Disputes about whether to take Lenin's body out of the mausoleum and where to bury it in this case have been going on for several decades. No less controversy was fought in government circles immediately after the death of the leader.
The variant with "eternal" embalming did not immediately become dominant.
Immediately after Lenin's death, a government commission was created to organize the funeral. In the future, she dealt with issues of perpetuating the memory of him: renaming streets and cities, publishing works, erecting monuments, and so on. But the primary task was to determine how the burial would be carried out.
Funeral at the Kremlin wall or crypt
There is a version that after the farewell ceremony, they wanted to bury Lenin at the Kremlin wall, next to the grave of Sverdlov. But because of the frost, the ground froze, besides, at the place of the alleged burial, underground passages were allegedly discovered, which would have taken a lot of time to seal. Semyon Budyonny proposed to betray Lenin's body to the ground.
At a meeting of the Politburo, it was proposed to erect a crypt. Bonch-Bruevich spoke about this, outraged by the talk about an open coffin with an embalmed body. He clarified: "I believe that it is necessary to build a simple crypt, as, for example, there is a grave of Dostoevsky, Turgenev - everyone knows that there is ashes here, but no one sees the face." As Academician Yu. Lopukhin wrote in a book dedicated to Lenin's death, “On January 25, the CEC Presidium decides: to keep the coffin with Lenin's body in the crypt, making it accessible for visiting; to build a crypt near the Kremlin wall, on Red Square, among the mass graves of the fighters of the October Revolution”. However, the idea of a crypt soon underwent a transformation. It was decided to keep the body and put it up for worship in a sarcophagus with a transparent lid.
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Embalming
Immediately after the news of Lenin's death, letters and telegrams from the people began to arrive at the commission for organizing the funeral with requests to extend the time of farewell to the leader. According to Kirill Anderson, who for a long time headed the former archive of the Central Archive of the Institute of International Literature and Literature, such letters did exist and came from “below”. Anderson cites the text of one of these messages: “The sacred body of Ilyich, dear to all of us, should not be buried, but made imperishable and physically visible as much as possible. Do not remove the blessed dust of Ilyich from us, do not cover it with earth."
In many memoirs and a number of works devoted to the situation with Lenin's funeral, Stalin is assigned the leading role in promoting the idea of embalming. For example, Trotsky's memoirs about a Politburo meeting are quoted, where he discusses Stalin's proposal to bury the leader "in Russian": "In Russian, according to the canons of the Russian Orthodox Church, saints were made relics. Apparently, we, the parties of revolutionary Marxism, are advised to go in the same direction - to save Lenin's body. " However, Stalin does not appear in the official documentation. He was not even a member of the funeral commission.
Many were against the creation of such "Soviet relics". Nadezhda Krupskaya on January 30 in the newspaper Pravda expressed herself explicitly: “Do not let your grief for Ilyich go into the outward veneration of his personality. Do not arrange monuments for him, palaces of his name, magnificent celebrations in his memory, etc. - he attached so little importance to all this during his lifetime, he was so burdened by all this. " Kliment Voroshilov was also opposed, stating that "the peasants will understand this in their own way: they, they say, destroyed our gods, smashed the relics, and created their own relics."
However, the supporters of embalming won. It was started a few months after Lenin's death.
Bury in the cemetery
The version that Lenin wanted to be buried at the Volkovo cemetery next to his mother was put forward at the 1989 Congress of People's Deputies by Yu. Koryakin. However, no evidence of the existence of such a wish of the leader was found. Lenin's niece Olga Ulyanova spoke out against this version. Alexei Abramov, the author of many books about the Mausoleum, also states that "there is not a single document of Lenin's relatives or relatives regarding Lenin's last will to be buried in a certain Russian cemetery."
In addition, among the Soviet elite, funerals in ordinary cemeteries near churches and monasteries were at least unpopular. Such ceremonies did not go well with the declared atheism. A place near the Kremlin wall gradually turned into a revolutionary cemetery. Later, the idea of cremation was spread.
However, the version that Lenin was not allowed to be buried the way he and his family wanted, still exists. So, in 2011, V. Medinsky, Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, said: “It is well known that Lenin himself was not going to erect any mausoleums for himself, and his living relatives - his sister, brother and mother - were categorically opposed. They wanted to bury him in St. Petersburg with his mother."