1953, March 5 - after an apoplectic stroke, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin died and an avalanche of grief and sobs covered the USSR. For goodbye, on March 6, the body of the leader was exhibited in the Column Hall of the House of Unions. Stalin's funeral took place on March 9 …
Stalin's stay at the pinnacle of power from 1922 to 1953 fell like a bloody streak on the pages of the history of the 20th century. Mass shootings and repressions, lawlessness, physical and moral destruction of free-thinking people in Siberian camps, without exaggeration, can be called an attempt at genocide, a crime against humanity. Stalin's soul did not calm down even after death. The last sacrifice was brought to him on the day of farewell to him …
Death of Stalin
1953, March 5, morning - at his dacha in Kuntsevo, the leader of all peoples and the world proletariat, Joseph Stalin, died, the whole state froze in anticipation. What will happen now? Who can replace a genius? This is on the one hand. On the other hand, it was necessary to prepare such a funeral as has never been done to any politician in the world.
In the USSR, a nationwide state mourning was declared for 4 days. Banners were lowered across the country, theaters, concert halls, dance floors were closed, and vodka was no longer sold in tents in the capital. Entry to Moscow was allowed only with special passes, so trains arrived in Moscow half empty. It was practically impossible to move around the city: the center was completely closed off, and stops at some metro stations were prohibited. The following fact is also curious: at the beginning of March 1953, posters of the film "The Dream Come True" were posted throughout the capital - they were urgently pasted over …
Farewell to the leader
Promotional video:
These days, all departments, ministries, factories, factories these days, in fact, stopped their work. Everyone was waiting for the main day - Stalin's funeral, scheduled for March 9th. For three days, a living, many kilometers long human river, meandering along Moscow streets, headed towards Pushkinskaya Street (later Bolshaya Dmitrovka) and along it to the Column Hall of the House of Unions. There, on a dais, framed by red banners, roses and green branches, there was a coffin with the body of the deceased. He was wearing his favorite grayish-green, casual, turndown collar uniform. From the uniform that he wore every day, it differed only in the sewn epaulettes of the Generalissimo and gold buttons.
Everything was furnished in the Column Hall with great pomp: “Crystal chandeliers with bunches of electric candles are covered with black crepe. 16 scarlet velvet panels, edged with black silk, with the coats of arms of the fraternal republics, fell from tall snow-white marble columns. The banner of the indestructible free USSR, bent over the head of the leader.
Among those who wished to say goodbye to the deceased there were many visitors, but the first to pass through the special entrance, of course, were foreign delegations. And ordinary residents of the capital and residents of other Soviet cities who arrived at the funeral - all stood in a huge queue. Of the seven million residents of Moscow, at least two million people wanted to see the body of the leader of the peoples with their own eyes.
Special mourners came to the historic funeral from Georgia. It was said that there were several thousand of them - women, in black clothes. On the day of Stalin's funeral, they were supposed to follow the funeral procession and cry bitterly, as loudly as possible. Their cry was to be broadcast on the radio. Already for 4 days, only tragic musical works were transmitted through it. The mood of the Soviet people these days was depressed. Many had heart attacks, malaise, and exhaustion of the nervous system. The increase in mortality in the country has noticeably increased, although no one really recorded it.
Monstrous crush
Everyone wanted to get into the Column Hall of the House of Unions in order to have at least one eye look at a person who became a monument during his lifetime. The city seemed to be depopulated. And if it was still possible to maintain order on Pushkinskaya Street and in the nearby lanes, in more distant places, a crowd of thousands of people formed. And it was simply impossible to get free from such a suffocating pandemonium - troops and trucks were standing everywhere. The cordon did not allow the crowd to disperse. And only on one side the streets were free, exactly from where the crowd was pushing. Everyone wanted to join the living human river and end up on Pushkinskaya Street. Nobody knew how to approach. So people poked around on different streets and went out to the military.
There was no information, only rumors. According to rumors, it was possible to get to Pushkinskaya Street from the direction of Trubnaya Square. This is where the main stream of people went. However, not everyone was able to get to her. Many died on the outskirts. How many people died? Hundreds, thousands? Most likely, we will never be able to find out about this.
By the way, the state paid for the funeral of the victims. Already a day after the tragic events, it was announced: everyone whose relatives and friends disappeared in the street crush can come to the Ambulance Institute for identification. In the lobby of the Sklif, boxes with photographs of the dead were placed on several tables. It was terrifying to look at them - trampled bodies, mash instead of faces … More often than not, relatives could recognize 'their' only by their clothes."
The nightmare taking place in real life was further complicated by the fact that many went with whole families: the onslaught was tearing loved ones apart, because there were children there too … But the worst thing was that among the crushed there were those who came to their senses and asked for help … They could still be saved. But the "ambulance" essentially did not work - at that time of mourning it was forbidden to travel along the central streets. No one was interested in the wounded. Their fate was sealed. Nothing was supposed to darken Stalin's funeral.
Funeral procession on the way to the Mausoleum.
Here is what Dmitry Volkogonov wrote about those days in his work "Triumph and Tragedy":
“The deceased leader remained true to himself: and the dead, he could not allow the altar to be empty. The crowd of people was so great that in several places on the streets of Moscow there were terrible crush, which claimed many lives"
This is very mean. Extremely. Almost nothing. Real dramas played out on many streets. The crush was so strong that people were simply pushed into the walls of houses. Fences collapsed, gates broke, shop windows were smashed. People licked themselves on the iron lampposts and, unable to resist, fell out of there, never to get up again. Someone rose above the crowd and crawled over their heads, as they did during the Khodynka tragedy, some in despair, on the contrary, tried to crawl under the trucks, but they were not allowed there, they fell exhausted on the asphalt and could no longer get up. They were trampled by those pressing from behind. The crowd swung in waves in one direction and then in the other.
O. Kuznetsov recalled:
“The chest was compressed, I, like many others, began to choke. How something completely incomprehensible, almost mystical, began to happen here: the dense, compressed crowd began to slowly sway. At first, the frightened screaming people leaned forward, as it seemed to me, up to 45 ° above the ground, and then also leaned back. Fear of falling to the ground and immediately being crushed caused even greater panic. And although it was impossible to fall to the ground - there were people around, no one then understood this! The crowd moved according to its own, unknown law, rocking people … After two or three strong inclinations, unnatural for a person, I felt that if I could not break out of this hellish stream, I was finished. It was at that time that I first learned what crowd panic was. People got infected with it from each other"
Biological scientist I. Zbarsky, who for many years dealt with the embalming of Lenin's body, wrote in his book of memoirs "Under the Roof of the Mausoleum" that on the days of farewell to the leader, he and his wife were literally sucked in by the crowd and forced out onto Trubnaya Square. They were able to get out with his wife alive. He wrote that not only people died in this pandemonium, but also the horses on which the policemen were sitting.
Of course, today we do not have exact information about how many people could have died in a mad crush. It was forbidden even to talk about it in those days. And only a few years later, already in the years when the personality cult was exposed, testimonies of the participants in those events began to appear. However, no one seriously studied this issue.
Here is what the famous poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said about this, who later made the film "Death of Stalin":
“I have carried within me all these years the memory that I was there, inside this crowd, this monstrous crush. This crowd is gigantic, multifaceted … As a result, they had one common face - the face of a monster. This can be seen even now - when thousands of people gathered together, perhaps each of them cute, become a monster, uncontrollable, cruel, when people have twisted faces … I remember this, and it was an apocalyptic sight … People died, squeezed into this artificial square made of trucks. They shouted to the cordon: "Take the trucks away!" I remember one officer, he cried, and, crying, saving the children, he only said: "I can't, there are no instructions …""
Why did it happen?
What happened then? The commandant's office of the city and the Ministry of State Security gave an order to protect Trubnaya Square with military trucks, and a human waterfall gushed from Sretenka, from the descent, people were forced to crush each other, climb through houses, apartments, they died, children died. It was like the crowd rushing to football or boxing. Those who had never seen the leader alive wanted to see him at least dead, but never saw him. People didn't cry. They cried when they heard the message about the death of the leader, in the kitchens, in the streets. Here everything turned into a struggle for survival, into a struggle for life.
Hundreds of thousands of people walked around the fenced streets leading to the Hall of Columns and could not find their way! Access was announced from 4 pm, and the route was announced at 9 pm.
How many people died in that crush? We will never know about this. In those days, everything was done secretly, secretly. After the crush, the bodies of all the victims were thrown onto the same trucks and taken away in an unknown direction. It is difficult to say whether there were more victims than during the Khodynka tragedy. But, most likely, there were largely more than one and a half thousand. Millions wanted to take part in the funeral of their beloved leader.
Effects
… And what about the leader of the nations? 1953, March 9 - a solemn ceremony of transferring Stalin's body to the Mausoleum took place. He did not rest for long next to the leader of the revolution Lenin - due to the "inexpedient further preservation" 8 years later, his body was reburied at night (!) At the Kremlin wall. But there is information that this grave was soon empty - the Master was cremated … Every year his reign was subjected to more and more critical assessment, but at the same time the name of the father of nations was overgrown with an increasing number of secrets and rumors. And this tangle has not been completely unraveled to this day …