GORKY'S ASHES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 181, 1 August 1936, Page 17

GORKY'S ASHES.

PLACED NEAR LENIN'S TOMB.

FUNERAL ORATIONS,

MOSCOW.

A bronze urn containing the ashes of Maxim Gorky, Russian author, who died recently, were placed in a niche in the Kremlin wall by Joseph V. Stalin, Sec-retary-General of the Communist party, after funeral ceremonies had been held in Red Square.

To the strains of a funeral march played by massed bands, Stalin, Viacheslav M. Molotov, President of the Council of People's Commissars; Lazar JI. Kaganovich, chairman of the Committee on Tarnsportation; Alexei Tolstoy and others prominent in government and the arts bore the urn into the square from the Hall of Columns in the House of Trades Unions. Gorky was cremated.

Red Square was almost filled with delegations of workers, each group carrying as a banner a photograph of Gorky. The procession was headed by an attendant 'bearing a large photograph of him and by another carrying on a red cushion his cap as a member of the Soviet Academy. The urn was placed on a catafalque before the tomb of Lenin, while four of the pall-bearers mounted the roof of tlie tomb and delivered eulogies. "The death of Gorky," Molotov eaid, "is the greatest loss we have suffered since the death, of Lenin. He came from the depths of the masses, from what was formerly called the dregs of the people. He believed whole-heartedly an Communism and masterfully depicted the capitalist parasites and brought out the noble features of the simple, toiling people. He was the stormy petrel who forecast the storm of revolution. To the last days of his life his eyes burned with lire and hvtte toward Fascism, and all the enemies of Socialism."

Andre Gide, French writer; Nikolai Bulganin, president of the MoscowSoviet, and Tolstoy also spoke. When the orations were finished Stalin and the other pall-bearers bore the urn to the niche in the Kremlin wall, almost directly 'behind Lenin's tomb, where other revolutionary heroes have been placed. As Stalin placed the urn in the niche and the Kremlin battery fired a twenty-one-gun salute, the bands broke from the slow" march into the "Internationale." After Red Square had been cleared several thousand persons who had been waiting behind police lines were allowed to file past the niche.