Lenin’s funeral in digitized newsreels

January 21, 2015, on the eve of the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, the Presidential Library website provides access to the unique newsreels of 1924 featuring the funeral of the founder of the Soviet state.

Six minutes of digitized newsreel show the mourning Moscow, an endless stream of people passing along the tomb of Lenin, the Red Army men in the guard of honor. On the screen there is a funeral procession on Red Square, led by Vyacheslav Molotov.

The footage captured top officials - Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, who will later be declared "enemies of the party and the people." Joseph Stalin, who headed the country shortly after the death of Lenin, was also captured. However, Lev Trotsky, Lenin's closest ally, is no longer there. Five years later, he would be expelled from the Soviet Union, yet three years later stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

As part of creating the collection on the personalities of the Soviet era, the Presidential Library has also presented a number of digital copies of rare books.

A small book, no more than 50 pages, by Gregory Zinoviev, "On the Death of Lenin", published in Leningrad in 1925 is another interesting document of the era. It is represented by a speech of Zinoviev, which includes the texts written particularly on the occasion of the death of Vladimir Lenin. In the same row there are the letters of a "working-miner Tarasov," of a "worker Nikiforova," of Maxim Gorky and reflections of the author himself.

"I have to say that my personal sympathy for him (Lenin) is of no importance in the moment, when I write about him, says Maxim Gorky. I consider him as a being subject to my observation, along with all the other people and phenomena that cannot but interest me as a chronicler of the homeland." In response to the writer Zinoviev says: "The scent of the artist, who knew Lenin personally, helped Gorky, who made a lot of mistakes in the assessment of our revolution, to note something that made comrade Lenin a legendary figure."

Here is what the author himself says about his teacher and colleague, with whom they were hiding together from the Provisional Government in Razliv after the events of 1917: "It will take us months and years to realize what V. I. Lenin had done for our country.” As to Zinoviev, he did not have much time to realize that - in 1936 he was sentenced to death.

The same year, Lev Kamenev was also shot. In 1926, the second 30-volume edition "The Works of V. I. Lenin" was published under the editorship of Kamenev supplemented with his foreword. The works are also available on the library website.