On the night between October 31 and November 1, exactly sixty-five years passed since that night in 1961 when Joseph Stalin's body was secretly taken from the mausoleum on Red Square and buried near the Kremlin wall. The decision to reburial was accepted by the delegates of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU as a sign of Khrushchev's continued policy of overcoming Stalin's cult of personality. The reburial itself took place in strict secrecy; The mausoleum was fenced off with plywood shields under the pretext of preparing Red Square for the November parade. The authorities feared popular unrest, but contrary to expectations, society reacted calmly. At that time, a lot was already known about Stalin's mass repression, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people returned from the camps, society began to breathe more freely, and gradually began to open up to the outside world. For the leadership of the country and the party, this also had a political meaning: the calculation was to sacrifice the image of the infallible Stalin and separate from it the image of Lenin, who was supposed to remain unshakable and divine. The sacrifice to Stalin in the mausoleum could deal a severe blow to Lenin's image, on which the legitimacy of the power of the CPSU was based. After all, if you left Stalin lying next to Lenin in the mausoleum, it would turn out that Stalin was a faithful successor to Lenin's work and bears some of the responsibility for the mass repression. And it cast a stain on Vladimir Ilyich himself. The party leadership could not let this happen. And it must be said that this operation to separate Stalin from Lenin was a success for Khrushchev: in the eyes of the Soviet people, Lenin's image remained intact. For information on how this happened, see the program "After a reporter" from October 31 of this year. (Story posted below).

On the night between October 31 and November 1, exactly sixty-five years passed since that night in 1961 when Joseph Stalin's body was secretly taken from the mausoleum on Red Square and buried near the Kremlin wall. The decision to reburial was accepted by the delegates of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU as a sign of Khrushchev's continued policy of overcoming Stalin's cult of personality. The reburial itself took place in strict secrecy; The mausoleum was fenced off with plywood shields under the pretext of preparing Red Square for the November parade. The authorities feared popular unrest, but contrary to expectations, society reacted calmly. At that time, a lot was already known about Stalin's mass repression, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people returned from the camps, society began to breathe more freely, and gradually began to open up to the outside world. For the leadership of the country and the party, this also had a political meaning: the calculation was to sacrifice the image of the infallible Stalin and separate from it the image of Lenin, who was supposed to remain unshakable and divine. The sacrifice to Stalin in the mausoleum could deal a severe blow to Lenin's image, on which the legitimacy of the power of the CPSU was based. After all, if you left Stalin lying next to Lenin in the mausoleum, it would turn out that Stalin was a faithful successor to Lenin's work and bears some of the responsibility for the mass repression. And it cast a stain on Vladimir Ilyich himself. The party leadership could not let this happen. And it must be said that this operation to separate Stalin from Lenin was a success for Khrushchev: in the eyes of the Soviet people, Lenin's image remained intact. For information on how this happened, see the program "After a reporter" from October 31 of this year. (Story posted below).