The Leader from the Storeroom: Why Did the Muscovite Empire Dig Up a Discarded Leader?

What is sadder, and funnier, is what came next. More than 60 years after one of those bodies was carried out at night behind plywood screens, Moscow is once again putting his profile on metro walls and his name on airport signs.

The real problem here is not Stalin the man. It is how Moscow's power works. It needs a cult object, something to bow to, but not for the sake of faith. It needs the sacred the way a shop needs inventory: something to put on display, push into a storeroom, and pull out again when the moment calls for it. Nothing shows this better than what happened on the night of October 31 to November 1, 1961, when one such idol was taken off the altar and moved to another shelf, further back.

A Soviet Paradise with Mummies

To understand why Stalin was evicted from the Mausoleum on Red Square, you have to remember how this central temple of communism was built. When Lenin died in January 1924, the funeral commission was chaired by Felix Dzerzhinsky. Notably, the man who ran the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, also oversaw the creation of the new state's holiest shrine. From day one, everything sacred in Moscow was in the hands of the secret police.

The decision was made to preserve the revolutionary leader's body. Among those who pushed for it was Leonid Krasin, a senior Bolshevik who sincerely believed Lenin could one day be brought back to life, because Soviet science would surely learn to raise the dead. Think about that. The Bolsheviks blew up thousands of churches, then built a temple of their own and put their own Lazarus on the pedestal. Lenin, who in life mocked those comrades who wanted to turn socialism into a new religion, became their chief relic in death.

There is an important detail that usually gets skipped. Throughout its history, the church took real wealth from people and promised them heaven after death in return. The Bolsheviks changed nothing in that model. They simply moved paradise from the sky to the earth and promised to build it soon. They took the bread, the land and the lives, and handed out tickets to a "bright future" in exchange. The Mausoleum became the sacred altar of that deal: here lay the very prophet who had promised paradise on earth in the not-too-distant future.

But however comfortable he may have felt on his pedestal, in March 1953 a second leader was laid beside him. 2 words appeared above the entrance: LENIN and STALIN. The Soviet pantheon now had 2 saints awaiting their speedy resurrection.

The Congress That Promised Paradise

Now picture October 1961. The 22nd Congress of the Communist Party is meeting in the Kremlin. It adopts a new party program, and the program states in black and white that the foundations of communism will be built by 1980. Nikita Khrushchev delivers a line that would later be quoted with a bitter smile: the current generation of Soviet people will live in paradise, that is, under communism.

For the first time, paradise on earth got a completion date, like an apartment block. And this very congress, which had just promised paradise in 19 years, suddenly decided to evict one of its gods from its main temple.

What's more, on October 30, the same day the delegates voted to remove Stalin, the Soviet Union detonated the most powerful bomb in human history over the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, around 50 megatons. Paradise was promised for 1980. Hell was being tested right now.

The Stalin question was not on the congress agenda. It "came up" at the last minute, following every rule of Soviet stagecraft. Ivan Spiridonov, the party boss of the Leningrad region, took the podium and, on behalf of the Leningrad delegation, relayed a proposal from the workers of the Kirov Plant, the Nevsky Machine-Building Plant and others. The workers, it turned out, were asking for Stalin to be removed from the Mausoleum. Pyotr Demichev followed for Moscow, then party officials from Georgia and Ukraine. The show needed voices from both capitals and from the provinces to look like the will of the people.

Note the technique. "At the request of the workers" in 1961, "at the request of local residents" today. Moscow's power never does anything on its own initiative. It only ever responds to an "appeal from citizens" that it wrote itself.

Then Dora Lazurkina took the podium. An old Bolshevik with nearly 60 years in the party, almost 20 of them spent in labor camps and exile. And at the congress of an atheist party she delivered a line worthy of the leaders of a cult. The old Bolshevik reported back from what was essentially a séance: "Yesterday I consulted with Ilyich." Lenin, she said, had appeared to her as if alive and told her he found it unpleasant to lie next to a man who had brought the party so much misfortune.

The hall applauded. The founder of the communist sect had made his will known through a medium, and the faithful carried it out unanimously. The resolution stated that keeping Stalin's sarcophagus in the Mausoleum any longer was "inappropriate" because of his violations of Lenin's precepts, his abuse of power and his mass repression of honest Soviet people. Note the wording: not crimes against people in general, but against "honest Soviet" people. Those not honest enough or Soviet enough, it seems, deserved what they got.

A Special Operation Behind Plywood

What followed was what Moscow today would call a "special operation." On the evening of October 31, Red Square was cordoned off. The official reason was flawless: a rehearsal for the November 7 parade. Barriers went up, access was closed, and the Mausoleum was boarded up with plywood screens so no one could see a thing.

The reburial commission was headed by Nikolai Shvernik, a figure who explains a great deal on his own. From 1946 to 1953 he had been the Soviet Union's nominal head of state, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the man who signed decrees while Stalin was alive. By 1961 he ran the Committee of Party Control, the party's own inquisition. The man who had put his signature under the leader's will was now carrying out his body.

The commission also included Alexander Shelepin, head of the KGB. The circle was complete. In 1924, the chekist Dzerzhinsky laid the first god in the shrine. In 1961, the country's top chekist was present at the eviction of the second. The shrine stayed in the custody of the same people. Only the name on their agency's door had changed.

Khrushchev, according to memoirs, dropped a line of calm cynicism: the commandant of the Mausoleum knows where to dig the grave. The Kremlin commandant's office assigned 6 soldiers, gave them shovels and an order to dig. Another 8 officers were to carry out the coffin.

The body was moved from its glass sarcophagus into a plain wooden coffin covered in black and red cloth. Then came a scene worth an entire dissertation on the Soviet system. The Mausoleum's commandant, Mashkov, removed the Hero of Socialist Labor star from Stalin's uniform. Then he cut off the gold buttons and sewed on brass ones.

The gold was taken off the leader and locked in a safe. The leader was sent to the afterlife in cheap brass.

The confiscated regalia went to the Kremlin's Guard Room, where the decorations of everyone buried by the Kremlin Wall were kept, and were sealed and stored away. The coffin was lowered on ropes into a grave behind the Mausoleum and covered with a slab of white marble. No relatives were invited. No speeches. No honors. The whole procedure of stripping a man out of the eternal symbols took about an hour. The commission members returned to the Kremlin and signed the official record.

That same night, the name STALIN on the facade was covered with a white strip bearing one word: LENIN. A permanent inscription was later carved in marble.

The calendar had its own irony. In the West that night, children dressed up as the dead and went door to door. In Moscow, a real dead man, a bloodsucker and a ghoul, was stripped of rank that same night and thrown into a pit. Presumably with an aspen stake driven through his chest, as the folk remedy for vampires prescribes.

A Morning Without Panic

On the morning of November 1, the barriers were removed and the guards withdrawn. People crossed the square and saw one name on the Mausoleum instead of two. Visitors filed silently past Lenin's sarcophagus as if nothing had happened.

There was no unrest. No one came out to defend the leader of communism, the same man whose funeral 8 years earlier had drawn crowds so hysterical with grief that people were crushed to death. The guard at the new grave was removed on the second day. No one intended to approach the mound, and it could not even be seen from the square.

Why? Because it was never faith. It was fear. A believer defends what is sacred. A subject defends only himself. While Stalin held power, he was loved the way people love a master on whom their life depends. Once the master was a corpse and the new master ordered him removed, the subjects simply accepted the new order. No questions, no protests, no tears.

In that sense Stalin was a czar in the original meaning of the word, which in Moscow came not from Byzantium but from the Horde: the master of lives and bodies. And the czar's body was handled according to old Moscow tradition. Power in Moscow never changes hands in daylight. So even Stalin, the most terrifying of them all, was carried out of his posthumous palace at night, behind plywood.

What Khrushchev Needed It For

It would be naive to see repentance in any of this. Khrushchev did not repent. In 1937-1938 he ran the Moscow party organization and personally asked for higher "quotas" for executions. From 1938 he led the Communist Party of Ukraine, where the terror did not stop. His hands were soaked to the elbow in the same blood as those of the man he was now carrying out.

Removing the body served entirely different purposes. First, it scrubbed his own biography: if every crime belongs to one dead man, the living executors become victims of the "cult of personality." Second, it was a weapon in the internal power struggle. At the same congress, the so-called "anti-party group" of Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich, whom Khrushchev had pushed aside in 1957, came under fire again. Stalin's body became an argument in a bureaucratic brawl.

But no one touched the system. The KGB stayed. The party that had given the orders stayed. The machine that allowed one man to dispose of millions of lives stayed intact. Only the mannequin was taken out of the shop window.

Here is the proof. 7 months later, in early June 1962, workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant went on strike against higher prices for meat and butter and cuts to their pay rates. The very workers in whose name the congress had asked for Stalin's removal. They were shot. According to official figures, acknowledged only in the 1990s, 26 people died. Stalin was carried out of the Mausoleum, but no one carried Stalin's methods out of the Kremlin.

Whose God Was He?

Now the main point. Stalin's cult rested on the image of the great builder of communism. Industrialization, the giant steelworks of Magnitogorsk, tractors, cars, a country that went "from the wooden plow to the atomic bomb." But who actually built that industry?

In the early 1930s, the firm of Detroit architect Albert Kahn designed more than 500 industrial facilities for the Soviet Union. The Stalingrad Tractor Plant was manufactured in the United States, taken apart, shipped across the ocean and reassembled on the Volga. The Magnitogorsk steelworks was designed by the Cleveland firm of Arthur McKee, modeled on the US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. The Gorky Automobile Plant grew out of a contract with Ford.

And how was it paid for? With grain scraped out of Ukrainian villages. While people in Ukraine were dying of famine, the Holodomor, grain was shipped abroad, and machine tools, turbines and engineers came back in exchange. That was the real economics of the Stalinist "miracle": Ukrainian bread turned into American factories, and American factories turned into the cult of a Moscow leader.

Stalin was no creator. He was the site manager of a project designed by the hegemon of his day, the United States. Moscow once again played its eternal role of middleman, as it had under Venice, the Dutch and England: technology in, raw materials out, and in between a layer that calls itself a great power. The leader in the glass sarcophagus was a comprador who had been declared a demiurge.

That is why removing the body changed nothing. The leader was scrapped, but the scheme survived. In 1959 Khrushchev traveled to America and came back with a dream of corn. In 1963 the USSR bought grain abroad for the first time, from Canada and the United States. A country that under Stalin had exported grain at the cost of the Holodomor now had to import it. And in 1970, under Brezhnev, Moscow signed the "gas for pipes" deal with West Germany. Stalin lay by the wall while the pipe kept growing. Raw materials to the West, technology from the West. Peter the Great once ran the same raw-material "pipes" westward, only his were made of timber and hemp.

You can carry out a god. You cannot carry out the comprador pipe. The whole building stands on it.

The Exile Returns

The expulsion from the Soviet pantheon turned out to be temporary. In 1970 a bust by Nikolai Tomsky appeared on Stalin's grave. Brezhnev quietly gave Stalin back his place in the pantheon, if not in the sarcophagus. And then came what we see today.

In May 2025, at Taganskaya station on the Moscow metro, a copy of the bas-relief "The People's Gratitude to the Leader and Commander" was unveiled, with Stalin at its center. The original had been removed in 1966. That same month, the airport in Volgograd was officially renamed "Stalingrad." This is the same Volgograd that had been renamed on November 10, 1961, 10 days after the night of the plywood screens. Monuments to Stalin are going up in Vologda, Ulan-Ude, Mozhaisk and villages in Chuvashia. And, of course, "at the initiative of local residents." The technology of 1961 runs in reverse without a single change.

Why does Moscow need this? Because Russia is at war again, this time against Ukraine. And war needs a god of victory and a model of mobilization. It needs a master who never asked what lives cost. It needs the "granddad" who, in the slogan of Russia's war fans, "can do it again." When there is no real wealth to offer people, the state once again hands out the imaginary: greatness, duty, ancestors. And in Moscow's warehouse of imaginary values, there is nothing bigger than Stalin.

In 1961 Moscow did not bury Stalin. It moved him a few dozen meters: from glass into earth, from inside the shrine to behind it. It changed the inscription, not the system. Repentance happens in daylight, with open archives, with trials and verdicts, as it did in Germany. Moscow had no trial and no verdict. It had a night, plywood and a commission's report. So the god was not overthrown. He was merely demoted. And the demoted can always be reinstated.

But the most telling thing about this return is not even Stalin himself. Bringing Stalin back into the pantheon of great Russians does not show that nobody grew up in Russia during the years of liberalization. On the contrary, people did. People grew up who could have been role models, both moral and ideological. They just did not grow toward a comprador colony. They stood for something else, for everything the Kremlin's own logic rejects. You cannot look up to such a person and remain an obedient subject at the same time, so Moscow has no use for them, alive or in bronze.

And where the Kremlin went looking for its heroes, among the comprador riffraff, nobody grew at all. That crowd knows how to pump raw materials west, move money offshore and buy villas, but it cannot produce an example. A middleman has nothing to show except someone else's pipe, and nobody prays to someone else's pipe.

So Moscow dug up the old bogeyman. The man the USSR itself had thrown on the trash heap, at night, behind plywood, was dug up, dusted off and waved over the country. And this second-hand idol turned out to be dearer to the Kremlin than the entire young generation that grew up in the years of liberalization.

The price of that choice has already been counted. According to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, by the summer of 2026 the Russian army's losses in Ukraine had reached about 1.4 million killed, seriously wounded and missing. At least 450,000 of them were killed.

In other words, Moscow simply turned back to the Gulag. Only now the millions are ground up not on construction sites, but at war.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might also be interested in my books: The Russian Myth, available in English and in Ukrainian, and The Economics of Losses, available in English and in Ukrainian.