Didn’t Drop Body of Brezhnev, Soviet Gravedigger Says

MOSCOW — The man who lowered the nation’s last four leaders into their graves laid to rest today a rumor that he dropped Leonid I. Brezhnev’s corpse.

“The sound people heard that day was the sound of the Kremlin clock and a cannon salute,” Georgy Kovalenko, gravedigger for Communist VIPs, told the Sobesednik supplement to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

Ever since Brezhnev was buried Nov. 15, 1982, Soviet citizens have disputed what caused a thud just as the Soviet leader was lowered into the grave.

One word-of-mouth story said the bottom of the coffin was faulty, like most manufactured products during Brezhnev’s time, and gave way under the bulky Brezhnev. Another blamed the gravediggers.

But Kovalenko said he lowered the now-loathed Brezhnev “by the book” as he did Nikita S. Khrushchev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko: “Quickly and gently as if by a high-speed elevator.”