On January 21, 1924, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin died. The body of the ideologue of communism was not buried, but mummified and put on public display. It is known that Lenin himself never asked for this, and his relatives were against such a perpetuation of the memory of Vladimir Ilyich. Why did the Soviet leader's associates insist on embalming and preserving the body for posterity?
Wanted to lie next to my mother
Vladimir Ilyich himself, according to numerous testimonies, asked to be buried next to his mother - at the Volkovsky cemetery in Petrograd.
In 1923-1924, the leader's health deteriorated sharply. He suffered two strokes, practically lost the ability to communicate with others.
From archival documents it is known that the question of perpetuating the memory of Lenin was raised in the fall of 1923 - after another crisis in the state of health of the leader. It was then, at a meeting of the Politburo, that Stalin proposed not to bury the body to the ground, but to embalm it, preserving it for future generations.
This idea was resolutely opposed by Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky. From their point of view, the worship of the mummy of the main Bolshevik meant the birth of a new religious cult. The opinion of Stalin, who had not yet become the autocratic master of the country, was described as "madness" and "priestly attempts to exalt the dust." Stalin remained in the minority and did not return to this topic until the death of Vladimir Ilyich.
But since 1923, the canonical image of the leader has been actively created in the country. In particular, the Institute of Leninism (later - the Institute of Marxism-Leninism) was established, and the newspaper Pravda urged to submit to this institution any records or documents related to Vladimir Ilyich.
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Lenin was made a saint during his lifetime. Therefore, the "eternal" preservation of his body was a logical continuation of this policy.
Mockery of the relics
It should be noted that, having seized power in the country, the Bolsheviks carried out active work to destroy and desecrate the relics of the saints that were kept in churches and monasteries. Their veneration was recognized as ideologically harmful and hindering the early victory of communism. Precious crayfish were confiscated as state revenue, and the relics were thrown away.
This happened in 1918 in the Savvino-Storozhevsky monastery in Zvenigorod near Moscow. The arrived Bolshevik detachment, led by Commissar Konstantin Makarov, requisitioned bread from the monks, and at the same time outraged the relics of the Monk Savva Storozhevsky, who founded the monastery in the XIV century. The relics were thrown to the ground, one of the red warriors spat on the saint's skull. Such actions became the cause of the peasant uprising, called the Zvenigorod counter-revolutionary rebellion. The rioters killed Makarov and two more communists, and began to smash Soviet institutions. The rebellion was suppressed by the arriving troops, the monastery was closed.
Desecration of the relics was one of the ways to undermine the authority of the church. In 1918, an armed detachment of the Cheka headed by August Wagner plundered the Alexander-Svirsky monastery in the Olonets province. A silver shrine with the relics of St. Alexander Svirsky, donated in 1641 by Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, was seized and opened. At the same time, the requisitioned values (more than 60 poods of silver) disappeared, and the Chekists drank church wine.
According to data published in the Soviet press, by the fall of 1920, as part of the struggle against the influence of the church, 63 reliquaries with the relics of saints had been opened in different parts of the country.
With the hope to revive
The very next day after Lenin's death, January 22, 1924, a group of doctors led by Professor Alexei Abrikosov carried out a procedure for temporary embalming of the leader's body in order to preserve it for the duration of a public farewell.
The burial was scheduled for January 27. By this time, a wooden Mausoleum had been built on Red Square, inside which they intended to bury the remains of the main Bolshevik. Thus, the original building was not supposed to serve as a storage place, but as a tombstone.
On January 27, the body of the leader was solemnly moved to the Mausoleum. But they did not close the sarcophagus - the funeral commission headed by the chairman of the OGPU Felix Dzerzhinsky decided to give everyone the opportunity to say goodbye to the deceased leader.
The body was examined every three days, and the burial time was constantly postponed for the same period - until March 1924.
Then it became clear that with the onset of heat, the body would begin to decompose.
The initiative for a new embalming, which would allow preserving the mummy for a very long time, came from two revolutionary leaders - General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) Joseph Stalin and a prominent party leader, People's Commissar for Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin. Krasin was fond of mysticism and believed that dead people could be revived after some time. He was friends with the doctor and science fiction writer Alexander Bogdanov, who conducted experiments on blood transfusion in order to rejuvenate the body. That is, according to Krasin, Lenin's body should have been saved so that later, when science develops the appropriate methodology, the leader could be resurrected.
Stalin, who graduated from an Orthodox theological school and studied at a theological seminary for several years, understood that the body of the leader of the revolution should have a sacred meaning and become an object of worship for millions of people. The Soviet government created a new religion called Leninism. The mummy of the main Bolshevik was called to take the place of the imperishable relics of the saints, who were outraged by his associates.
Fake letters
But for a new embalming, the consent of the relatives had to be obtained. Lenin's widow Nadezhda Krupskaya, in a letter addressed to the Party's Politburo, asked: “Do not let your sorrow for Ilyich go into outward reverence for his personality. Do not arrange for him monuments, palaces named after him, magnificent celebrations in his memory, etc. - he attached so little importance to all this during his lifetime, so weighed down by all this.
A member of the Politburo Nikolai Bukharin was sent to Krupskaya. He agreed with the widow, initially deceiving her: they say, we are talking only about a few months of postponing the burial, so that everyone who wants to can say goodbye to the leader of the world proletariat.
In addition, the press launched a mass campaign of appeals from labor collectives with a request to save Lenin's body. By the way, during perestroika, the archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU was partially opened. And it turned out that all these letters were organized "from above" - that is, they were drawn up in party bodies and, by order, were proposed for signing by the collectives of factories and plants.
No alternative option
To resolve issues related to the dead body of the leader, a special troika was created, which included Leonid Krasin, as well as the secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) Vyacheslav Molotov and Lenin's former closest aide Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich.
Krasin insisted that the body should be kept frozen - then there is a chance that the leader can someday be revived. In Germany, they ordered expensive equipment, and a group of doctors led by Alexei Abrikosov began experiments with freezing bodies.
Suddenly, a prominent biochemist Boris Zbarsky intervened in the struggle for the safety of the dead Ilyich. He understood that they would not spare money for this project, which meant that those who were involved in it would not need anything. The calculation turned out to be correct: in 1939, the group led by Zbarsky received the status of a permanent research laboratory at the Mausoleum, and in 1945 Boris Ilyich himself was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
Zbarsky convinced the top party leadership that the frozen body would still undergo decomposition, and most importantly, it is problematic to demonstrate it in this form due to the change in skin color. He and a pathologist from Kharkov, Vladimir Vorobyov, were assigned to do the embalming. True, Vorobyov did not want to take on this case, since there was a risk that nothing would work out, and then the doctors would be declared counter-revolutionaries. But Zbarsky persuaded him to start work.
Moreover, the German company, from which the freezing equipment was ordered, delayed its delivery, so that the alternative option disappeared by itself.
Rubber suit
New embalming began at the end of March 1924. On Lenin's body, 20 incisions were made so that the liquid better penetrated the cavities and muscles.
The spots that appeared on the corpse were removed using injections of acetic acid. Several holes were drilled into the skull for the solution to penetrate. The eyes were removed by inserting glass beads instead. The mouth was carefully sewn up.
In June Lenin's body was shown to the delegates of the Comintern and relatives. Krupskaya silently cried, and Lenin's brother Dmitry said that it had turned out very well, and Vladimir Ilyich was lying as if alive.
On July 26, 1924, it was announced to Soviet citizens that Lenin would always be with them. A week later, on August 1, 1924, the Leader's Mausoleum opened its doors to visitors.
Subsequently, once every few years, special commissions were convened to assess the condition of Ilyich's body. In addition, it is periodically bathed in special solutions. A rubber "suit" is hidden under the clothes of the leader, which retains the embalming liquid. If not for these actions, the body would have shrunk and resembled Egyptian mummies.
The remains of the "red pharaoh" became a symbol of the new religion, and millions of citizens sought to visit his tomb. In 1924, Leonid Krasin wrote about Lenin's Mausoleum: "This will be a place that will surpass Mecca and Jerusalem in its importance for humanity." The cult of the relics of the leader of the proletariat was supposed to contribute to the deification of not only himself, but the entire communist doctrine.
Margarita Kapskaya
