Curated playlist
Burials at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis
- Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin signed his articles "K. Stalin", an alias drawn from the Russian word for steel, translated as "Man of Steel." The man who chose it was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, into poverty in the small Georgian city of Gori.…
- Alexei KosyginAlexei Kosygin spent the last night of his life alone in a Moscow hospital, stripped of his government protection, his communications, and the luxury goods he had accumulated across five decades of Soviet power. When he died on the 18th of…
- Mikhail SuslovMikhail Andreyevich Suslov held the Soviet Union's ideological line for nearly four decades, yet he remains one of the most obscure figures of the Cold War era. Born in 1902 in the village of Shakhovskoye in Saratov Governorate, he rose…
- Leonid BrezhnevLeonid Ilyich Brezhnev died on the 10th of November 1982, and within days, leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and India had declared national mourning. He was buried in his Marshal's uniform, medals pinned to his chest,…
- Yuri AndropovYuri Andropov died on the 9th of February 1984 at 16:50, aged 69, after spending barely 15 months as the leader of the Soviet Union. He entered the Kremlin as the first former head of the KGB ever to become General Secretary, and he left…
- Konstantin ChernenkoKonstantin Ustinovich Chernenko became the de jure leader of the Soviet Union on the 13th of February 1984, and by the time he died just over thirteen months later, Soviet newspapers ran his obituary on page two while page one celebrated…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world would come to know as Vladimir Lenin, took the name from no person at all. He first used it in December 1901, and one theory ties it to the Siberian Lena River. He often wrote it as N. Lenin,…
- Kliment VoroshilovKliment Voroshilov put on his military uniform one winter morning in 1969, fully decorated with his medals, called a car, and drove himself to the hospital. He had refused, the night before, to let his family call an ambulance. That quiet…
- Andrey VyshinskyAndrey Vyshinsky is remembered for a chilling line attributed to him from the Stalin era: "Give me a man and I will find the crime." Vyshinsky was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat, best known as the state prosecutor at Joseph…
- Maxim GorkyMaxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, and by the time he died in June 1936, his ashes were carried through Moscow by Joseph Stalin himself. Between those two facts lies a life of extraordinary contradiction: a…
- Yuri GagarinYuri Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on the 12th of April 1961, and did it in 108 minutes. The spacecraft was called Vostok 1. The call sign Gagarin chose for himself was Kedr, the Russian word for Siberian pine. At the moment of…