Is it true that the Mausoleum was built according to the drawings of the Babylonian ziggurats? Did scientists work on the embalming of Lenin's body using occult sciences? Endless secrets, riddles and conjectures surround this symbol of the Soviet era throughout its existence.
Many are surprised that the militant atheists from the CPSU (b) decided not to bury Vladimir Lenin, but to put it on public display. But in general, their actions are understandable. Taking away the faith in Christ from the people, they wanted to give them a new God. Nikolai Bukharin wrote in a private letter: "We … instead of icons, we hung the leaders, and we will try to open the relics of Ilyich under communist sauce for Pakhom and the" lower classes ".
And the idea of a mausoleum and mummification may have come from the hype from the main archaeological sensation of the time. In 1923, the world press enthusiastically described the found tomb of Tutankhamun and the untold treasures recovered from it. Everyone, young and old, discussed the mystery of the pharaoh's mummy, which had not decayed for 3 millennia. So the analogies between the embalming of the pharaohs and Lenin suggest themselves.
The pyramid project really existed. It was proposed by the outstanding architect Fyodor Shekhtel. But in the end, instead of the Egyptian pyramid, a Mausoleum was erected, similar to the Babylonian ziggurat or the step pyramid of South America.
Ur city ziggurat
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Sacred body
His comrades-in-arms began to discuss Lenin's funeral even before the death of their leader. People's headman Kalinin told them: “This terrible event should not take us by surprise. If we bury Vladimir Ilyich, the funeral should be as magnificent as the world has never seen before. " Stalin agreed with him and said: "Some comrades believe that modern science has the ability to preserve the body of the deceased with the help of embalming in order to allow our minds to get used to the idea that Lenin is not among us after all."
And after the death of Vladimir Ilyich, letters and telegrams from working people from all over the country showered in the Central Committee with an appeal to preserve the body of dear Ilyich and place it in a sarcophagus. The decision had already been taken by a narrow circle by that time. And although the leader's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, his sisters Anna and Maria, as well as brother Dmitry did not agree with this idea, the "people's opinion" was more important. Ilyich's body became the property of the party, and a real embalming experiment was performed on it.
Six days after the death of the leader, already on the day of Lenin's funeral - January 27, 1924 - the first wooden mausoleum was erected on Red Square, designed by Alexei Shchusev. It was built in the form of a cube topped with a three-stage pyramid. A few months later, the mausoleum was rebuilt, and stands were erected on its sides. This was also a temporary wooden version of the structure.
In 1930, the familiar and now familiar Mausoleum, decorated with marble, labrador and crimson quartzite, finally appeared. There is a lobby and a funeral hall inside the building. There are also a number of office premises. The administration of the Mausoleum works in them. One of the secret rooms is called "government" - from it members of the Politburo rose to the podium of the Mausoleum during public holidays.
Ilyich's spirit
Joseph Stalin was one of the main initiators of the construction of a magnificent tomb for Lenin. And when in 1953 he himself left the mortal world, the "communist god" was already two-sided, it was not by chance that the party was called by the names of Lenin and Stalin. Naturally, together they found rest in the Mausoleum.
It became known as the "Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin ". Moreover, Stalin continued to lie there even after his cult was debunked at the XX Congress of the CPSU. A paradoxical situation has developed. At the ideological level, Stalin was taken out of the host of "gods", equated with mere mortals and declared almost a heretic. And crowds of people continued to worship his tomb every day.
In 1961, at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, the people were first promised that soon the Soviet people would live under communism. And then they decided that the first step for this was to get rid of the "vestige of the past." On the last day of the congress, the old Bolshevik woman Dora Lazurkina spoke. And she spoke in a completely mystical vein: "Yesterday I consulted with Ilyich, as if he stood in front of me as if he were alive and said: I hate being next to Stalin, who brought so many troubles to the party."
This was followed by stormy, prolonged applause, and the floor was given to the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Nikolai Podgorny, who made a proposal to decide on the removal of Stalin's body from the Mausoleum. As usual, no one dared raise a hand "against".
Under cover of the night
The execution of the decision of the congress was not postponed indefinitely, and the very next day, as it got dark, Red Square was blocked for the rehearsal of the parade. Two companies of machine gunners were deployed near the Mausoleum and got down to business.
For the burial of Stalin by the decision of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, a special commission of five people was created, headed by the chairman of the Party Control Committee under the Central Committee of the CPSU, Nikolai Shvernik. The work was supervised by General Nikolai Zakharov, who headed the 9th Directorate of the KGB, and the commandant of the Kremlin, Andrei Vedenin. Only 30 people took part in the operation, but by morning everything was ready.
Pyramid layout
Eight officers through the back door carried out the coffin with Stalin's body from the Mausoleum, brought it to the grave near the Kremlin wall, at the bottom of which a kind of sarcophagus was made of eight slabs, and placed it on wooden stands. There were no military salutes, no funeral speeches. The next day, a slab with the date of birth and death of Stalin was installed over the grave. Only in 1970 was it replaced with a bust by the sculptor Nikolai Tomsky.
On the morning of November 1, 1961, a traditional queue lined up in front of the Mausoleum. At first, people were surprised to find that only one surname flaunts on the slab above the Mausoleum - Lenin. And then they noted with amazement that instead of two bodies, only one rests in the Mausoleum.
The most striking thing is that there was no protest reaction in society. The people took the secret reburial of the former leader, with whose name he went on the attack at the front, surprisingly calmly. The party said "it is necessary" - so, so be it.
Mystic or Science?
Supporters of mysticism believe that the Mausoleum is a ziggurat not only in form, but also in essence. In their opinion, in every Babylonian ziggurat was kept a teraphim - a mummified human head with magical properties. The functions of a teraphim in the case of the Mausoleum are performed by the body of Vladimir Lenin.
And everything was started in order to irradiate people with some invisible rays, inspiring respect for the socialist system. The antenna transmitting this radiation is supposedly a niche to the right of the entrance. Parades pass by during public holidays; here, in Soviet times, there was a long line of people wishing to get to the Soviet shrine.
To the disappointment of the apologists of the mysterious versions, the radiation of the Mausoleum is not detected by any ultra-precise physical devices. As for the "teraphim", the term is not Babylonian, but ancient Hebrew. Even before believing in one God, the Jews kept ancestral idols in their homes - rude figurines resembling a person. In fact, it is the same as the antique lares and penates. This concept has nothing to do with the Babylonian ziggurats. As with the Moscow Mausoleum.
The mummified body of the leader of the world revolution is no less surprising. More precisely, not mummified, but embalmed. The unique operation began only in March 1924, that is, two months after Lenin's death. The body by that time was no longer in the best condition. The outstanding chemist Boris Zbarsky and his colleague Vladimir Vorobyov were entrusted with responsible work.
Scientists had to not only embalm the body, but also first develop the technique itself, since before that there was nothing like it in the world. It is clear that the cost of the error was extremely high. As a result, the success of the embalming team was declared a "scientific achievement of world significance." However, many are sure that science alone was not enough. Allegedly, Zbarsky in his work used the works of the Austrian zoologist Paul Kammerer, who, in addition to biology, was no stranger to occultism.
Kammerer is even credited with knowing the secrets of the magicians of Ancient Egypt. It was this mystical knowledge of the Austrian that allegedly helped Soviet scientists to preserve Lenin's body. Alas, Kammerer is not drawn to a figure endowed with power and involvement in secrets. His scientific biography is quite
inglorious and tragic - in 1926 he committed suicide after being convicted of gross falsification of experiments. Trying to prove that salamanders change colors depending on the color of the soil on which they live, he injected ink under the skin of the poor amphibians. In the USSR, however, he was really welcomed, as he adhered to atheism and anti-racism, for which he was even persecuted in conservative Europe.
Lenin's embalmed body did not always rest peacefully in the sarcophagus. At the beginning of the war, he was evacuated to Tyumen in a special sealed coffin soaked in paraffin. But the details of how the leader's body was kept from July 1941 to April 1945 are still carefully hidden. Meanwhile, according to unverified information, they did not follow him properly. Up to the point that they even dropped it into boiling water when trying to wash.
The strict regime established by academician Zbarsky demanded that the embalmed body be lowered into a bath with a special solution every 18 months. Whether this was done in Tyumen is unknown. Therefore, many are sure that now in the Mausoleum lies not Lenin at all, but a wax doll. Others argue that no more than 10-15% of the body of the real Ilyich survived.
War with the past
Over the years of the Mausoleum's existence, more than a dozen different incidents have occurred in and around it. Those who were dissatisfied with the Soviet system tried to take out their emotions on the most sacred thing - on the embalmed body of the leader. The first mausoleum terrorist in March 1934 was Mitrofan Nikitin, an employee of one of the state farms, who decided to take revenge on the dead Lenin for all the horrors of dispossession and collectivization.
Nikitin fired a revolver at Ilyich twice, but missed. He fired the third shot into his heart. A note was found in his pocket, criticizing the current situation in the country.
After this incident, it became impossible to carry weapons to the Mausoleum. But this did not stop those who wanted to vent their anger. In 1957, a certain Romanov threw a bottle of ink into the sarcophagi of the two leaders. In 1959, the glass of one of the sarcophagi was broken with a hammer. And in 1960, one of the visitors jumped on the barrier and smashed the glass with his feet. Shards of glass damaged the skin of Lenin's body, and the Mausoleum was then closed for a month. In 1961 and 1962, they threw stones at Lenin.
The first event leading to loss of life occurred in September 1967. A resident of Kaunas named Krysanov came to Red Square in a belt filled with explosives. Unable to get inside, he blew himself up in front of the Mausoleum. The terrorist himself and several people were killed. In 1973, another criminal followed in his footsteps, who managed to enter the funeral hall with an improvised explosive device under his coat.
The explosion killed the attacker himself, as well as a married couple who had arrived from Astrakhan. Several children were injured. But the sarcophagus, covered with bulletproof glass after the previous incident, was not damaged, although it was in it, according to the expert opinion, that the main force of the explosion was directed. The terrorist's identity remained unidentified. Only scraps of documents were found, from which it followed that he had previously been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Oleg LOGINOV, Kirill IVANOV