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Under communism, Red Square also came to serve as a cemetery. Immediately after the Bolsheviks took control of Moscow in 1917, two identical tombs were built beneath the Kremlin wall to hold the remains of 240 casualties of the October Revolution. The Russian Orthodox Church was against the plan, but it made no difference. Red Square became a necropolis. It became a tradition to bury Soviet heroes by the Kremlin walls. The Post Office and Telegraph Commissar V. Podbelskiy was one of the first, along with Inessa Armand and American journalist John Reid. Space beneath the walls soon ran out, and from 1925 VIPs were buried within the wall itself. More than 100 people are now interred there, including Charles Rutenberg, the first General Secretary of the US Communist Party, Maksim Gorky,Yuri Gagarin, and a host of marshals and ministers.
The first granite bust was put here in 1919 after the death of one of the Revolution's main leaders, Iakov Sverdlov. He was soon to be followed by Frunz, Dzerzhinsky, Kalinin, Zhdanov etc. After sharing the Mausoleum with Lenin for a few yeas, Stalin's body was moved to this area as well. The last man to be buried beneath the blue spruces was Yuri Chernenko, General Secretary for less than a year, who became the twelfth of the "Party Apostles" here.
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