In Soviet Russia....They Put the Big Kahunas in the Kremlin Wall

Since we already discussed the monument analyses in class and decided where they'll be done, I'm not going to discuss here where in Victoria I'd like to do a monument analysis. Instead I will stick to the prompt involving where I'd like to do a monument analysis if I could do it anywhere else in the world. Given my previously stated enthusiasm for Russian history, of course I'm going pick somewhere such as the Kremlin. I not only think this would be interesting to me because it has to do with Russian history, but I also think it would be interesting for anyone wanting to do a comparative grave/monument analysis because there are several types of burials within Red Square. There are the mass graves of the revolutionaries that died in the street fighting of 1917, Lenin's mausoleum, and the Kremlin wall necropolis containing the cremated remains of the Bolshevik/Communist Party's upper echelons as well as other prominent figures, such as cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

"Gagarin and Seryogin, Kremlin memorials. Guards of honour stationed at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis next to the shrines erected following the interment here of the ashes of Soviet heroes Gagarin (right) and Seryogin (left). Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) had become the first human in space, orbiting the Earth in the Vostok 1 spacecraft on 12 April 1961. He died on 27 March 1968 with Soviet test pilot Vladimir Seryogin (1922-1968) when an aeroplane they were flying crashed. Their remains were cremated and the ashes were placed in the Kremlin Wall (behind plaques) with full military honours. Photographed in Moscow, Russia, on 30 March 1968." (courtesy of http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/122992/enlarge)


Cremation was the ideal form of Soviet body disposal. The Bolsheviks faced some substantial obstacles with this though. Russia, at the time of the revolution, was a deeply Orthodox country. In the Orthodox tradition, cremation was forbidden because one's body needed to be intact for resurrection on Judgement Day. Because of this, no crematorium actually existed in Russia! The Bolsheviks tried to build one, but they had difficulties finding a place to build one and had no idea how to actually construct a working one. The first crematorium in Russia opened in December 1920, but it was a converted bathhouse that had wooden components. Apparently the Bolsheviks didn't think about the fact that it's not a great idea to have large fires in a wooden building -- it burned down two months later. The first working crematorium did not open until 1927 or 1928 in Moscow, so although cremation was the atheist ideal, good Soviet revolutionaries had to have their actual corpses buried for about a decade. The Bolsheviks began burying their fallen comrades in mass and individual grave underneath the Kremlin Wall. This honour was for revolutionaries who spilt their blood for the cause, ordinary Red Army soldiers, victims of the Civil War...basically any good communists who died at least somewhat heroically or at the hands of anti-revolutionaries, as well as top-ranking Party members. This practice, of inhuming people in the Kremlin wall necropolis, continued until 1927.


Once the Soviets worked out the cremation problem, they began cremating their dead and placing them inside the Kremlin wall. This first occurred in 1925, but it did not become a regular practice until 1927/8. In this 2 year period, inhumations beneath the wall and cremated remains being placed within the wall (with memorial plaques on the facade) both occurred, but inhumation was generally for honoured communists but not top Party officials (the top officials were cremated and placed in the wall). An interesting thing about these cremation burials in the wall is that, since cremation was an entirely  new practice in Russia, people were unfamiliar with how to go about burying someone's cremated remains, so at first they would put the remains in an urn and carry this urn to the wall in an ordinary coffin. Only individuals were placed within the wall -- families of the honoured dead were buried elsewhere.


Apart from these burials, Lenin himself is interred within Red Square in his own mausoleum, built by his successors as a massive political strategy, after having been embalmed (and re-embalmed, also a political statement) -- he can still be viewed by tourists today (seeing Lenin's body is at the top of my list for my eventual trip to Moscow...). Following "The Great Patriotic War" (AKA WWII), individual tombs were built behind the Mausoleum. Burials in Red Square ended with Konstantin Chernenko (Mikhail Gorbachev's predecessor) in 1985.

Vladimir Lenin's entombed and embalmed corpse on display in is mausoleum in Red Square (photo courtesy of http://jornale.com.br/wicca/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/pop2.jpg)


So, over a period of less than 70 years, many different disposal styles were used within Red Square. This makes not only the graves and monuments themselves interesting, but also the landscape of Red Square.