When Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum? Why was Stalin taken out of the Mausoleum?

The tradition of overthrowing idols is not new. After the XX Congress of the CPSU, monuments to the leader of the party, who died in 1953, continued to stand in the USSR, but two or three years later the Soviet leadership took it easy, and ordered them to begin demolishing them. And they were different - from the simplest type specimens to the huge statues and bas-reliefs carved by prisoners on the rocky Kolyma banks. But the most important monument to the deceased tyrant was in the capital, Moscow, in her heart. Stalin in the Mausoleum lay beside the unshakable, indestructible and cornerstone shrine, the mummy of the creator of the world's first socialist state, to which he himself placed it. For the champion of the Leninist norms of the leadership of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, NS Khrushchev, this neighborhood was unbearable.

Mausoleum and Lenin

In order to deal with the Soviet relics, some retrospection is necessary at the beginning of 1924, it is necessary to analyze the events that followed the death of Lenin.

Since the leader of the Bolshevik Party was an atheist, he also treated the ritual side of life accordingly, that is, almost in any way.

Of course, during the years of the Civil War, a certain set of rituals was formed, accompanied by farewells to the dead fighters for the people's happiness. The procedure of the funeral included, as a rule, the decline of red banners, the performance by the brass band of the party hymn - the Internationale, speeches (sometimes politically illiterate) of various combat (and not so) comrades (not always sober), accompanied by vows of loyalty and promises to take revenge on the counter .

In the case of such a majestic figure as Lenin, this was clearly not enough. And then a specialist with an incomplete seminary education joined the organization of the funeral ceremony, Comrade Stalin. In the Mausoleum, first made of boards, a coffin was put up, and everyone was able to look at the deceased leader of all the proletarians of the world. Since there were a lot of such, the time for people's access to the body was extended, and then a decision was made to conserve the corpse by embalming. This was done with a great delay.

Mausoleum Science

During the time when Lenin's body was in the Mausoleum, Soviet science made a major leap in a unique direction. And before that, there have been cases of successful embalming corpses, in some countries in ancient times people sought to preserve the corporal shells of their rulers and eminent personalities, but these skills, having reached the level of art, were kept secret, and partly for this reason lost.

In modern history, there is a case associated with embalming technology, developed by the great surgeon Pirogov, and applied to him after his death. However, this method also had, apparently, many subtleties, it was not easy to reproduce it. Therefore, the Soviet anatomists had to invent their own way, which included forcedly not only the operation for the preservation of tissues, but also their partial restoration. Stalin lay in the Mausoleum for almost nine years, his corpse was also embalmed, and specialists working in the special laboratories dealing with the preservation of the mummy of Lenin, reasonably suggest that even today, after decades of lying in a common grave, it is possible that the body of the second Soviet leader is In a completely tolerable form. Although with some reservations.

Relics forever?

The question of whether it is advisable to expose the dead body to the general public is today, rather, morally-ethical rather than politically. The number of people for whom Lenin's name remains a saint is not very great today, although it is also impossible to say that there are none at all.

No less significant relic for many Soviet people was the body of Joseph Vissarionovich. From 1953 to 1962, they knew that both the great ruler, comrade-in-arms and revolutionary Lenin and Stalin were in the Mausoleum. Photos of their bodies were almost never published, but anyone could see them, who came to Moscow and stood a long line. It seemed that now it will always be like this.

Excesses

During the years of Stalin's rule, a "new man" was not created, which is necessary for the complete victory of communism. But there was another type, personifying the leader of the Soviet type. This character always agreed with the opinion of the head of the party, and if hesitated, then certainly together with the general line.

Ironically, it was Stalin's methods of management that were used in making the decision to exclude the corpse of the general secretary-violator of the Leninist norms from the list of official Soviet shrines. Not all of the workers who supported this initiative of the Kirov plant agreed internally with him. When Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, some members of the commission for the reburial were shedding tears. A few handfuls of earth were thrown into the open mouth of the grave. It was bold, but before the protest, much less the riot was not enough. Where bravery led the officers who were part of the funeral team. They refused to cut off the buttons made of gold from the jacket of JV Stalin, as the First himself insisted, and were demoted. There were no other excesses.

"Initiative from below"

Formal initiator of the removal of Stalin's body from the Mausoleum is the first secretary of the Leningrad regional party organization comrade. Spiridonov IV But he acted according to the usual scheme for the nomenclature, according to which the Communists simply supported the rush of the working masses and, of course, headed it.

The meeting of the Kirov workers probably took place, but the agenda and the decision were, without a doubt, prepared in advance and approved "at the very top". The historical background on which Stalin was taken from the Mausoleum is important.

The year 1961 was marked by many events in the life of the whole country. The next party congress was coming to an end, XXII. Internal affairs were not the best way, the prices were growing. The broad masses of the working people freely and involuntarily compared Khrushchev's time with the previous epoch, to which, on the contrary, they were reduced. People remember the good better than the bad. Even the first flight of man into space and testing the most powerful hydrogen charge could compensate for the absence of meat and sausages in stores only partially.

Night and Mystery

The removal of Stalin from the Mausoleum took place immediately after the Congress's approval vote. It happened simultaneously with the reburial near the Kremlin wall, where a grave had already been dug in advance, with the lights projected onto it.

Before long, they installed plywood shields that fenced the participants in the process, both living and dead, from curious eyes. The option of burial at the Novodevichy cemetery was rejected in order to avoid unpredictable consequences. Perhaps everything from a demonstrative pilgrimage to the abduction of the coffin.

When Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, all his precious elements in the form of gold epaulettes of the Generalissimo, the star of the Hero of Socialist Labor and the notorious buttons, in exchange for which the brass were sewn in exchange, were nevertheless removed from his uniform. History is silent about who did this.

The prohibition of passage to Red Square by a few night passersby was explained by the fact that a parade was being prepared in honor of November 7.

The Last Parade

On the night when Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, he, without knowing himself, was welcomed by Soviet troops. The caterpillars of the tanks rumbled along the paving stones, the engines of menacing fighting vehicles rumbled, and the hammered step of the infantrymen reflected from the walls of the Kremlin. The rehearsal did take place, but for the deceased seven years ago the Supreme Commander-in-Chief was a real parade.

Meanwhile, the veneer over the entrance was already filmed, in its place the surviving Stalin inscription with the same name was being prepared, but it required time to install it, and the blank space was simply covered with a piece of cloth with the word "LENIN". In the morning the main tomb of the USSR was planned to be opened for a visit. It was difficult to predict the reaction of the population, although the most influential Soviet organization, the KGB, was trying to solve this problem.

Gravestone

The monument was not long, only a heavy horizontal slab with laconically broken letters and figures, meaning the name, party pseudonym and dates of the boundaries of life. The tombstone in the form of a sculptural bust of the work of N. Tomsky appeared almost a decade after Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum.

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

Murmur

Concerns about the fact that, having learned about the absence of Comrade Stalin's dust in the mausoleum, the people will have to be pacified, proved to be in vain. Unwanted conversations, of course, went, but they did not go beyond the usual philistine murmur.

State security officers noted the appearance of political anecdotes, the essence of which was reduced to assumptions about the future burial place of First Secretary Khrushchev. "This Nikita is breaking with his cot, Comrade Lenin," as if Stalin spoke to Vladimir Ilyich with his famous Caucasian accent, hearing the roar at the back doors of the Mausoleum.

The reasons for the dissatisfaction were, they led to many conflicts, the most famous of which was the Novocherkassk uprising, which happened soon, but these disturbances had no relation to the movement of the dead body, the people perceived the change in Red Square quite passively. Fans of hard methods in the person of "hard-stone" Communists laid flowers every year on March 5 and December 21 at the mausoleum, where Stalin's grave was surrounded by other graves of prominent party figures. These protests and limited.

Memory and History

From the point of view of the ordinary citizen of Russia, who grew up in the last two decades, much in this story can be incomprehensible. For example, what is the fundamental difference between the two inhabitants of the burial vault, which is still on the Red Square today?

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

Modern man, who knows and understands the nature of communism, most often it is not clear why Stalin was removed from the Mausoleum, but there is no Lenin. The answer is simple, it's all about culture and attitude to the history of your own country. Respect the convictions of those who because of old age can not and do not want to change them, it is simply necessary. Today, in Russia and abroad, there are very worthy people, committed, nevertheless, to communist ideals. And we need to reckon with them if we want our descendants to respect us.