When Kim Il Sung was alive, he used the palace as one of his residences. After the death of the Korean leader in 1994, his son and political successor ordered the building to be converted into a pantheon of memory. Kim Il Sung's embalmed body was placed in an open sarcophagus. 17 years later, Kim Jong Il was buried in the same building.
For North Koreans, going to Kim Il Sung's mausoleum is a sacred ceremony. They visit the tomb in groups - school classes, brigades and military units. Upon entry, everyone goes through a scrupulous security check, handing over smartphones, cameras and even sunglasses. From the entrance, visitors take a horizontal escalator along a long corridor, the walls of which are covered with photographs of North Korean leaders.
One part of the pantheon is dedicated to Kim Il Sung, and the other to his son. The bodies are in tall, empty, darkened marble halls trimmed with gold. Four people are allowed to visit the sarcophagi, accompanied by a guide. Visitors circle and bow. After this, they are led to the halls with awards and personal belongings of the leaders. In addition, tourists are shown cars and railway carriages in which North Korean leaders moved around the country. The Hall of Tears, where the farewell ceremony took place, is located separately.
In front of the squat gray building of the Kim Il Sung Mausoleum there is a spacious square with flower beds and a park. Here everyone can take a memorable photo against the backdrop of the pantheon. For this purpose, special steps have been installed on the square, and a photographer is working.
Visiting the mausoleum by foreign tourists
Foreigners are allowed to enter the Kim Il Sung Mausoleum only during an organized tourist trip, twice a week - on Thursday and Sunday. Visitors are asked to wear formal, discreet clothing. It is forbidden to talk loudly inside the building, and taking photographs is prohibited not only inside the pantheon, but also in the square near it.
How to get there
The Mausoleum of Kim Il Sung is located in the northeastern part of Pyongyang, next to the Gwangmyeon metro station. Travelers come here on sightseeing buses, accompanied by a North Korean guide.
Today we will take the first big tour of Pyongyang, and we will start with the holy of holies - the mausoleum of Comrade Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong Il. The mausoleum is located in the Kumsusan Palace, where Kim Il Sung once worked and which, after the death of the leader in 1994, was turned into a huge pantheon of memory. After the death of Kim Jong Il in 2011, his body was also placed in the Kumsusan Palace.
A trip to the mausoleum is a sacred ceremony in the life of any North Korean worker. Mostly people go there in organized groups - entire organizations, collective farms, military units, student classes. At the entrance to the pantheon, hundreds of groups anxiously await their turn. Foreign tourists are allowed to enter the mausoleum on Thursdays and Sundays - the guides also put foreigners in a reverent and solemn mood and warn about the need to dress as formally as possible. Our group, however, for the most part ignored this warning - well, we don’t have anything better than jeans and a shirt on our trip (I must say that in the DPRK they really don’t like jeans, considering them “American clothes”). But nothing - they let me in, naturally. But many other foreigners whom we saw in the mausoleum (Australians, Western Europeans), playing the role to the fullest, dressed very formally - lush funeral dresses, tuxedos with a bow tie...
You cannot take photographs inside the mausoleum and at all approaches to it - so I will try to simply describe what is happening inside. First, tourists wait in line in a small waiting pavilion for foreigners, then go to the common area, where they mingle with North Korean groups. At the entrance to the mausoleum itself, you need to hand over your phones and cameras, a very thorough search - you can only take heart medicine with you if in the state rooms with the leaders someone suddenly becomes ill from awe. And then we ride on a horizontal escalator along a long, very long corridor, the marble walls of which are hung with photographs of both leaders in all their greatness and heroism - photographs of different years are interspersed, from the young revolutionary times of Comrade Kim Il Sung to the last years of the reign of his son, Comrade Kim Jong Ira. In one of the places of honor near the end of the corridor, a photograph of Kim Jong Il in Moscow at a meeting with the then very youthful Russian president, taken in 2001, it seems, was noticed. This pompous long, very long corridor with huge portraits, along which the escalator travels for about 10 minutes, willy-nilly sets the mood for some kind of solemn mood. Even foreigners from another world are incensed - let alone the trembling local residents, for whom Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are gods.
From the inside, the Kumsusan Palace is divided into two halves - one is dedicated to Comrade Kim Il Sung, the other to Comrade Kim Jong Il. Huge marble halls decorated with gold, silver and jewelry, pompous corridors. The luxury and pomp of all this is quite difficult to describe. The bodies of the leaders lie in two huge, darkened marble halls, at the entrance to which you pass through another inspection line, where you are driven through streams of air in order to blow away the last specks of dust from the common people of this world before visiting the main sacred halls. Four people plus a guide approach directly to the bodies of the leaders - we go around the circle and bow. You need to bow to the floor when you are in front of the leader, as well as to the left and right - when you are behind the head of the leader, you do not need to bow. On Thursday and Sunday, foreign groups also come along with ordinary Korean workers - it is interesting to watch the reaction of North Koreans to the bodies of the leaders. Everyone is in the brightest ceremonial attire - peasants, workers, a lot of military men in uniform. Almost all women cry and wipe their eyes with handkerchiefs, men also often cry - the tears of young, thin village soldiers are especially striking. Many people experience hysterics in mourning halls... People cry touchingly and sincerely - however, they are brought up with this from birth.
After the halls where the bodies of the leaders are buried, the groups go through other halls of the palace and get acquainted with the awards - one hall is dedicated to the awards of Comrade Kim Il Sung, and the other to the awards of Comrade Kim Jong Il. Also shown are the personal belongings of the leaders, their cars, as well as two famous railway cars in which Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il traveled around the world, respectively. Separately, it is worth noting the Hall of Tears - the most pompous hall where the nation said goodbye to its leaders.
On the way back, we again drove for about 10 minutes along this long, very long corridor with portraits - it so happened that several foreign groups were driving us in a row, and towards the leaders, already sobbing and nervously fiddling with their scarves, were only Koreans - collective farmers. , workers, military... Hundreds of people rushed in front of us, going to the coveted meeting with the leaders. It was a meeting of two worlds - we looked at them, and they looked at us. I was very amazed by those minutes on the escalator. I slightly disturbed the chronological order here, because the day before we had already thoroughly traveled around the regions of the DPRK and got an idea about them - so I will give here what I wrote in the travel notebook upon leaving the mausoleum. “For them these are Gods. And this is the ideology of the country. At the same time, there is poverty in the country, denunciations, people are nothing. Taking into account the fact that almost everyone serves in the army for at least 5-7 years, and soldiers in the DPRK manually perform the most difficult work, including almost 100% of national construction, we can say that this is a slave-owning system, free labor. At the same time, the ideology presents that “the army helps the country, and we need even stricter discipline in the army and in the country in general to move towards a bright future”... And the country is on average at the level of the 1950s... But what palaces of the leaders! This is how to zombify society! After all, they, not knowing otherwise, really love them, they, if necessary, are ready to kill for Kim Il Sung and are ready to die themselves. Of course, it’s great to love your homeland, to be a patriot of your country, you can also have a good or bad attitude towards this or that political figure. But how all this happens here is beyond the comprehension of modern man!”
You can take photographs in the square in front of the Kumsusan Palace - it is especially interesting to photograph people.
1. Women in ceremonial costumes go to the mausoleum.
2. Sculptural composition near the left wing of the palace.
4. Group photography with the mausoleum in the background.
5. Some take pictures, others impatiently wait for their turn.
6. I also took a photo for memory.
7. Pioneer bow to the leaders.
8. Peasants in ceremonial clothes wait in line at the entrance to the mausoleum.
9. Almost 100% of the male population of the DPRK is subject to military conscription for 5-7 years. At the same time, military personnel perform not only military, but also general civilian work - they build everywhere, plow with oxen in the fields, work on collective and state farms. Women serve for one year and on a voluntary basis - naturally, there are many volunteers.
10. The front facade of the Kumsusan Palace.
11. The next stop is a memorial to the heroes of the struggle for liberation from Japan. Heavy rain…
14. The graves of the fallen stand on the mountainside in a checkerboard pattern so that everyone buried here can see the panorama of Pyongyang from the top of Taesong Mountain.
15. The central place of the memorial is occupied by the revolutionary Kim Jong Suk, glorified in the DPRK - the first wife of Kim Il Sung, the mother of Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Suk died in 1949 at the age of 31 during her second birth.
16. After visiting the memorial, we will head to the suburbs of Pyongyang, the village of Mangyongdae, where Comrade Kim Il Sung was born and where his grandparents lived for a long time until the post-war years. This is one of the most sacred places in the DPRK.
19. A tragicomic story happened with this pot, crumpled during smelting - not realizing all its holiness, one of our tourists tapped it with his finger. And our guide Kim did not have time to warn that touching anything here is strictly prohibited. One of the memorial employees noticed this and called someone. A minute later, our Kim’s phone rang - the guide was called somewhere for work. We walked around the park for about forty minutes, accompanied by a driver and a second guide, a young guy who didn’t speak Russian. When it became really worrying about Kim, she finally appeared - upset and tearful. When asked what would happen to her now, she smiled sadly and quietly said, “What difference does it make?”... She felt so sorry for her at that moment...
20. While our guide Kim was at work, we walked a little in the park surrounding Mangyongdae. This mosaic panel depicts the young comrade Kim Il Sung leaving his home and leaving the country to fight the Japanese militarists who occupied Korea. And his grandparents saw him off in his native Mangyongdae.
21. The next item on the program is a monument to Soviet soldiers who took part in the liberation of Korea from Japan at the very end of World War II.
23. Behind the memorial to our soldiers, a huge park begins, stretching along the hills along the river for several kilometers. In one of the cozy green corners, a rare monument of antiquity was discovered - there are few historical monuments in Pyongyang, since the city suffered greatly during the Korean War of 1950-1953.
24. From the hill there is a beautiful view of the river - how familiar these wide avenues and panel buildings of high-rise buildings seem. But how surprisingly few cars there are!
25. The newest bridge over the Taedong River is the last of five bridges included in the post-war master plan for the development of Pyongyang. It was built in the 1990s.
26. Not far from the cable-stayed bridge is the largest May Day Stadium in the DPRK with a capacity of 150,000, where major sporting competitions are held and the famous Arirang festival is held.
27. Just a couple of hours ago, I left the mausoleum slightly in a negative mood, which intensified after the higher authorities got into trouble because of some pot of our unfortunate escort. But as soon as you walk around the park, look at the people, your mood changes. Children play in a cozy park...
28. A middle-aged intellectual, secluded on a Sunday afternoon in the shade, studies the works of Kim Il Sung...
29. Does it remind you of anything? :)
30. Today is Sunday - and the city park is full of vacationers. People play volleyball, just sit on the grass...
31. And the hottest thing on Sunday was on the open dance floor - both local youth and older Korean workers were having a blast. How brilliantly they performed their bizarre movements!
33. This little guy danced the best.
34. We also joined the dancers for about 10 minutes - and they happily accepted us. This is what an alien guest looks like at a disco in North Korea! :)
35. After a walk through the park, we will return to the center of Pyongyang. From the observation deck of the Juche Idea Monument (remember, which glows in the night and which I photographed from the hotel window) there are wonderful views of Pyongyang. Let's enjoy the panorama! So, a socialist city as it is! :)
37. Much is already familiar - for example, the Central Library named after Comrade Kim Il Sung.
39. Cable-stayed bridge and stadium.
41. Incredible impressions - quite our Soviet landscapes. Tall buildings, wide streets and avenues. But how few people are on the streets. And almost no cars! It’s as if, thanks to a time machine, we were transported 30-40 years ago!
42. A new super hotel for foreign tourists and high-ranking guests is being completed.
43. "Ostankino" tower.
44. The most comfortable five-star hotel in Pyongyang - naturally, for foreigners.
45. And this is our hotel “Yangakdo” - four stars. I look now - how reminiscent it is of the high-rise building of the Moscow Design Institute where I work! :))))
46. At the foot of the monument to the Juche Ideas there are sculptural compositions of workers.
48. In the 36th photo you may have noticed an interesting monument. This is the Workers' Party of Korea Monument. The dominant feature of the sculptural composition is the sickle, hammer and brush. Everything is more or less clear with the hammer and sickle, but the brush in North Korea symbolizes the intelligentsia.
50. Inside the composition there is a panel, in the central part of which the “progressive socialist world masses” are shown, who are fighting against the “bourgeois puppet government of South Korea” and are moving the “occupied southern territories torn apart by class struggle” towards socialism and inevitable unification with the DPRK.
51. These are the South Korean masses.
52. This is the progressive intelligentsia of South Korea.
53. This appears to be an episode of ongoing armed struggle.
54. A gray-haired veteran and a young pioneer.
55. Sickle, hammer and brush - collective farmer, worker and intellectual.
56. In conclusion of today’s post, I would like to give some more scattered photographs of Pyongyang, taken while moving around the city. Facades, episodes, artifacts. Let's start from Pyongyang Station. By the way, Moscow and Pyongyang are still connected by rail (as I understand, several trailer cars for the Beijing train). But Russian tourists cannot travel from Moscow to the DPRK by rail - these cars are intended only for North Korean residents working with us.
57. A typical city panel - there are a lot of them in North Korea.
58. Czech tram - and ordinary people. The DPRK has very good people - simple, sincere, kind, friendly, welcoming, hospitable. Later I will dedicate a separate post to the North Korean faces I snatched from the streets.
59. A pioneer tie, taken off after lessons, flutters in the May breeze.
60. Another Czech tram. However, the trams here are all so familiar to our eyes. :)
61. "South-Western"? "Vernadsky avenue"? "Strogino?" Or is it Pyongyang? :))))
62. But this is a really rare trolleybus!
63. Black Volga against the background of the Museum of the Patriotic Liberation War. There is a lot of our automobile industry in the DPRK - Volgas, military and civilian UAZs, S7s, MAZs, several years ago the DPRK bought a large batch of Gazelles and Priors from Russia. But, unlike the Soviet automobile industry, they are dissatisfied with them.
64. Another photo of the “dormitory” area.
65. In the previous photo you can see the agitator machine. Here it is larger - such cars constantly drive through the cities and towns of North Korea, slogans, speeches and appeals, or simply revolutionary music or marches, sound from their horns from morning to evening. Propaganda machines are designed to encourage the working people and inspire them to work even harder for the benefit of a brighter future.
66. And again the quarters of a socialist city.
67. Simple Soviet “Maz”...
68. ...And a tram from fraternal Czechoslovakia.
69. Final photos - Arc de Triomphe in honor of the victory over Japan.
70. And this stadium very much reminded me of our Moscow Dynamo stadium. Back in the forties, when he was still brand new.
North Korea leaves ambiguous, very mixed feelings. And they accompany you constantly while you are here. I will return to walks around Pyongyang, and next time we will talk about a trip to the north of the country, to the Myohan Mountains, where we will see several ancient monasteries, visit the museum of gifts to Comrade Kim Il Sung, and visit the Renmun Cave with stalactites, stalagmites and a group of military men in one of the dungeons - and also just look at the unostentatious life of the DPRK outside the capital
Today we will take the first big tour of Pyongyang, and we will start with the holy of holies - the mausoleum of Comrade Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong Il. The mausoleum is located in the Kumsusan Palace, where Kim Il Sung once worked and which, after the death of the leader in 1994, was turned into a huge pantheon of memory. After the death of Kim Jong Il in 2011, his body was also placed in the Kumsusan Palace.
A trip to the mausoleum is a sacred ceremony in the life of any North Korean worker. Mostly people go there in organized groups - entire organizations, collective farms, military units, student classes. At the entrance to the pantheon, hundreds of groups anxiously await their turn. Foreign tourists are allowed to enter the mausoleum on Thursdays and Sundays - the guides also put foreigners in a reverent and solemn mood and warn about the need to dress as formally as possible. Our group, however, for the most part ignored this warning - well, we don’t have anything better than jeans and a shirt on our trip (I must say that in the DPRK they really don’t like jeans, considering them “American clothes”). But nothing - they let me in, naturally. But many other foreigners whom we saw in the mausoleum (Australians, Western Europeans), playing the role to the fullest, dressed very formally - lush funeral dresses, tuxedos with a bow tie...
You cannot take photographs inside the mausoleum and at all approaches to it - so I will try to simply describe what is happening inside. First, tourists wait in line in a small waiting pavilion for foreigners, then go to the common area, where they mingle with North Korean groups. At the entrance to the mausoleum itself, you need to hand over your phones and cameras, a very thorough search - you can only take heart medicine with you if in the state rooms with the leaders someone suddenly becomes ill from awe. And then we ride on a horizontal escalator along a long, very long corridor, the marble walls of which are hung with photographs of both leaders in all their greatness and heroism - photographs of different years are interspersed, from the young revolutionary times of Comrade Kim Il Sung to the last years of the reign of his son, Comrade Kim Jong Ira. In one of the places of honor near the end of the corridor, a photograph of Kim Jong Il in Moscow at a meeting with the then very youthful Russian president, taken in 2001, it seems, was noticed. This pompous long, very long corridor with huge portraits, along which the escalator travels for about 10 minutes, willy-nilly sets the mood for some kind of solemn mood. Even foreigners from another world are incensed - let alone the trembling local residents, for whom Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are gods.
From the inside, the Kumsusan Palace is divided into two halves - one is dedicated to Comrade Kim Il Sung, the other to Comrade Kim Jong Il. Huge marble halls decorated with gold, silver and jewelry, pompous corridors. The luxury and pomp of all this is quite difficult to describe. The bodies of the leaders lie in two huge, darkened marble halls, at the entrance to which you pass through another inspection line, where you are driven through streams of air in order to blow away the last specks of dust from the common people of this world before visiting the main sacred halls. Four people plus a guide approach directly to the bodies of the leaders - we go around the circle and bow. You need to bow to the floor when you are in front of the leader, as well as to the left and right - when you are behind the head of the leader, you do not need to bow. On Thursday and Sunday, foreign groups also come along with ordinary Korean workers - it is interesting to watch the reaction of North Koreans to the bodies of the leaders. Everyone is in the brightest ceremonial attire - peasants, workers, a lot of military men in uniform. Almost all women cry and wipe their eyes with handkerchiefs, men also often cry - the tears of young, thin village soldiers are especially striking. Many people experience hysterics in mourning halls... People cry touchingly and sincerely - however, they are brought up with this from birth.
After the halls where the bodies of the leaders are buried, the groups go through other halls of the palace and get acquainted with the awards - one hall is dedicated to the awards of Comrade Kim Il Sung, and the other to the awards of Comrade Kim Jong Il. Also shown are the personal belongings of the leaders, their cars, as well as two famous railway cars in which Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il traveled around the world, respectively. Separately, it is worth noting the Hall of Tears - the most pompous hall where the nation said goodbye to its leaders.
On the way back, we again drove for about 10 minutes along this long, very long corridor with portraits - it so happened that several foreign groups were driving us in a row, and towards the leaders, already sobbing and nervously fiddling with their scarves, were only Koreans - collective farmers. , workers, military... Hundreds of people rushed in front of us, going to the coveted meeting with the leaders. It was a meeting of two worlds - we looked at them, and they looked at us. I was very amazed by those minutes on the escalator. I slightly disturbed the chronological order here, because the day before we had already thoroughly traveled around the regions of the DPRK and got an idea about them - so I will give here what I wrote in the travel notebook upon leaving the mausoleum. “For them these are Gods. And this is the ideology of the country. At the same time, there is poverty in the country, denunciations, people are nothing. Taking into account the fact that almost everyone serves in the army for at least 5-7 years, and soldiers in the DPRK manually perform the most difficult work, including almost 100% of national construction, we can say that this is a slave-owning system, free labor. At the same time, the ideology presents that “the army helps the country, and we need even stricter discipline in the army and in the country in general to move towards a bright future”... And the country is on average at the level of the 1950s... But what palaces of the leaders! This is how to zombify society! After all, they, not knowing otherwise, really love them, they, if necessary, are ready to kill for Kim Il Sung and are ready to die themselves. Of course, it’s great to love your homeland, to be a patriot of your country, you can also have a good or bad attitude towards this or that political figure. But how all this happens here is beyond the comprehension of modern man!”
You can take photographs in the square in front of the Kumsusan Palace - it is especially interesting to photograph people.
1. Women in ceremonial costumes go to the mausoleum.
2. Sculptural composition near the left wing of the palace.
4. Group photography with the mausoleum in the background.
5. Some take pictures, others impatiently wait for their turn.
6. I also took a photo for memory.
7. Pioneer bow to the leaders.
8. Peasants in ceremonial clothes wait in line at the entrance to the mausoleum.
9. Almost 100% of the male population of the DPRK is subject to military conscription for 5-7 years. At the same time, military personnel perform not only military, but also general civilian work - they build everywhere, plow with oxen in the fields, work on collective and state farms. Women serve for one year and on a voluntary basis - naturally, there are many volunteers.
10. The front facade of the Kumsusan Palace.
11. The next stop is a memorial to the heroes of the struggle for liberation from Japan. Heavy rain…
14. The graves of the fallen stand on the mountainside in a checkerboard pattern so that everyone buried here can see the panorama of Pyongyang from the top of Taesong Mountain.
15. The central place of the memorial is occupied by the revolutionary Kim Jong Suk, glorified in the DPRK - the first wife of Kim Il Sung, the mother of Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Suk died in 1949 at the age of 31 during her second birth.
16. After visiting the memorial, we will head to the suburbs of Pyongyang, the village of Mangyongdae, where Comrade Kim Il Sung was born and where his grandparents lived for a long time until the post-war years. This is one of the most sacred places in the DPRK.
19. A tragicomic story happened with this pot, crumpled during smelting - not realizing all its holiness, one of our tourists tapped it with his finger. And our guide Kim did not have time to warn that touching anything here is strictly prohibited. One of the memorial employees noticed this and called someone. A minute later, our Kim’s phone rang - the guide was called somewhere for work. We walked around the park for about forty minutes, accompanied by a driver and a second guide, a young guy who didn’t speak Russian. When it became really worrying about Kim, she finally appeared - upset and tearful. When asked what would happen to her now, she smiled sadly and quietly said, “What difference does it make?”... She felt so sorry for her at that moment...
20. While our guide Kim was at work, we walked a little in the park surrounding Mangyongdae. This mosaic panel depicts the young comrade Kim Il Sung leaving his home and leaving the country to fight the Japanese militarists who occupied Korea. And his grandparents saw him off in his native Mangyongdae.
21. The next item on the program is a monument to Soviet soldiers who took part in the liberation of Korea from Japan at the very end of World War II.
23. Behind the memorial to our soldiers, a huge park begins, stretching along the hills along the river for several kilometers. In one of the cozy green corners, a rare monument of antiquity was discovered - there are few historical monuments in Pyongyang, since the city suffered greatly during the Korean War of 1950-1953.
24. From the hill there is a beautiful view of the river - how familiar these wide avenues and panel buildings of high-rise buildings seem. But how surprisingly few cars there are!
25. The newest bridge over the Taedong River is the last of five bridges included in the post-war master plan for the development of Pyongyang. It was built in the 1990s.
26. Not far from the cable-stayed bridge is the largest May Day Stadium in the DPRK with a capacity of 150,000, where major sporting competitions are held and the famous Arirang festival is held.
27. Just a couple of hours ago, I left the mausoleum slightly in a negative mood, which intensified after the higher authorities got into trouble because of some pot of our unfortunate escort. But as soon as you walk around the park, look at the people, your mood changes. Children play in a cozy park...
28. A middle-aged intellectual, secluded on a Sunday afternoon in the shade, studies the works of Kim Il Sung...
29. Does it remind you of anything? :)
30. Today is Sunday - and the city park is full of vacationers. People play volleyball, just sit on the grass...
31. And the hottest thing on Sunday was on the open dance floor - both local youth and older Korean workers were having a blast. How brilliantly they performed their bizarre movements!
33. This little guy danced the best.
34. We also joined the dancers for about 10 minutes - and they happily accepted us. This is what an alien guest looks like at a disco in North Korea! :)
35. After a walk through the park, we will return to the center of Pyongyang. From the observation deck of the Juche Idea Monument (remember, which glows in the night and which I photographed from the hotel window) there are wonderful views of Pyongyang. Let's enjoy the panorama! So, a socialist city as it is! :)
37. Much is already familiar - for example, the Central Library named after Comrade Kim Il Sung.
39. Cable-stayed bridge and stadium.
41. Incredible impressions - quite our Soviet landscapes. Tall buildings, wide streets and avenues. But how few people are on the streets. And almost no cars! It’s as if, thanks to a time machine, we were transported 30-40 years ago!
42. A new super hotel for foreign tourists and high-ranking guests is being completed.
43. "Ostankino" tower.
44. The most comfortable five-star hotel in Pyongyang - naturally, for foreigners.
45. And this is our hotel “Yangakdo” - four stars. I look now - how reminiscent it is of the high-rise building of the Moscow Design Institute where I work! :))))
46. At the foot of the monument to the Juche Ideas there are sculptural compositions of workers.
48. In the 36th photo you may have noticed an interesting monument. This is the Workers' Party of Korea Monument. The dominant feature of the sculptural composition is the sickle, hammer and brush. Everything is more or less clear with the hammer and sickle, but the brush in North Korea symbolizes the intelligentsia.
50. Inside the composition there is a panel, in the central part of which the “progressive socialist world masses” are shown, who are fighting against the “bourgeois puppet government of South Korea” and are moving the “occupied southern territories torn apart by class struggle” towards socialism and inevitable unification with the DPRK.
51. These are the South Korean masses.
52. This is the progressive intelligentsia of South Korea.
53. This appears to be an episode of ongoing armed struggle.
54. A gray-haired veteran and a young pioneer.
55. Sickle, hammer and brush - collective farmer, worker and intellectual.
56. In conclusion of today’s post, I would like to give some more scattered photographs of Pyongyang, taken while moving around the city. Facades, episodes, artifacts. Let's start from Pyongyang Station. By the way, Moscow and Pyongyang are still connected by rail (as I understand, several trailer cars for the Beijing train). But Russian tourists cannot travel from Moscow to the DPRK by rail - these cars are intended only for North Korean residents working with us.
61. "South-Western"? "Vernadsky avenue"? "Strogino?" Or is it Pyongyang? :))))
62. But this is a really rare trolleybus!
63. Black Volga against the background of the Museum of the Patriotic Liberation War. There is a lot of our automobile industry in the DPRK - Volgas, military and civilian UAZs, S7s, MAZs, several years ago the DPRK bought a large batch of Gazelles and Priors from Russia. But, unlike the Soviet automobile industry, they are dissatisfied with them.
64. Another photo of the “dormitory” area.
65. In the previous photo you can see the agitator machine. Here it is larger - such cars constantly drive through the cities and towns of North Korea, slogans, speeches and appeals, or simply revolutionary music or marches, sound from their horns from morning to evening. Propaganda machines are designed to encourage the working people and inspire them to work even harder for the benefit of a brighter future.
66. And again the quarters of a socialist city.
67. Simple Soviet “Maz”...
68. ...And a tram from fraternal Czechoslovakia.
69. Final photos - Arc de Triomphe in honor of the victory over Japan.
70. And this stadium very much reminded me of our Moscow Dynamo stadium. Back in the forties, when he was still brand new.
North Korea leaves ambiguous, very mixed feelings. And they accompany you constantly while you are here. I will return to walks around Pyongyang, and next time we will talk about a trip to the north of the country, to the Myohan Mountains, where we will see several ancient monasteries, visit the museum of gifts to Comrade Kim Il Sung, and visit the Renmun Cave with stalactites, stalagmites and a group of military men in one of the dungeons - and also just look at the unostentatious life of the DPRK outside the capital.
On January 27, 1924, the coffin with Lenin’s body was placed in a wooden mausoleum built in a matter of days on Red Square. The decision not to bury the body is not unprecedented: earlier cases of embalming are known. But not in relation to personalities of this magnitude. However, the example of the leader of the world proletariat turned out to be contagious. Over the next half century, the bodies of many political figures were mummified.
1. Joseph Stalin
Lenin's successor died on March 5, 1953, four days later the coffin was transported on a gun carriage from the House of Unions to Red Square. At noon, an artillery salute thundered over the Kremlin, and the whole country fell silent for five minutes. Stalin’s body lay in the mausoleum until 1961, until the 22nd Congress of the CPSU decided that “Stalin’s serious violations of Lenin’s covenants, abuse of power, mass repressions against honest Soviet people and other actions during the period of the cult of personality make it impossible to leave the coffin with his body in the Mausoleum IN AND. Lenin". A day later, Stalin was buried near the Kremlin wall.
2. Mao Zedong
The tomb of the long-time leader of the People's Republic of China is one of the main attractions of Beijing. The mausoleum was erected in Tiananmen Square in 1977. The area of the structure is more than 57 thousand square meters. In addition to the hall for visitors, where the crystal coffin with the mummified corpse of Mao is placed, the mausoleum houses a hall of revolutionary achievements, and on the second floor there is a cinema hall. There they show the documentary film “Tosca”, dedicated to the life of the idol.
3. Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il
After the founder of the North Korean state, Kim Il Sung, passed away in 1994, his son Kim Jong Il ordered the leader’s residence to be converted into a mausoleum. Officially it is called Geumsusan Sun Memorial Palace. In 2011, the body of Kim Jong Il was placed next to the sarcophagus of the Eternal President of the DPRK. It is forbidden to take photographs, talk loudly or appear in bright clothes in the mausoleum.
4. Ho Chi Minh
The first president of North Vietnam asked in his will to be cremated, place his ashes in three ceramic urns and bury them in different parts of the country. But his will was not fulfilled. When the politician died in 1969, Soviet specialists embalmed his body. The mummy was initially kept in a secret place to protect it from American bombing during the Vietnam War, and the glass coffin was transferred to the mausoleum in Hanoi six years after the death of Ho Chi Minh. There is a garden around the tomb, where about 250 species of flora from various regions of Vietnam grow.
5. Georgiy Dimitrov
The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, who was called the “Bulgarian Lenin,” died in 1949 in Barvikha, near Moscow, where he came for treatment. The body was taken to Sofia, embalmed and placed in a mausoleum. There it lay until 1990, when the communist regime fell. At the request of his relatives (according to the official version), Dimitrov was reburied and the crypt was demolished.
6. Eva Peron
Eva was the wife of Argentine President Juan Peron, and for her active civic position she was considered the spiritual leader of the nation. The woman died at the age of 33 from cancer, and her embalmed body was put on public display. After the overthrow of Juan Peron in 1955, the mummy was transported to Milan and buried. Having regained the presidency, Peron sent Eva’s body home and placed it in the family crypt.
Exactly 90 years ago, the Lenin Mausoleum was opened in Moscow. Today we will talk about it and about other mausoleums of the leaders of the proletariat, where tourists have access.
Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow
The Mausoleum of Vladimir Ilyich, despite the endless controversy over whether in the 21st century in a European state the body of a deceased person can be located on the main square of the capital at the main architectural monument of the country, which thousands of tourists come to see every day, is one of the most visited attractions in Moscow. Moreover, Lenin's final resting place remains the most visited mausoleum in the world and is one of the main cliché symbols of the Soviet Union and Russia, along with balalaikas, vodka and bears. The mausoleum is especially popular among tourists from countries with communist regimes. So, here you can often see whole crowds of Chinese students who want to bow to the world inspirer of communism.
But you can’t just go and get into the mausoleum: it’s only open from Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and before entering you will find a huge queue and instructions on what to do and how to behave in the tomb. A step to the left, a step to the right - and you are already a violator. At the same time, it is not clear why such strictness is needed (they say that Ilyich’s sarcophagus can withstand even a direct hit from a grenade launcher, and about a dozen people have already unsuccessfully attempted to kill it), except perhaps to create an atmosphere of the triumph of communism.
Mausoleum of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang
North Korea, a country where the cult of personality of the leaders of the ruling party is elevated to an absolute level and any public ridicule of the leader is fraught with execution, could not do without a whole network of mausoleums throughout the country. There are more mausoleums in North Korea than McDonald's in Moscow, but the most important, majestic and revered one was erected in Pyongyang for the greatest leader Kim Il Sung. For foreigners, the golden gates of the mausoleum are open only on Thursdays and Sundays; on other days, only North Korean citizens can worship the shrine.
All the tourists who have been inside the main North Korean tomb say that the most difficult thing in the Kim Il Sung Mausoleum is not to laugh, since the guide’s tone is so enthusiastic and unwaveringly patriotic that a person who does not firmly believe in the Juche ideas may become hysterical. Which people with machine guns standing around the perimeter of all premises may try to immediately stop. Before looking at the leader’s mummy, you will have to stand in a huge line and go through several disinfection procedures and inspections. X-rays, metal detector frames - everything stands guard over the eternally young Kim Il Sung.
Mausoleum of Mao Zedong in Beijing
The legendary Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman of the Chinese people, could not do without his own mausoleum. The tomb was erected in 1972 in the very heart of Beijing. The last refuge for the leader of billions was built exclusively by volunteers who wanted to pay tribute to Mao in this way. The “House of Memory of Chairman Mao” is surrounded by sculptural compositions that tell about the leader’s accomplishments, his merits and political successes. The mausoleum consists of several halls with tapestries and monuments to the red supreme ruler.
And although Mao himself wanted to be cremated, he was placed in a crystal coffin in the center of a huge granite hall. Anyone can see the body, and for free. True, you will have to stand in a huge line, go through several inspections and metal detectors. And you can’t stop near the coffin, you need to move forward all the time. Therefore, the entire journey through the tomb takes only a few minutes. You can “visit” Mao from Tuesday to Sunday. From Tuesday to Thursday the mausoleum is open from 14 to 16 hours, and from Friday to Sunday the leader “receives” from 8 to 11.
Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi
The mausoleum of the first president of North Vietnam, the poet and philosopher Ho Chi Minh, was equipped with the help of Soviet craftsmen, who organized everything in the best possible way, like the main Soviet mummy - Vladimir Ilyich. Our specialists helped embalm the leader, designed the mausoleum, and helped our Vietnamese colleagues master the difficult art of caring for the dead body of a great man. The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in the very center of Hanoi even looks similar to Lenin's, only much larger and more majestic.
As in the case of Mao Zedong, no one began to burn Ho Chi Minh, who wanted to be cremated - he deserved better. The leader’s body canonically lies in a glass coffin; everyone is allowed to look at it from 9 to 12 o’clock. As in all mausoleums, before visiting you will be thoroughly searched, illuminated with all possible rays, and only after endless checks will you be allowed to look at the exhibit. They also don’t take money and they don’t allow photography either.
