Between the 1917
October Revolution and June 1927, the area outside the Kremlin Wall between the
Senate and
Nikolskaya towers was used for mass and individual burials of people who had to some extent contributed to the socialist revolution or the Bolshevik cause. This included ordinary soldiers killed in battle, victims of the Civil War, militia men fallen while fighting anti-Bolsheviks, noted Bolshevik politicians, and individuals associated with creating the new Soviet society. Burial plots of the 1917–1927 period are organized into 15 landscaped grave sites with the names of the buried inscribed on black marble tablets.
Mass graves of 1917 In July 1917, hundreds of soldiers of the Russian Northern Front were arrested for mutiny and desertion and locked up in
Daugavpils (then Dvinsk) fortress. Later, 869 Dvinsk inmates were transported to Moscow. Here, the jailed soldiers launched a
hunger strike. Public support for them threatened to develop into a citywide riot. On 22 September, 593 inmates were released. The rest were left behind bars until the
October Revolution. The released soldiers, collectively called
Dvintsy, stayed in the city as a cohesive unit, based in
Zamoskvorechye District and openly hostile to the ruling
Provisional Government. Immediately after the October Revolution in Saint Petersburg,
Dvintsy became the strike force of the
Bolsheviks in Moscow. Late at night on 27–28 October, a detachment of approximately two hundred men marching north to
Tverskaya Street, confronted the loyalist forces near the
State Historical Museum on Red Square. During the fighting, 70 of the
Dvintsy, including their company commander, Sapunov, were killed at the barricades. The following day, loyalists led by Colonel
Konstantin Ryabtsev succeeded in taking over the Kremlin. They gunned down the surrendered Red soldiers at the
Kremlin Arsenal wall. More Red soldiers were killed as the Bolsheviks stormed the Kremlin, taking control on the night of 2–3 November. Street fighting tapered off after claiming nearly a thousand lives. On 4 November the new Bolshevik administration decreed their dead would be buried at Red Square next to the
Kremlin Wall, where most of them were killed. Voices reached us across the immense place, and the sound of picks and shovels. We crossed over. Mountains of dirt and rock were piled high near the base of the wall. Climbing these we looked down into two massive pits, ten or fifteen feet deep and fifty yards long, where hundreds of soldiers and workers were digging in the light of huge fires. A young student spoke to us in German. "The Brotherhood Grave", he explained. –
John Reed,
Ten Days that Shook the World. A total of 238 dead were buried in the mass graves between
Senate and
Nikolskaya towers in a public funeral on November 10.
John Reed incorrectly mentions 500. Two more victims were buried on the 14 and 17 of November. The youngest, Pavel Andreyev, was 14 years old. Of 240 pro-revolution martyrs of the October–November fighting, only 20, including 12 of the Dvintsy, are identified in the official listing of the Moscow Heritage Commission. The largest single burial occurred in 1919. On 25 September,
anarchists led by former
socialist revolutionary Donat Cherepanov set off an explosion in a Communist Party school building in
Leontyevsky Lane when Moscow party chief
Vladimir Zagorsky was speaking to students. Twelve people, including Zagorsky, were killed and buried in a mass grave on Red Square. Another unusual incident was the 24 July 1921 crash of the
Aerowagon, an experimental and not fully tested high-speed railcar fitted with an
aircraft engine and
propeller traction. On the day of the crash, it delivered a group of Soviet and foreign communists led by
Fyodor Sergeyev to the
Tula collieries. On the return trip to Moscow, the
aerowagon derailed at high speed, killing 7 of the 22 people on board, including its inventor
Valerian Abakovsky. This was the last mass burial in the ground of Red Square.
Yakov Sverdlov, who died in 1919, allegedly from the
Spanish flu, was buried in an individual grave near the Senate Tower. This area later included eleven more individual graves of top-ranking Soviet leaders (see
Individual tombs section). Sverdlov was followed by
John Reed,
Inessa Armand,
Viktor Nogin and other notable Bolsheviks and their foreign allies. Interment in the Kremlin Wall, apart from its location next to the seat of government, was also seen as a statement of
atheism. Burial in the ground at a traditional cemetery next to a church was deemed inappropriate for a Bolshevik. For the same reason,
cremation, then prohibited by the
Russian Orthodox Church, was preferred to burial in a coffin and favored by Lenin and
Trotsky – though Lenin expressed the wish to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg. The new government had sponsored the construction of
crematoria since 1919. In 1925, the first burial of cremated remains in a niche in the wall took place. ==Mausoleum, 1924–1961==