The Soviet capital choked with grief: Witnessing Lenin’s funeral, Moscow 1924
On January 26th, 1924, the New York Times published Walter Duranty’s report of Lenin’s funeral, as well as an obituary of the late Soviet revolutionary leader. This post is a brief extract from my book, Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin, on day the young Soviet state bid a final farewell to its founder.
DURANTY DESCRIBED THE NEWS spreading through the snow-covered city, carried by special editions of papers which reached the streets in the early evening, producing ‘literal stupefaction’ in those who read them. Duranty followed the story at length and in detail, reporting later that week that the frozen ground beneath the Kremlin wall had been blasted open by sappers in order to create Lenin’s grave, and then on the simple funeral ceremony itself on a day of extreme cold (minus 37 Celsius), even by the standards of Moscow in midwinter. ‘Beards, hats, collars and eyebrows were white like the snowclad trees in the little park close to the Kremlin wall, where nearly 3000 communists now lie buried, including the American, John Reed.’ Duranty mentions that this ‘little part’ is the burial place of John Reed, but says nothing more about Reed. Was his a reputation Duranty coveted, and hoped one day to eclipse? Instead, he went on, once more reminding his reader of the life-threatening frost, ‘Few dared take off their hats as Lenin’s body was borne to its last resting place.’ In the same newspaper, in material generated in the United States, western wishful thinking that the end of Lenin would mean the end of Soviet power was much in evidence. Duranty would have been frustrated by some of the other coverage that the New York Times ran that week. ‘Lenin lived to see his theories fail,’ the headline for Lenin’s obituary, published the same day as Duranty’s description of the Soviet capital choked with grief, confidently declared. ‘Lenin’s great experiment: he failed, and no one else is likely to try again,’[v] was the headline the letters’ editor chose for correspondence that same week arguing that it was all over for Communism before it had even really started.
You can read Duranty’s report here, on the New York Times’ website. He is remembered now mostly for the fact that his coverage played down the famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s, with ongoing debate about whether his Pulitzer prize should be posthumously rescinded in consequence. There is more on Duranty’s work and reputation in the book.
