On September 1, 1973, an explosion was heard in the mausoleum on Red Square. The tomb of Lenin was immediately cordoned off by state security officers and closed to outsiders. Not a single Soviet newspaper wrote about this. Until now, almost nothing was known about the circumstances of the incident.
Explosion
In the afternoon, when a long line of children rushed to the mausoleum, an unknown man walked through the doors of the funeral hall without hindrance - the guards took him for a school teacher accompanying his class. Due to the large flow of visitors that day, the security was weakened, no one guessed to inspect the unknown person.
Once next to the sarcophagus, the man detonated an explosive device hidden under his clothes, connecting the wires.
As a result of the terrible explosion, the terrorist himself and two more visitors, a husband and wife, who had arrived in Moscow from Astrakhan, died. Four schoolchildren were taken away from the scene with serious injuries. The soldiers of the Kremlin regiment, who were thrown back by the explosion, were shell-shocked. There could have been more victims, but the armored glass of the sarcophagus, installed in April 1973, took the brunt. Lenin's body was not injured.
Despite the fact that the investigation was taken under the personal control of the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, the investigators were unable to answer many questions.
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Who was the attacker?
The terrorist was literally smashed into a bloody crumb - only a hand and a fragment of a skull remained from his body. In this regard, it turned out to be possible to identify the person only by scraps of documents found next to the remains. It was found that the explosion was staged by a repeat offender, who had previously been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The identity of the terrorist has not been officially named to this day, however, as the former head of the 5th department of the KGB of the USSR Philip Bobkov later said in an interview, this man came to the capital from Horlivka (Donetsk region of Ukraine).
The same version was confirmed in his book by Militia General Mikhail Kornienko. He recalled that in 1973, when he was working in the Gorlovka prosecutor's office, the department received a request from the KGB. The Chekists asked to raise the documents on the murder of a 23-year-old local woman who was found stabbed to death in the nude in her apartment. The suspect in this case was a roommate of a Gorlovka woman named Nikolai, who had previously beaten his beloved.
“He told his mother this: I'm leaving, but soon the whole country will hear about me,” Kornienko shared with the KGB officers. In response, the Chekists told him that a Gorlovka resident had committed a crime in Moscow. A few days later it became clear that it was a terrorist attack in the Mausoleum.
Terrorist motives
The main version of the investigation initially boiled down to the fact that the suicide bomber wanted to repeat the "feat" of Herostratus and go down in history as the man who destroyed Lenin's mummy.
However, Mikhail Kornienko's story gives a picture of a demonstrative suicide, undertaken partly out of despair (he was facing a new prison term) and partly out of protest against the authorities. It was found that Nikolai took the ammonal for the explosion from his friend who worked at the mine, saying that he was going fishing.
Note that there have already been cases of "protest" suicides in the mausoleum. For example, in 1934, a peasant from the Moscow region, Mitrofan Nikitin, aimed at Lenin's corpse with a pistol and shot himself while trying to prevent him. In Nikitin's pocket, they found a note in which he reproached the Soviet authorities for starving in the villages.
And in 1967, a similar in handwriting terrorist attack in the mausoleum was staged by a resident of the Lithuanian Kaunas by the name of Krysanov - an explosion then tore off an Italian tourist's leg.
The terrorist attack of 1973 was the last serious incident in Lenin's mausoleum. In the perestroika and post-Soviet eras, this well-guarded place no longer attracted the attention of terrorists.
Timur Sagdiev