, founded by decree of Peter I in 1702.