Where is stalin buried

Though he is now considered responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people through famine and purges, when his death was announced to the people of the Soviet Union on March 6, , many wept. Stalin had led them to victory in World War II. And now he was dead. Through a succession of bulletins, the Soviet people were made aware that Stalin was gravely ill. Stalin, 73, had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at p.

Stalin's body was washed by a nurse and then carried via a white car to the Kremlin mortuary, where an autopsy was performed. After the autopsy, Stalin's body was given to the embalmers to prepare it for the three days it would lie in state. His body was placed on temporary display in the Hall of Columns, the ballroom of the historic House of Unions, where thousands of people lined up in the snow to see it.

The crowds were so dense and chaotic that some people were trampled underfoot, others rammed against traffic lights, and still others choked to death. It is estimated that people lost their lives trying to get a glimpse of Stalin's corpse. On March 9, nine pallbearers carried the coffin from the Hall of Columns onto a gun carriage. The body was then ceremoniously taken to Lenin's tomb on Red Square in Moscow. Only three speeches were made, by Georgy Malenkov, a Soviet politician who succeeded Stalin; Lavrenty Beria, chief of Soviet security and the secret police; and Vyacheslav Molotov, a Soviet politician and diplomat.

Then, covered in black and red silk, Stalin's coffin was carried into the tomb. At noon, throughout the Soviet Union, came a loud roar: whistles, bells, guns, and sirens were blown in honor of Stalin.

Though Stalin's body had been embalmed, it was prepared only for the three-day lying-in-state. It was going to take much more to make the body seem unchanged for generations. The site, believed to date back to the late s, was uncovered during exploration works for a planned expansion of an airport. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are believed to have died during Joseph Stalin's rule of the Soviet Union.

Sergiy Gutsalyuk, the head of the regional branch of Ukraine's National Memory Institute, told AFP that the victims were likely to have been killed by the Soviet secret police unit during the late s. However, he said it would not be possible to identify the victims as any records were held in Russia.

According to the Ukrinform website, around 8, people in Odessa were sentenced to death by the Soviet secret police between and The National Memory Institute had initially said it was not possible to estimate the number of people executed at the site, but that it already appeared to be one of the largest mass graves ever found in Ukraine.

By the s, the system broke down. Thirty years ago the Berlin Wall fell. On Christmas Day , the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time. Yet Stalin remains buried in a place of honor. And not just him. Many communist unworthies remain alongside him in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, a protected landmark since He was not the first to be interred there, however.

Notable people also were buried there: revolutionary leader Yakov Sverdlov and American journalist John Reed, for instance. The practice of mass burials continued for only a few years, though rank retained its privileges in the classless society: Sverdlov and two other Communist Party leaders, Bolshevik leader and Red Army commander Mikhail Frunze and Secret Police Chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Pole by birth, were buried individually in front of the wall before the practice was stopped in Next came the interment of ashes in the Kremlin wall.

Since the Orthodox Church forbade cremation, the practice was viewed as an affirmation of atheism. Occasional burials resumed in , however, starting with Mikhail Kalinin, who had served as head of state. Most interments continued in the wall; occasionally cosmonauts and generals muscled their way into the atheistically sacred ground. The last such honored burial occurred in , that of Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov.

He demonstrates the fickleness of fame. Public domain. Stalin's tomb near the Kremlin wall. Subscribe to our newsletter! Get the week's best stories straight to your inbox. We've got more than 2,2 million followers on Facebook. Join them! Read more. Will rehabilitation of Stalin split Russian society?

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