Death of Sergei Eisenstein

Richard Cavendish remembers the events of February 11th, 1948

The body of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, the most famous name in Soviet Russian cinema, was found on the floor of his Moscow flat on the morning of February 11th, 1948. He had died of a severe heart attack in the early hours, a few days after his fiftieth birthday. The body lay in state in the Hall of the Cinema Workers, beneath a gold-embroidered velvet pall and surrounded by a profusion of flowers, before being cremated on February 13th. The ashes were buried in the snow-covered ground of the Novodevichy Cemetery.

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