When the leader of the Soviet people and the world proletariat, Joseph Stalin, died at his dacha in Kuntsevo on the morning of March 5, the whole country froze in anticipation. What will happen now? Who will replace the genius? This is on the one hand. On the other hand, it was necessary to prepare such a funeral as has never been arranged for any politician in the world.
National state mourning was declared for four days in the Soviet Union. In fact, all departments, ministries, departments, plants, factories stopped working these days. Everyone was waiting for the main day - the funeral, scheduled for March 9th. For three days in a row, a living, many kilometers long human river, meandering through the streets of Moscow, headed towards Pushkinskaya Street (now Bolshaya Dmitrovka) and along it to the Column Hall of the House of Unions. There, on a dais, a coffin with the body of the deceased was installed all in flowers. Among those who wanted to say goodbye to the leader there were many visitors, but the first to pass through the special entrance, of course, were foreign delegations. Ordinary Muscovites and residents of other cities of the Union who arrived at parting - all stood in a huge queue. Of the seven million inhabitants of the Soviet capital, at least two million wanted to see the deceased leader with their own eyes.
Special mourners came to the historic funeral from Georgia. It was said that there were several thousand of them - women dressed all in black. On the funeral day, they had to follow the funeral procession and cry bitterly, as loudly as possible. Their cry was to be broadcast on the radio. For four days already, only tragic musical works have been transmitted through it. The mood of the Soviet people these days was depressed. Many have had heart attacks, malaise, and exhaustion of the nervous system. The increase in mortality among the population has noticeably increased, although no one really recorded it.
Everyone tried to get into the Column Hall of the House of Unions in order to have at least one eye look at the 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 nearby lanes, in more distant places, crowds formed due to the crowd of thousands. And to break free from such a suffocating pandemonium was simply impossible: troops and trucks were 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 be sure to join the living human river and get to 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 walk to Pushkinskaya Street from Trubnaya Square. This is where the main stream of people headed. But not everyone managed to get to her. Many died on the outskirts. How many were killed? Hundreds, thousands? Most likely we will never know about it. According to eyewitnesses, all the crushed bodies were put on trucks and taken out of town, where they were all buried in one common grave. 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 service practically did not work - in those days of mourning it was forbidden to travel along the central streets. No one was interested in the wounded. Their fate was decided. Nothing was supposed to distract from Stalin's funeral.
This is what Dmitry Volkogonov wrote about those days in his work “Triumph and Tragedy”: “The deceased leader remained true to himself: and when he was 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 was a terrible crush, which claimed many lives. This is very mean. Extremely. Almost nothing. Real tragedies 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 crashed. People climbed onto iron lampposts and, unable to resist, fell from there, never to rise again. Some rose above the crowd and crawled over their heads, as they did during the Khodynka crush, some in despair, on the contrary, tried to crawl under the trucks, but they were not allowed there,they collapsed on the asphalt in exhaustion and could no longer get up. Those who were pressing behind them stamped on them. The crowd swayed in waves in one direction, then in the other.
Biological scientist I. B. 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 day of farewell to Stalin, he and his wife were literally sucked in by the crowd and forced out onto Trubnaya Square. He and his wife managed to get out alive. He wrote that not only people were killed in this crush, but also the horses on which the policemen were sitting.
Of course, today we do not have accurate information about how many people died in the mad pandemonium. It was forbidden even to talk about it at that time. And only several years later, already in the years when the personality cult was exposed, testimonies of the participants in those events began to appear. But no one seriously studied this issue.
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Here is what the famous poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who later made the film "Death of Stalin", told about it:
“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 who have gathered together, perhaps each one cute, become a monster, uncontrollable, cruel, when people have twisted faces … I remember this, and it was an apocalyptic sight.
What happened then? The city commandant's office and the Ministry of State Security ordered to protect Trubnaya Square with military trucks, and human Niagara gushed from Sretenka, from the descent, people were forced to crush each other, climb through houses, apartments, they died, there were cases when children died. It was like the crowd rushing to football or boxing. Those who had never seen Stalin alive wanted to see him at least dead, but never did. I didn’t see either … 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. People died, crammed into this artificial square of trucks. They shouted to the cordon: "Remove the trucks!" I remember one officer, he cried, and, crying, saving the children, he only said: “I can't, there are no instructions …”.
How many people died in that crush? We will never know about this. At that time 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 disaster. But most likely there were much more than one and a half thousand. Millions wanted to take part in the funeral of their beloved leader.
From the book: "HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS". ON. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev