The removal of Stalin from the mausoleum

The CPSU’s 22nd Congress, mediumship, Shamanism and bureaucratic superstitions

Kremlin Palace of Congresses - Congress delegates (1961)

The 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) convened on 17 October 1961 in the newly completed modernist Palace of Congresses, built of marble and glass within the Kremlin grounds. (The congress, which lasted fourteen days, concluded on 31 October.)

Five years had passed since the last regular congress, the 20th Congress of 1956, at which Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” on the closing day. (The 21st Congress of 1959 had been an extraordinary congress.)

Around five thousand Soviet delegates, together with leaders of Stalinist parties from across the world, were present at the congress.

Under Khrushchev’s leadership, the congress approved the adoption of the Party’s Third Programme and sanctioned the construction of communism in the Soviet Union within twenty years. In doing so, the bureaucratic caste, carried away by its own momentum, effectively transformed the formula of “socialism in one country” into “communism in one country.”

Another striking development at the congress, alongside the celebratory atmosphere, was the sudden resumption of attacks on Stalin -largely dormant since 1957. In the run-up to the congress, Stalin’s reputation was once again dragged through the mud, and along with it the names of Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich. For instance, Pavel Satiukov, editor of Pravda, described Molotov and his associates as “swamp creatures grown used to slime and dirt.” Khrushchev had voiced attacks against these three figures in 1956 and 1957 as well; yet on the eve of the 21st Congress such accusations were, for the first time, aired openly before the public.

At the time of the 22nd Congress, Stalin’s embalmed body still lay in the mausoleum on Red Square, beside Lenin. The “hero city” of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga River, like thousands of streets, squares and enterprises across the country, continued to bear his name.

On 30 October, the penultimate day of the congress, a resolution was adopted declaring that “it was inappropriate for the sarcophagus containing J.V. Stalin’s coffin to continue to be kept within the mausoleum” -passed, of course, unanimously as always. [*]

The decision had, without any doubt, been taken in advance; the delegates were expected merely to approve it as a formality. The staging was as follows: the resolution was presented as though it were a demand from the workers of Leningrad, and was read out to the delegates by Party functionary Ivan Spiridonov [**].

Then, Dora Abramovna Lazurkina (1884-1974), eighty years old and a Party member since 1902, took the rostrum and delivered a speech that could, at the very least, be described as peculiar. It was no coincidence that this task had been assigned to Lazurkina; she had served under Kirov’s command in the Leningrad region, been held in labour camps between 1939 and 1949, lived in exile from 1949 to 1955, and, upon her release, was readmitted to membership as an “Old Bolshevik.” In other words, she embodied the “moral purity” of the founding generation of the CPSU.

Lazurkina declared that her heart had always been filled with Lenin, and that in difficult moments she invariably sought his counsel. Then, speaking with excitement from the rostrum, she said: “Yesterday I asked Ilyich [Lenin] for advice, and it was as if he stood before me alive and said, ‘I do not like lying next to Stalin, who brought so much misfortune to our party.’”

Dora Lazurkina

Lazurkina’s speech -delivered in the manner of a supposed “Leninist medium”- was greeted with enthusiastic applause from the delegates. Following other speeches in favour of the resolution, the motion to remove Stalin’s remains from the mausoleum was unanimously adopted.

For a party that claimed to be materialist and atheist to resort to such a spiritualist narrative was, without any doubt, a complete scandal and a profound disgrace. The spirit of the Party’s historical leader was intervening in active politics through the medium of an “Old Bolshevik”!

The privileged bureaucratic caste, having usurped power from the working class, deified its leaders in accordance with the hierarchy. This process was strangely -and one might even say schizophrenically- intertwined with the Stalinist Party’s official atheism. The delegates, moreover, accepted even such unscientific and irrational “arguments” with enthusiasm and without a single word of objection.

That night, Stalin’s embalmed body -removed, of course, as had been decided in advance- was taken out of the mausoleum. Under the cover of darkness, with Red Square deserted, the coffin was carried from the “honourable” place it had occupied for eight years, taken out of the marble building, and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Video: Archival footage showing how the decision to remove Stalin’s coffin from the mausoleum was taken at the CPSU’s 22nd Congress.

At the time Stalin’s coffin was removed from the mausoleum, Alexander Shelepin (1918-1994), then head of the KGB, would later write of that night: "They didn't carry it out horizontally, but at a 45-degree angle. I had the feeling he was going to open his eyes and say, 'What are you doing to me, you bastards?'"

Stalin’s grave (in the foreground-1963)

Instead of filling the opened grave with earth, the authorities sealed the coffin with several truckloads of cement. Thus, Stalin’s embalmed body was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, about ninety metres away from the now‑renamed Mausoleum, alongside other “secondary” leaders. At first, his grave was marked only by a plain, dark granite stone inscribed with “J.V. STALIN 1879-1953.”

Stalin’s coffin was not only carried out of the mausoleum at a 45-degree angle, as Shelepin recalled, but was also removed feet-first. This was no random detail; on the contrary, it was a deliberate choice rooted in Soviet peasant folklore. According to Russian popular belief, carrying the coffin of someone who had committed great evils in life with the feet foremost was a way of preventing their spirit from returning to trouble the living.

The historian Moshe Lewin, in his work The Soviet Century, describes this practice as “a kind of shamanism to exorcise the demon of Stalinism.” [***] Exhausted by their inability to enjoy the privileges they had held under Stalin without fear for their lives, the bureaucratic caste, after his death, inaugurated a period of stability for itself by resorting to popular superstitions.

It should be noted that this “exorcism ritual,” unlike Lazurkina’s speech, was not performed for the Party delegates or the public. What was at issue was a superstitious practice engaged in by the so-called Marxist-Leninists at the very top of the bureaucratic caste, intended solely to ease their own consciences.

[*] For the minutes of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU and the text of the resolution concerning the removal of Stalin’s remains from the mausoleum, see Report of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1962, p. 627.

[**] Feliks Chuev recounts the following anecdote in his long interview with Molotov concerning Spiridonov, Lazurkina, and Mzhavanadze -who, before Spiridonov, had been asked to present the resolution to the Congress. 

“We are out for a walk. Molotov has been greeted by Spiridonov, who proposed at the XXIInd Congress that Stalin’s body be removed from the Mausoleum.
“Sometimes I would join him for a walk. I know he is a Stalinist; he was just a disciplined party member then. But Mzhavanadze refused to come out with such a proposal. Khrushchev asked him to make the proposal at the congress, but he ate so much ice cream that he lost his voice. (…)
“I recall Dora Lazurkina making her comments.
“A sheer witch! She appeared to have dreamed that Lenin was swearing at Stalin. [4-10-79]” (Felix Chuev, Molotov Remembers - Inside Kremlin Politics, Ed.: Albert Resis, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1993, pp. 402-3.

[***] “Stalinism was riddled with irrationality that rendered it not only decrepit but abject. To exorcize it, a variety of shamanism was required; and this was what Khrushchev, following popular beliefs, supplied. When Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum in Red Square to be reburied elsewhere, it was carried out feet first. In peasant demonology, this ensured that the evil dead would not return to haunt the living.” (Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century, Ed.: Gregory Elliott, Verso, London, 2016, p. 163).