The mausoleum, erected on the main square of the Russian capital, keeps within its walls a mummy that has long survived the regime established by the one whose flesh and blood it once was. Despite active discussions about the need to bring Lenin's body to the ground, since mummification does not correspond to either the current Christian tradition or even the ancient pagan tradition, and it has lost its ideological significance, this symbol of political utopia still remains where it was placed in 1924.
Disagreements related to the burial of the leader
The materials published during the years of perestroika allow us to recreate the picture of those days when the country said goodbye to a man who managed to reverse the course of its history. The unreliability of the official version, which claimed that the decision to preserve the body of Lenin was made as a result of numerous appeals to the Central Committee of the party of labor collectives and individual citizens, became apparent. They simply weren't there. In addition, both leaders of the state, headed by L. D. Trotsky, who then held the second most important government post, and the widow of Lenin, N.K. Krupskaya, opposed the mummification of the leader.
The initiator of the honors, befitting the pharaohs rather than a statesman of the 20th century, was I.V. Stalin, who wanted to turn from his former opponent in the internal party struggle an icon of the new religion, and turn his resting place into a kind of communist Mecca. He succeeded to the fullest, and the mausoleum in Moscow for many decades has become a place of pilgrimage for millions of citizens.
Hasty funeral
However, in that winter of 1924, the future “father of peoples”, in order to obtain consent from the widow of the deceased leader, had to assure her that it was not a question of the long-term preservation of the remains. According to him, it was only necessary to protect the body of Lenin from decay for the period necessary for everyone to say goodbye to him. This could take several months, and for this reason it was necessary to build a temporary wooden crypt.
The funeral, or rather, the laying of the body in a temporary mausoleum, was performed on January 27, and took place with great haste, since it was necessary to finish everything before the main opponent of mummification, Lev Trotsky, returned from the Caucasus. When he appeared in Moscow, he was confronted with a fait accompli.
Immediate Solution
For embalming the body, a group of scientists was involved, using the method developed by Professor Abrikosov in his work. At the initial stage, they introduced through the aorta a mixture consisting of six liters of alcohol, glycerol and formaldehyde. This helped to hide the external signs of decomposition for some time. But soon Lenin's body began to become covered with cracks. The relics, which by their status were supposed to be incorruptible, disintegrated before everyone's eyes. Immediate action required.
A very remarkable initiative was shown at that time by a large party functionary, Krasin. It occurred to him to freeze the leader’s body, similar to how it happened with the carcasses of mammoths, which have survived to the present day. The proposal was accepted, and its implementation was not realized only through the fault of the German company, which delayed the delivery of the refrigeration equipment ordered by it.
Creation of the Zbarsky scientific group
The solution to the problem was under the personal control of F.E. Dzerzhinsky, who, on behalf of Stalin, led the funeral commission. It was quite obvious that in case of failure, scientists could pay for it with their lives. Their situation was further complicated by the fact that the classical embalming technology was not suitable in this case, and none of the known methods was suitable. I had to rely only on my own creative thought.
Despite all the risks, the team leader, Professor Boris Zbarsky, assured the government that, thanks to the development of his friend, Professor Vorobyov, head of the department of medicine at the Kharkov Institute , he and his colleagues would be able to stop the smoldering process. Since Lenin’s body was in critical condition by that time, and there was no choice, Stalin agreed. This responsible, from an ideological point of view, work was entrusted to Zbarsky and a group of his employees, which included Kharkov professor Vorobyov.
Later, a young student of a medical institute, the son of Boris Zbarsky, Ilya, joined them as an assistant. By the beginning of perestroika, he, an eighty-eight-year-old academician, remained the only living participant in those events, and thanks to him today many details of the process are known, as a result of which the Lenin mummy has been the object of worship for millions of people drugged by utopian ideas for decades.
The beginning of the mummification process
Especially for the work was equipped with a basement located under a temporary mausoleum. Embalming began with the extraction of the lungs, liver and spleen. Then the doctors thoroughly washed the chest of the deceased. The next step was the application of the incisions throughout the body necessary for the balm to penetrate the tissues. It turned out that this operation requires special permission from the party Central Committee.
After receiving it and performing all the necessary procedures, Lenin's mummy was placed in a special solution consisting of glycerin, water and potassium acetate with the addition of chlorine quinine. His formula, although considered secret at the time, was discovered back in the late 19th century by the Russian scientist Melnikov-Razvedenkov. This composition was used by him during anatomical preparation.
In the new lab
The granite mausoleum in Moscow was erected in 1929. He replaced the old wooden, built four years earlier. During its construction, the need for a room for a special laboratory, in which Boris Zbarsky now worked with his colleagues, was taken into account. Since their activities were especially politically important, scientists were tightly controlled by specially designated agents of the NKVD. The operation mode of the mausoleum was established taking into account all the necessary technological measures. They were then only under development.
Scientific search
The preservation of the body of Lenin required continuous research, since in the scientific practice of those years there were no proven technologies. In order to establish the reaction of body tissues to certain solutions, countless experiments were conducted on nameless deceased delivered to the laboratory.
As a result, a composition was developed that several times a week covered the face and hands of the mummy. But caring for Lenin’s body was not limited to this. Every year it was necessary to close the mausoleum for a month and a half, so that, having immersed the body in the bath, thoroughly soak it with a special embalming preparation. Thus, it was possible to maintain the illusion of incorruptibility of the leader of the world proletariat.
Correction of the deceased's appearance
In order for Lenin's mummy to have a presentable appearance in the eyes of the visitors, a lot of work was done, the results of which struck everyone who first got into the interior of the mausoleum and unwittingly compared what he saw with the image of the leader in his last lifetime photographs.
Shortly before his death, Ilya Borisovich Zbarsky said that the dying thinness of Lenin's face was hidden with the help of special fillers injected under the skin, and red filters mounted on light sources gave it a “lively” color. In addition, glass balls were inserted into the eye sockets, filling their emptiness and giving the mummy an outward resemblance to the appearance of a leader. The lips under the mustache were stitched, and in general, Lenin in the mausoleum, the photo of which is presented in the article, looked like a sleeping man.
Evacuation to Tyumen
The years of war were a special period in the work to preserve the Leninist body. When the Germans approached Moscow, Stalin ordered the evacuation of the leader’s remains in Tyumen. By this time, a small team of scientists involved in the conservation of the mummy suffered an irreparable loss - in 1939, under very mysterious circumstances, Professor Vorobyov died. As a result, Zbarsky, his father and son, had to accompany the box with the body of the leader to Siberia.
Ilya Borisovich recalled that for all the importance of the mission assigned to them, the difficulties caused by wartime constantly complicated the work. In Tyumen it was impossible to get not only the necessary reagents, but even for ordinary distilled water had to send a special plane to Omsk. Since the fact that Lenin’s body was in Siberia was strictly classified, a laboratory for conspiracy was placed in a local school that trained agricultural workers. The mummy stayed there until the end of the war, guarded by a detachment of forty soldiers led by the commandant of the Mausoleum.
Matters related to the brain of Lenin
In the conversation about the leader’s mummy preserved for many decades, questions related to the Leninist brain occupy a special place. People of the older generation, of course, remember the legends that used to go about its uniqueness. It should be noted that they have no real reason for themselves. It is known that in 1928 the leader’s brain, extracted from the skull, was divided into fractions, which were stored in the safe of the Institute of Brain of the USSR, previously coated with a layer of paraffin and placed in a solution of alcohol with formaldehyde.
Access to them was closed, but the government made an exception for the famous German scientist Oscar Voigt. His task was to establish those structural features of the Leninist brain that served as a prerequisite for his so prolific thinking. The scientist worked at the Moscow Institute for five years, and during this time he conducted large-scale research. However, he did not find any structural differences from the brain of ordinary people.
Was that mythical gyrus?
It is believed that the reason for the emergence of subsequent legends was the statement, allegedly made by him at one of the conferences, that he had discovered one gyrus exceeding the standard size. However, another German scientist, the head of the Department of Neuropathology at the University of Berlin, Professor Jordi Servos-Navarro, who had the opportunity to study samples of the Leninist brain in 1974, said in an interview that his colleague, if he made his sensational statement, was only to please the Bolsheviks, to which had sympathy.
However, this same scientist dispelled yet another widespread legend that Lenin allegedly suffered from syphilis, which was carefully concealed by the Communists. After conducting the most thorough study, he came to the conclusion that this statement was untenable, noting that only an insignificant scar caused by the wound received during the assassination committed on Lenin in 1918 by the Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan was distinguishable on brain tissues.
Mummy Attempts
It is interesting to note that the mummy of Lenin in the subsequent period repeatedly became the object of assassination attempts. For example, in 1934, a certain citizen Mitrofan Nikitin, coming to the mausoleum, fired several shots from the revolver into the leader’s body, after which he killed himself. Several attempts were also made to break the glass sarcophagus, after which it had to be made of especially durable material.
Immortality according to the price list
With the advent of perestroika, when a halo of holiness was dispelled around a person who became the evil genius of an era, the secrets of the mausoleum associated with embalming technology became the trade secret of the Ritual company, created by scientists working with the body of Lenin. This company was engaged in embalming and restoring the appearance of mutilated corpses. The price list was so high (12 thousand euros for a week of work) that it allowed to use its services mainly to relatives and friends of criminal authorities who died during the bloody showdowns.
In 1995, the North Korean government replenished the company's customer base by paying more than a million euros for embalming the body of their deceased leader, Kim Il Sung. Here, the bodies of the head of the Communist Party of Bulgaria Georgy Dimitrov and his ideological brother Choibalsan, the leader of socialist Mongolia, were prepared for eternal worship. The body of each of them at home has become the same object of worship, like Lenin in the mausoleum, whose photo serves as a kind of advertising.
Queue on Red Square
Today, discussions about the burial of this most famous mummy in the world do not stop. The annual cost of servicing the Lenin Mausoleum amounts to millions of dollars and is very burdensome for the budget. The cult of the leader of the proletariat, which once reached colossal proportions, is now supported only by small groups of tourists nostalgic for the communist past. The secrets of the mausoleum, so zealously kept for almost eight decades, have become available to everyone who shows interest in this side of our history. History has put everything in its place.
However, in spite of everything, a line is being drawn up on Red Square. The working hours of the mausoleum are limited today, visitors are allowed only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 to 13:00. What will be the future fate of the mummy, time will tell.