Dora Abramovna Lazurkina
(1884-1974) Old Bolshevik and friend of Lenin, was arrested by Stalin’s secret
police in 1937, jailed and tortured and sent to the Gulag. She was not released
until 1955 and had nightmares about what she had endured until the end of her
life.
At the 22nd
Communist Party Congress in 1961 she rose to say that she had dreamed that
Lenin told her that he was not happy about lying next to Stalin in the
Mausoleum on Red Square. After Stalin’s death, his mummified body had been interred next to
Lenin’s, Stalin in his gorgeous generalissimo’s uniform, Lenin’s in a civilian
black suit.
Lazurkina told the
Party Congress:
I always carry Ilyich in my heart and always, comrades, in the most
difficult moments, I survived only because I had Ilyich in my heart and I
consulted with him what to do. Yesterday I consulted with Ilyich, as if he
stood before me as if alive and said: it is unpleasant for me to be next to
Stalin, who brought so much trouble to the party.
Though Molotov, a
diehard Stalinist, declared that this was the dream of a witch, she got a
standing ovation and “stormy applause, according to the transcript. Khruschev was already planning to remove
Stalin from the Mausoleum but wanted cover, fearing riots by Stalin’s perfervid
followers, especially in Georgia. On the night of Halloween, October 31, 1961,
a secret police unit carried Stalin’s corpse to a burial plot by the Kremlin
wall on Halloween, where it was stripped of its decorations before being
interred under a heavy stone slab.
A year later, the
Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, for whom I read translations when he spoke in
Canberra in 1966, published a poem in Pravda titled “The Heirs of Stalin”
in which he appealed to the regime not to let Stalin rise again: “And I,
appealing to our government, petition them to double, and even triple, the
number of sentries guarding this slab, and stop Stalin from ever rising again
and, with Stalin, the past."
No comments:
Post a Comment