Kremlin Wall Necropolis - Mass Graves of 1917

Mass Graves of 1917

In July 1917, hundreds of soldiers of the Russian Northern Front were arrested for mutiny and desertion and locked up in Daugavpils (then Dvinsk) fortress. Later, 869 Dvinsk inmates were transported to Moscow. Here, the jailed soldiers launched a hunger strike; public support to them threatened to develop in city-wide riot. On September 22, 593 inmates were released; the rest were left behind bars until the October Revolution. The released soldiers, collectively called Dvintsy, stayed in the city as a cohesive unit, based in Zamoskvorechye District and openly hostile to the ruling Provisional Government. Immediately after the October Revolution in Saint Petersburg, Dvintsy became the strike force of the Bolsheviks in Moscow. Late at night of October 27–28 a detachment of around two hundred men marching north to Tverskaya Street confronted the loyalist forces near the State Historical Museum on the Red Square. In the fighting 70 of the Dvintsy, including their company commander Sapunov, were killed at the barricades.

On the following day the loyalists, led by Colonel Konstantin Ryabtsev, succeeded in taking over the Kremlin. They gunned down the surrendered Red soldiers at the Kremlin Arsenal wall. More were killed as the Bolsheviks stormed the Kremlin, finally taking control on the night of November 2–3. Street fighting settled down after having claimed nearly a thousand lives, and on November 4 the new Bolshevik administration decreed their dead would be buried at Red Square next to the Kremlin Wall, where indeed most of them were killed.

Voices reached us across the immense place, and the sound of picks and shovels. We crossed over. Mountains of dirt and rock were piled high near the base of the wall. Climbing these we looked down into two massive pits, ten or fifteen feet deep and fifty yards long, where hundreds of soldiers and workers were digging in the light of huge fires. A young student spoke to us in German. “The Brotherhood Grave,” he explained.
- John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World.

A total of 238 dead were buried in the mass graves between Senate and Nikolskaya towers in a public funeral on November 10 (John Reed incorrectly mentions 500); two more victims were buried on November 14 and 17. The youngest, Pavel Andreyev, was 14 years old. Of 240 pro-revolution victims of the October–November fighting only 20, including 12 of the Dvintsy, are identified in the official listing of the Moscow Heritage Commission. As of March, 2009, three Moscow streets remain named after these individual victims, as well as Dvintsev Street named after the Dvintsy force.

The loyalists secured a permit to publicly bury their dead on November 13. This funeral started at the old Moscow State University building near Kremlin; thirty-seven dead were interred at the Vsekhsvyatskoye cemetery (now demolished) in then suburban Sokol District.