Kremlin Wall Necropolis

Fifteen small parish graveyards stood along the wall between the Spassky and Nikolsky gates in tsarist times; in 1552 Ivan the Terrible attended the funeral of the holy fool Basil the Blessed at one of them, the graveyard of the Trinity church above the Kremlin moat.

On the night of 27-28 October 1917 about two hundred Dvintsy - soldiers jailed for mutiny that July and freed in September after a hunger strike - met loyalist forces near the State Historical Museum, and seventy died at the barricades with their commander Sapunov. The next day loyalists under Colonel Konstantin Ryabtsev took the Kremlin and shot the Red soldiers who had surrendered, against the Arsenal wall. The Bolsheviks stormed the Kremlin on the night of 2-3 November, and street fighting tapered off after nearly a thousand deaths.

On 4 November the new administration decreed that its dead be buried on Red Square beside the wall, where most of them had been killed, and two trenches of 75 metres were dug on the 8th. Church representatives objected to civil burial without rites beside Russia's holy places. On 10 November 238 coffins went into the ground; Lenin spoke, and a choir sang a cantata on verses by Sergei Yesenin. Two later burials brought the year's total to 240, the youngest of them Pavel Andreyev, aged fourteen.

On 25 September 1919 anarchists led by Donat Cherepanov bombed a Communist Party school in Leontyevsky Lane while Moscow party chief Vladimir Zagorsky was speaking; twelve were killed, Zagorsky among them, and buried together on Red Square. The last mass grave in the ground followed the Aerowagon crash of 24 July 1921, when an experimental propeller-driven railcar derailed, killing seven of the twenty-two aboard, including its inventor Valerian Abakovsky.

Yakov Sverdlov, dead in 1919, took the first individual grave near the Senate Tower; John Reed and Inessa Armand followed. Burial by a church was held unfitting for a Bolshevik and a place at the wall read as a statement of atheism; for the same reason cremation, then forbidden by the Orthodox Church, was favoured by Lenin and Trotsky. The first urn was walled up in 1925, that of Miron Vladimirov. Ground burials ran on until the funeral of Pyotr Voykov in June 1927.

Lenin died of a stroke on 21 January 1924. As the body lay in state in the Pillar Hall of the House of the Unions, the Politburo debated preserving it, at first for forty days, over the objections of his widow and siblings; Stalin ordered a vault inside the Kremlin Wall, and the casket went into a temporary wooden crypt on 27 January. A wooden mausoleum followed between March and July 1924, and Alexey Shchusev's permanent design was begun in July 1929 and finished sixteen months later. The mausoleum has served as the government's reviewing stand ever since; the body left it only for evacuation to Tyumen in 1941-1945.

Stalin was put on display beside Lenin when the mausoleum reopened in November 1953, and in 1961 the 22nd Party Congress unanimously sanctioned his removal. On 31 October the mausoleum was covered with plywood and Red Square closed, as was routine before the 7 November parade; his remains were reburied in a deep concrete-lined grave behind the building, watched only by the state commission under Nikolay Shvernik. The grave carried no bust that November, only a name tablet; Nikolai Tomsky's tomb was installed in June 1970.

Behind the granite tablets are 115 urns - 107 men and eight women - holding revolutionaries, commanders, cosmonauts and scientists, among them Clara Zetkin, Sen Katayama and Bill Haywood. Interment was strictly individual but for three group burials: the Osoaviakhim-1 balloon crew in 1934, Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Seryogin after their 1968 crash, and the Soyuz 11 crew in 1971. No remains were ever taken out of the wall, not even those of men later accused of conspiracy or of repressions. The last urn was that of the defence minister Dmitriy Ustinov in 1984, and the last grave that of Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985.

Protected as a cultural monument since 1974, the necropolis is in the charge of the Moscow Kremlin Commandant's Service. Boris Yeltsin withdrew the guard of honour after the constitutional crisis of 1993 and said Lenin should eventually be buried in the ground. When a federal military memorial opened at Mytishchi in 2013 a transfer was discussed again, but Russian law forbids reburial without the consent of relatives, and the mass graves hold people who have never been identified.