The Russians are arguing again about what to do with the preserved corpse of V.I. Lenin. Late last year, there was discussion about burying the body of the founder of the U.S.S.R., but the Communist Party, which is still quite politically viable and wields no small amount of power in the Duma, vowed to oppose any such action, preferring to keep him on display in the mausoleum in front of the Kremlin where he has been since since his death in 1924. It’s not the first time since the end of the Soviet government that this dispute has occurred; in the mid-1990s, Boris Yeltsin also tried to close the public shrine and bury Lenin, and this recent flap with the Putin government has been a sore spot for several years.
Today at the photoblog EnglishRussia.com, there’s a post about the contest that was held by the Soviet government shortly after Lenin’s death to solicit design ideas for the mausoleum. The designs ranged from the simple to the grandiose. Looking at these pictures, I was reminded of the public contest to submit design ideas for the World Trade Center memorial and some of the bizarre ideas submitted for that. The picture above, which is included in the EnglishRussia post is actually one of the designs submitted for a later design contest in the 1930s for a Palace Of The Soviets to be built near the Kremlin on the site of a demolished cathedral. The contest attracted designs from architects like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, but the eventual winner was a revision of this (without the giant statue of Lenin) by a Soviety architect. Lenin’s tomb was to have been included in this building, however the outbreak of World War II halted construction, and the building materials were repurposed for the war effort.
The 1924 tomb, which was never replaced, was designed by Aleksey Shchusev, who went on to design the Hotel Moscow and the infamous Lubyanka Square headquarters of the NKVD (later the KGB).
As for poor old Lenin himself, what’s left of his earthly remains are re-treated by Russian forensics experts every 18 months by dipping the cadaver in a bath of glycerol and potassium acetate. The actual formula of the preservative bath was a state secret during the Soviet period. The body is further preserved by keeping the mausoleum cold and humid at all times. Rumor has it that Dick Cheney uses similar techniques to keep himself looking lifelike for public display. Joseph Stalin was similarly preserved and displayed for a while after his death, but when Krushchev “de-Stalinized” the U.S.S.R. he had the body buried in a less-than-prominent grave. But ol’ V.I. won’t last forever, even with the extraordinary amount of care he gets, so the Russians are going to have to plant him sooner or later. This 2007 documentary, “Forever Lenin” explores the history of the tomb and the care of Lenin’s body. Sadly, it does not seem to be online yet, but you can buy the DVD for $390 (!!). I’d love to see the film, but I think I’ll wait until it turns up online, on cable, or at the Kendall Sqaure theaters.
We’ve got a Lenin statue in Seattle (the Fremont neighborhood). I’ll bet they’d be happy to have his body there too…as long as he was naked.