Dora Lazurkina


Dora Abramovna Lazurkina was a Russian revolutionary who was active in the October Revolution. Between 1918 and 1922 she acted as the director of the preschool division of the People's Commissariat for Education, underneath Anatoly Lunacharsky. From 1922 to 1932 she was active in the Leningrad Regional Committee under the leadership of Sergey Kirov, and from 1932 to 1934 she was Deputy Secretary of the Leningrad Party Control Commission.
At the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, Lazurkina gave a speech in which she detailed a dream she had supposedly had in which Vladimir Lenin told her he did not want Joseph Stalin's body being situated next to his. Soon after the Congress, Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's Mausoleum and reburied in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Lazurkina's speech and the resulting actions are regarded as having aided Nikita Khrushchev's drive towards De-Stalinization.