AMAZING FUNERAL

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 497, 3 April 1933, Page 3

AMAZING FUNERAL

IN SOVIET MOSCOW WIFE OF DICTATOR STALIN BURIED IN RED COFFIN. " - PUBLIC IN1TRIGUED. There has heen a funeral in Soviet Moscow — the first since Lenin's body was encased in glass ten years ago. None since him has heen thought worthy of'burial, says the Sunday Express. Even the greatest are only cremated in Russia to-day. Their lashes are placed in an urn and planted in a hole in the Red Square. None expectgi' or receives more in Moscow. All (Rtussia is still vibrating with the sensation of this new, strange burial. It was conducted with grand ceremony last month. Ministers carried the coffin. It contained the body of th,e woman who had been Stalin's wife. Not till the 'day before the funeral was it known that she had died. On Sunday she had heen seen, happy and gay, at the Grand Theatre, Moscow. On WedneJsday it had heen officially announced. "Death came to Comrade Nadezhda Alliluieva on the night hetween . . But no one knew Comrade Alliluieva. ! On Thursday the body, in a black crepe dress, pinned at the throat with a brooch, was laid out in the Parliament Building on the third floor. Five workmen stood 'guard over the coffin, and the G.P.U. band piayed doleful airs occasionally from one end of th;e> rooml "Stalin's Wife is Dead." Two middle-aged women, red-eyed, weeping, came to visit the coffin. They stayed for an hour and then went sorrowfully aw.ay. Who are they? Who was she ? Then suddenly, early in the afternoon, the news swept th'e city that Comrade Nadezhcja Alliluieva was the Dictator's- wife. Stalin's wife was dead; she could be seen! By evening th'ousands of peering peasants queued up at the doors to catch a glimpse of the coffin. They filed p-ast the little comn four deep. Still there came no official acknowledgment of her status -as the wife of Stalin. Official condolences were worded with emotion: — "We will always keep in dearest memory the most faithful Bolshevi'st woman, the friend and devoted aid of Comrade Stalin." Moscow wondered at the death which had caused all this emotion. Yet burial was not even whispered. On Friday morning the red flag floated at half-mast on the Kremlin. Mumbling crowds gathered in huddled thousands in the bleak square, and out : of the cold wind in every street lead- ■ to it. There had been th'e faintest murmur ; of a funeral. The flag still flapped at ' half-mast. This was a .strange death 1 . . . so quick. Something would ' surely happen. Minds almost numb • as the frozen feet clung hopefully, [ stoically, to the" thought of the whisr pered funeral.

- A Small Red Coffin. | lOne o'clock, two o'clofck, then three banged from the raucous bell. Hardly had its tones ceased reverberating acrosis the snow than a small red coffin emerged from the doors of the mourning hall in the Kremlin, carried on four weirdly different shoulders. In front the crowd recognised young Molotov, the Premier, next to him old President Kalinin. Then behind eame husky Voroshilov, Minister of War, and next to him the huge Ordzhomkidze, Minister of Heavy Industry. The crowd, now 100,000 strong, murmured, moved forward, and tiien stood istill. All this for Nadezhda Alliluieva. ( The red hear^e drew up in the graveyard behind the old Convent of the New Virgins, and there the little coffin was lowered into th'e earth. It is a convent no longer, of course, but it is a place of great memories. Moscow wondered and speculated over all this pomp and grandeur. The idea of ' a burial ia.t all in Moscow kept the death of young Nadezhda a whispered mystery long after the Ministers had returned to the Kremlin. Girlhood of Mrs. Stalin. The small body inside th'e coffin first saw the light of day in a foul hovel in Tiflis, just thirty years ago. Her father, Sergei Alliluieva, a locksmith, lived and worked in that gloom ■and smell to which shewals born. She had grown to know the heavy footsteps- of the tall, noisy man who came from time to time to spend evenings there. He drank countless glasses of tea with her father and talked about the coming "Revolutzi" with fierce violence. She had heen named Nadezhda, which means Hope. He was called Koha. Long before the girl was grown up she had become accustomed to bearing of his robberies and murders; which he called his expropriations and exeeutions. She thought them quite natural. He was rohbing and killing to get money for the "Revolutzi." Suddenly came the news of the "Revolutzi," of which she had almost forgotten. Koha came back. Kerensky, the first revolutionary Minister of Justice, had pardoned him and still lives to rue it. . Lenin came into power. He chmstened Koha "Stalin," which means steel. He was a great man ,now. _ One day in 1919 he went to Tiflis and took Nadezhda to Moscow as his bride. She was seventeen, he was f orty. ~ He guarded her with harsh (jealousy. She was allowed to go where ishe would so long as she worked. She made friends with the wife of young Premier Molotov, who carried her coffin.