Kremlin Wall Necropolis
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The Kremlin Wall Necropolis (Некрополь у Кремлёвской стены in Russian) is a part of the Kremlin Wall, which surrounds the Moscow Kremlin and overlooks the Red Square. This was the place where the Soviets buried the most prominent figures of the USSR and other countries.
The first burial in the Red Square was performed on November 10, 1917 by the order of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. The Soviets buried 238 Red Guards and soldiers who had died during the October Revolution in two common graves. In the fall of 1919 they buried the secretary of the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik Party, Vladimir Zagorsky, and a few other victims of a terrorist act performed by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries on September 25.
The victims of an explosion in the building of the Dorogomilovsky Soviet, People's Commissar of the Postal Service and Telegraph Vadim Podbelsky, American journalist John Reed, secretary of the Moscow Committee Feodor Artyom, diplomats Vaclav Vorovsky and Peter Voikov and others were also buried in the Red Square.
In 1924 Lenin's Mausoleum became the center of the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Behind the mausoleum and at the foot of the Senatskaya Tower of the Kremlin, there are the graves of Yakov Sverdlov, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Mikhail Frunze, Mikhail Kalinin, Andrei Zhdanov, Joseph Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Budyonny, Mikhail Suslov, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, with monuments. On both sides of the Senatskaya Tower, the Soviets placed the urns with the ashes of the CPSU members and members of foreign Communist parties, statesmen, military and political leaders, prominent people of science and culture between 1925 and 1984. Several cosmonauts, including the victims of the Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 disasters, are buried in the necropolis, as well as Sergei Korolev, chief designer of the Soviet Space Program.
In 1967, the Soviets opened a memorial called the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Kremlin Wall in the Alexander Garden.
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