Soon after Lenin's death, his beloved student Nikolai Bukharin wrote to one of his comrades: "We … instead of icons, we hung the leaders and will try to open the relics of Ilyich for Pakhom and the" lower classes "under communist sauce" This rude phrase explains why the Mausoleum and embalming were chosen.
Bukharin called the village peasant "Pakhom", and the mention of the relics did not slip through the letter by accident. In February 1919, by decision of the Leninist government, a campaign began to "expose" the relics of Orthodox saints. Cancers with the remains of the saints of God were to be cut open and put on display. In such a barbaric way, it was supposed to demonstrate "the tricks with which the churchmen deceived the dark, illiterate population."
"Wrong" powers
Ardent atheists were sure that instead of imperishable relics, believers would see piles of bones or wax dolls mixed with scraps of clothing. Sometimes this happened, and the explanations of the clergy that the concept of "holy relics" does not imply that they should be incorruptible, or were hushed up or ignored.
However, the very first experience of "exposure" led to the exact opposite result. Contrary to all the laws of science, the remains of Saint Alexander of Svir, who died in 1533, turned out to be truly incorrupt. Having been taken from Lodeynoye Pole to Petrograd, they were examined by medical luminaries, after which they were hidden out of sight so as not to embarrass communists who do not believe in miracles.
Similar things happened in other regions. The newspaper Kurskaya Pravda was forced to admit that during the autopsy of the relics of Joasaph Belgorodsky, “the audience was amazed at the high degree of preservation of the body, which had been in the coffin for 166 years. It seemed to people that this was the result of artificial mummification, and they asked the doctor to open the stomach to make sure it was content. The surgeon made an incision and took out part of the intestines, completely dry, which proves the natural process of mummification. How to explain this phenomenon?
"Warm ambient temperature, circulation of dry air and the suction capacity of the soil are the essence of the conditions for the natural mummification of corpses," wrote Professor Semenovsky. To confirm this, the remains of Joasaph were exhibited in a museum next to the body of a counterfeiter killed by his accomplices in a dry cellar and a dead rat. They even provided the same microclimate in the showcase as in the basement. However, the criminal and the rat began to decompose, and Joasaph's body remained the same. As a result, many visitors came to the museum only to worship the saint.
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The results of the "liquidation" campaign turned out to be so discouraging that it was gradually curtailed, and all the "exposed relics" were hidden in museums and medical institutions.
On the other hand, in the minds of the Bolshevik leaders, the idea settled down - to defeat death by scientific methods. And first, it was necessary to find a means to preserve the material shell of the deceased.
At the request of the workers …
When Lenin died on January 21, 1924, there were proposals to freeze the body of the leader, so that later, when science steps forward, resurrect him from the dead. Dzerzhinsky, who was actively involved in economic issues at that time, having estimated how much energy would be required to keep the body frozen, either jokingly or indignantly exclaimed at one of the meetings: "Is this during our power outages?"
It was Dzerzhinsky who was appointed chairman of the Commission for organizing Lenin's funeral, so that in the story of the embalming and the Mausoleum, he was one of the initiators.
Proposals to expose Ilyich's body for public viewing were heard at the Central Committee meetings, even when Ilyich himself was dying in Gorki. But then they did not think of anything concrete.
On January 22, Academician Aleksey Abrikosov performed the standard procedure for embalming Lenin's body using a solution designed for six days. It was assumed that during these days everyone would have time to say goodbye to the leader. The Dzerzhinsky commission decided to bury the leader in a zinc coffin, in a grave dug near the Kremlin wall, next to the grave of Sverdlov.
The coffin with the body was taken to Moscow and on January 23 was placed in the Column Hall of the House of Unions. On the same day, at a meeting of the party leadership, proposals were made to save the body of the leader in a special crypt. A similar thought in the House of Unions was announced to the public by the great chief of the People's Commissariat for Health, Vladimir Obukh. From different parts of the country, telegrams were sent to the Kremlin with approximately the following content: "Do not bury in the ground, like an ordinary mortal, do not hide from our eyes, leave embalmed."
This particular telegram was sent by the peasants of the Orenburg province. But the idea of embalming and placing the body in a specially equipped crypt was also supported by Stalin, adding: “There are newest methods in this regard, thus keeping Lenin for many years. This does not contradict the old Russian customs either. Besides him, Dzerzhinsky, Molotov, Krasin, Muralov, who were members of the Funeral Commission, spoke in favor. Against - the widow and two sisters of Lenin, Bonch-Bruevich and Voroshilov (who soon changed his mind).
However, two technical questions remained unresolved: will the body of the blasphemer Lenin be preserved in the same way as the relics of the saints, and what will the place of his resting place look like?
Meanwhile, in three days about a million people passed by the coffin of the deceased. About 9 thousand more, taking turns, stood on the guard of honor. After looking at the crowds of people, Krupskaya agreed to extend the farewell ceremony for a month, and then return to discussing the question of the form of burial.
Red ziggurat
The architect Alexei Shchusev was given three days to design and build a temporary wooden mausoleum. From the memoirs of Shchusev: “I expressed my views that the silhouette of the Mausoleum should not be high-rise, but have a stepped shape. I suggested a simple inscription on the Mausoleum: one word - LENIN."
Based on the wishes of the customer, Shchusev could work in any style. His track record included Orthodox churches, a railway station, and exhibition pavilions. But, as a professional, he understood that the building should fit into the architectural environment, and not suppress it, especially since it would not have been possible to suppress the Red Square ensemble that had been forming for centuries in three days. Since the frozen one and a half meter layer of earth did not even succumb to crowbars and was slowly warmed up by fires, they had to resort to dynamite.
The idea of a tomb for the embalmed leader aroused direct associations with the Egyptian pyramids, and against the background of the Kremlin, such a structure would have looked ridiculous. The term "mausoleum" itself originated from the tomb of the Carian king Mausol (Mavsol), but Shchusev's cubic shape did not inspire either. Many researchers argue that he borrowed the concept of the stepped pyramid from the Assyrian and Babylonian cult structures - ziggurats, in which human sacrifices were also performed. Here the similarity looks more obvious, but, having resorted to this borrowing, the architect simply had no other alternative. In the shortest possible time, it was required to build something impressive, capable of admitting a significant number of visitors and not looking ridiculous against the background of old Moscow architecture.
The funeral took place on January 27. At the building of the Mausoleum, post No. 1 was established with two sentries changing every hour. Then the access of the people was resumed and then stopped.
The first time the Mausoleum was closed for revision on January 30, in order to build a glass sarcophagus with constant air circulation over the open coffin with Lenin's body. Then Boris Zbarsky and Vladimir Vorobyov carried out re-embalming, already more thoughtful, using technologies and materials purchased in Germany. In fact, their work had nothing to do with mummification, when the body seems to dry out and ossify. Lenin's body continued to maintain flexibility and was periodically pumped up with various drugs, decomposed pieces of flesh were replaced with other "biological material." In general, doctors knowingly called what was happening "experiment" and, starting work, did not know where it would lead them.
In June 1924, Zbarsky demonstrated the results to the delegates of the Congress of the Comintern, as well as to Lenin's relatives, who continued to insist on his burial. Krupskaya, seeing her husband's body, burst into tears, and Lenin's brother, Dmitry, admitted: "He lies the way I saw him immediately after death, and even better."
In fact, the Bolsheviks were supporters of cremation and in the 1920s - 1930s this method of burial was actively promoted in the media. But in the case of Lenin, the work on preserving his body had already reached the level of a state project, and it was too late to curtail it.
Touch Lenin
The construction of a new, but also wooden mausoleum began two months after Lenin's funeral, simultaneously with the beginning of the secondary embalming. In fact, Shchusev only increased the size of the former mausoleum, and also added a portico and stands.
But this option was considered as temporary, and in January 1925 an international competition was announced for the project of a stone tomb.
Of the 117 proposed options, the most memorable were the projects of the mausoleum in the form of the globe, as well as in the form of a ship, with Ilyich on the captain's bridge. There were also designs in the shape of a pyramid and a five-pointed star.
But they got so used to the wooden version of Shchusev that they again gave preference to his own project, only with the next cosmetic amendments and with granite as a building material.
The total height of the mausoleum, together with the basements, was 36 meters (the height of a modern ten-story building), but only a third of this volume rises above the ground. The "sole" of the mausoleum is a square, with a side length of 72 meters and a diagonal length of 104 meters, and the angle of inclination is equal to the classic 45 °.
Supporters of occult theories argue that Shchusev deliberately, at the behest of the customers, chose the form of a ziggurat. Thus, a pagan temple with an altar was allegedly built in the center of Moscow, on which the Orthodox state was sacrificed. Another theory suggests that the top of the mausoleum is something like an "energy antenna" that made it possible to zombify the population of the Soviet Union.
One can either believe in such theories or not. But in the form of the mausoleum, you can see the signs of both classical antique buildings and constructivist architectural trends, characteristic precisely for the beginning of the 20th century. In addition, the Bolsheviks could focus not so much on ancient monuments as on the ideologically and chronologically close structures of the era of the Great French Revolution: then the pyramids and ziggurats again became fashionable, in connection with attempts to establish the cult of Reason.
The construction of the new stone mausoleum was completed in 1930. Four years later, a commission of specialists came to the conclusion that the task of preserving Ilyich's body had been successfully completed. A separate excursion was organized for Western journalists, who wrote that instead of the real Lenin, there was a wax doll in the Mausoleum. Opening the glass lid of the sarcophagus, Zbarsky turned the leader's head to the right and left.
And if he gets up?
With the beginning of World War II, on July 3, 1941, Lenin's body was evacuated to Tyumen, where it was kept in the building of the local agricultural technical school. The Mausoleum itself was disguised as a residential building, although on November 7, 1941, the party leaders who stood on it greeted the troops who were sent to defend the capital.
The body of the leader was returned back on March 26, 1945. On June 24, the Soviet leadership hosted the Victory Parade, when fascist banners were thrown at the foot of the Mausoleum.
There were always plenty of rumors about the Mausoleum and its inhabitants. For example, that during the evacuation Lenin's body suffered and was replaced by a kind of double. Or that sometimes the body moves. It is rather difficult to comment on this in any way: again it remains “to believe - not to believe”. But there were plenty of attempts to commit an act of vandalism against the body of Ilyich by citizens who did not love the Soviet system.
Balm for the leaders
In the laboratory dedicated to the preservation of Lenin's body, in different years, other communist leaders were embalmed - the "Mongol Stalin" Horlogyin Choibalsan (1952), the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Klement Gottwald (1953), the leader of the Vietnamese revolution Ho Chi Minh (1969), Angolan President Agostinho Neto (1979), North Korean chiefs Kim Il Sung (1995) and Kim Jong Il (2011).
Dmitry MITYURIN