page_title: Kremlin Wall Necropolis
section_title: Burial in the Kremlin Wall, 1925–1984
hierarchical_section_title: Kremlin Wall Necropolis / Burial in the Kremlin Wall, 1925–1984
caption_attribution_description: English: Kremlin Wall Necropolis
context_page_description: Burials in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow began in November 1917, when 240 pro-Bolshevik victims of the October Revolution were buried in mass graves at Red Square. It is centered on both sides of Lenin's Mausoleum, initially built in wood in 1924 and rebuilt in granite in 1929–1930. After the last mass burial made in 1921, funerals on Red Square were usually conducted as state ceremonies and reserved as the last honor for notable politicians, military leaders, cosmonauts, and scientists. In 1925–1927 burials in the ground were stopped; funerals were now conducted as burials of cremated ash in the Kremlin wall itself. Burials in the ground only resumed with Mikhail Kalinin's funeral in 1946. The practice of burying dignitaries at Red Square ended with the funeral of Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985. The Kremlin Wall Necropolis was designated a protected landmark in 1974.
context_section_description: The first person to be cremated and interred in an urn in the Kremlin wall, 45-year-old former People's Commissar of Finance Miron Vladimirov, died in Italy in March 1925. The procedure for dealing with human remains in an urn was still unfamiliar at the time, and Vladimirov's urn was carried to his grave in an ordinary coffin. Between 1925 and the opening of the Donskoye Cemetery crematorium in October 1927, interments in the wall and burials in the ground coexisted together; the former was preferred for foreign dignitaries of the Comintern (Jenő Landler, Bill Haywood, Arthur MacManus, Charles Ruthenberg) while the latter was granted only to top Party executives (Mikhail Frunze, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Nariman Narimanov and Pyotr Voykov).
  Initially, the bodies of the deceased were laid in state in the Kremlin's halls, but with tightening of security in the late 1920s the official farewell station was relocated to the House of the Unions' "Pillar Hall" on Okhotny Ryad (where Lenin lay in state in 1924) and remained there until the end of the Soviet state. Burials initially took place to the north from the Senate tower, switching to the south side in 1934 and returning to the north side in 1977 (with a few exceptions). Interments in the wall were strictly individual; spouses and children of those interred in the wall had to be buried elsewhere. There were only three instances of group burials: the three-man crew of the Osoaviakhim-1 high-altitude balloon in 1934, the crew of a MiG-15UTI crash in 1968 (Gagarin and Seryogin), and the three-man crew of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft in 1971. In total, the wall accommodates the graves of 107 men and 8 women. No remains interred in the wall were ever removed from it, including the deceased who were posthumously accused of "fascist conspiracy" (Sergei Kamenev) or political repressions (Andrey Vyshinsky).
  Under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, the honor of interment in the Kremlin wall was awarded posthumously by the Politburo. When members of the Politburo were not available immediately, Mikhail Suslov had the first call. Brezhnev overruled Suslov's decision at least once, voting to bury Semyon Budenny in an individual grave. There were also at least two known cases when groups of professionals pressed the government to extend special honors to their deceased colleagues:
  In June 1962, following the death of Army General Andrey Khrulyov, a group of marshals pressed the Politburo to bury Khrulyov in the Kremlin wall. Normally, generals of his rank were not entitled to this honor; Khrushchev was known to dislike Khrulyov and suggested burying him at the Novodevichy Cemetery. The military prevailed, and Khrulyov was buried on Red Square.
  In January 1970 the official decision to bury Pavel Belyayev at the Novodevichy Cemetery, already made public through newspapers, was confronted by fellow cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova, Alexei Leonov, and Vladimir Shatalov who insisted that Belyaev deserved a place in the Kremlin wall like Yuri Gagarin. According to Nikolai Kamanin's diaries, the cosmonauts, Shatalov in particular, pressed the issue despite knowing that the decision was made by Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin and that the funeral commission would not dare to challenge it. Belyaev was buried as planned at the Novodevichy. According to an alternative version of events, the choice of Novodevichy was decided by his widow's will before the official decision was published.
  On 26 April 1967, Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was given a state funeral in Moscow, and his ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis at Red Square. Komarov was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin, once more, and also the order of Hero of the Soviet Union. Komarov died as a result of the crash of his Space Capsule, Soyuz 1 – its parachutes failed and Komarov was killed when the capsule impacted the earth at aerodynamic terminal velocity.
  The last person to be buried in the Kremlin wall, in December 1984, was Minister of Defence Dmitriy Ustinov.
caption: Section of the Kremlin Wall with urn burials (Vladimirov, Ruthenberg, MacManus, Landler, Haywood)