Kremlin Wall Necropolis - Graves of 1918-1927

Graves of 1918-1927

Mass and individual burials in the ground under the Kremlin wall continued until the funeral of Pyotr Voykov in June 1927. In the first years of the Soviet regime, the honor of being buried on Red Square was extended to ordinary soldiers, victims of the Civil War, and Moscow militia men killed in clashes with gang members (March–April 1918). In January, 1918, the Red Guards buried the victims of a terrorist bombing in Dorogomilovo. In the same January white terrorists machine-gunned a pro-Bolshevik street rally; the eight victims were also buried under the Kremlin wall.

The largest single burial occurred in 1919. On September 25, a gang of anarchists led by former socialist revolutionary terrorist Donat Cherepanov, set off an explosion in a Communist Party school building in Leontyevsky Lane when Moscow party chief Vladimir Zagorsky was speaking to students. Twelve people, including Zagorsky, were killed and buried in a mass grave on Red Square. Another unusual incident was a railway crash of July 24, 1921. The aerowagon, an experimental high-speed railcar fitted with an aero engine and propeller traction, was not yet tested properly. On the day of the crash it successfully delivered a group of Soviet and foreign communists led by Fyodor Sergeyev to the Tula collieries; on the return route to Moscow the aerowagon derailed at high speed, killing everyone on board, including its inventor, Valerian Abakovsky. This was the last mass burial in the ground of Red Square.

Yakov Sverdlov, who died in 1919 allegedly from the Spanish flu, was buried in an individual grave near the Senate tower. Later it became the first of twelve individual graves of top-ranking Soviet leaders (see Individual tombs section). Sverdlov was followed by John Reed, Inessa Armand, Viktor Nogin and other notable Bolsheviks and their foreign allies. Interment in the Kremlin wall, apart from its location next to the seat of government, was also seen as a statement of atheism while burial in the ground at a traditional cemetery next to a church was deemed inappropriate for a Bolshevik. For the same reason, cremation, then prohibited by Russian Orthodox Church, was preferred to burial in a coffin and favored by Lenin and Trotsky - though Lenin expressed the wish to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg. The new government sponsored construction of crematoria since 1919, but the first burial of cremated remains in a niche in the wall did not take place until 1925.