Lenin, Going Strong 80 Years After His Death

Lenin’s body is always on display, and he looks more or less like he did the day he died. In fact, shortly before her death, his widower said that he was acutally looking younger.

I vaguely understood this Lenin-as-preservative concept, but hadn’t really thought about it. I recently read this fascinating article (preview only) in the Atlantic Monthly about Lenin’s embalmers, and how they built a lucrative private industry in the nineties handling recently-murdered criminals on the side.

These people take their work seriously. Since he died in 1924, they check his body twice a week for deterioration. Every 18 months it is taken to a laboratory beneath its mausoleum to be undressed, examined and immersed in preserving chemicals. He was the first Russian to be evacuated from Moscow in 1941, spending the war (and improving in looks, to hear the scientists tell it) in Siberia. Apparently they update his wardrobe every few years as well.

Does anybody else think that this is kind of weird? To me, it’s a deeply religious act. It’s as if Lenin were a true piece of the Cross or the Turin Shroud, and his ‘mausoleumists’ are acolytes, working to preserve this holy object of Russian history.