Politics of Death: Vladimir Lenin's Corpse

With all the talk this week about the politics of death and about reburial, I thought I'd talk about a subject that was controversial back in the 1920s and has arisen once again to the topic of a heated debate: what to do with Vladimir Lenin's body. I mentioned briefly in another on of my posts ("In Soviet Russia....They Put the Big Kahunas in the Kremlin Wall") that Lenin, following his death in 1924, was embalmed and interred in his own mausoleum in Red Square, and that he has been re-embalmed ever since -- all of which was a giant political statement. How was it a political statement? The embalming and the obvious presence of the mausoleum were carefully chosen by the remaining Party leaders and were meant as reminders that technically Lenin was dead but he and the legitimacy of his rule lived on in his successors and the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. The embalming was also a sign not only to the people of the Soviet Union but also the rest of the world that the Soviets could hold their own in the scientific community (we may have a massive famine every now and then, but, hey! We can keep a body looking alive for decades...).

This was all in direct opposition not only to what Lenin wanted but also to Communist doctrine. Lenin's grandiose funeral and lying-in-state, the embalming, the mausoleum, and the Cult of Lenin all flew in the face of the social equality that Communism was supposed to espouse, not to mention the fact that it was all highly reminiscent of the tsars' funerals AND used a lot of religious-with-the-veneer-of-Communist imagery. Lenin's uncorrupted body and the Cult of Lenin essentially made him a Communist saint, for instance. Lenin would have found everything done to him and his legacy after he died absolutely abhorrent, but after all, he was dead -- there was nothing he could do about it.

With Lenin dead and the living Party constantly bombarding the public with the glory that was Lenin by way of these ostentatious displays, the public could see no fault in Lenin's leadership and therefore could not see fault in those that claimed to perpetuate it after he died -- the Party maintained power and political stability, just as it had hoped to by "disposing" of Lenin's body in such a way.

The embalming and the mausoleum were not decided upon straight away -- there was much debate within the party as to what exactly would be the best course of action. There were those that argued for a good Communist funeral and burial, but these efforts ultimately failed. The matter was closed.

Until recently. For almost 90 years Lenin has been on display in his cushy, temperature-controlled mausoleum, only being taken out for his regular re-embalmings.  Lately, however, many Russians have been urging the government to finally bury him and to close down the mausoleum. This request was actually placed shortly after the fall of the USSR by then-president Boris Yeltsin, but immediately after the fall of the Union there were too many people who were vehemently opposed to the removal of Lenin from his tomb. More recently, though, the idea has become much more welcomed. It would only make sense that after the political and cultural era Lenin began crumbled to the ground he should be removed from his symbolic position in the middle of Red Square. Of course, Russia's present-day Communist Party as well as those who still remain nostalgic for the Communist past hate the idea of burying Lenin.

The increased prominence of this issue last year probably had something to do with the upcoming Russian elections. It was a member of Russia's ruling political party -- United Russia -- that reopened the idea of burying Lenin, probably as a way to keep the party's popularity up in the lead-up to elections. Now that the elections are over and United Russia maintained a majority in the Duma elections in December and Valdimir Putin won the presidency (again...) a few weeks ago, the debate is cooling off again.

Current Mortuary Archaeology and Kinship: A Case Study of Iron Age Judah

Osborne, J.F., 2011. Secondary mortuary practice and the bench tomb: structure and practice in Iron Age Judah. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 70(1), pp. 35-53.


This article relates to the archaeological study of kinship by "seeking to illuminate the meaning associated specifically with the secondary handling of skeletal remains within the bench tomb and the implications this secondary mortuary practice has on current understandings of ancient Judahite social structure and cultural practice" (p. 36). Unlike the article we looked at in class today, it does  not attempt to discern kinship or aspects of a wider social structure based mainly on skeletal remains and distribution data in cemeteries but rather uses material culture in conjunction with ethnographic and textual evidence. 


The article reviews anthropological/ethnographic research to determine what ought to be practiced by those who engage in secondary mortuary treatments, then compares this to how secondary rituals were practiced with the Judahite bench tombs and how this relates to how beliefs were outlined in the Hebrew Bible. The article posits that the presence of bone repositories (as well as bone piles separate from benches in cases where actual repositories were absent) in bench tombs indicates them as locations of secondary interments and were, as it has been traditionally interpreted, used to allow continued use of the tomb but that these bench tombs also served a more important symbolic function for the Judahite people and how they related to their dead (p. 37).  The author's main purpose in discerning this symbolic function is to attempt to determine exactly how kinship systems were constructed and given meaning in ancient Israel via cultural practices such as burial as researches, for a long time now, have recognized that kinship played a highly important role in Judahite culture but have not really looked to determine how kinship was constituted through culture and the processes that went into constructing kinship. The author argues, then, that the secondary mortuary practices involved in the use of these bench tombs were an integral part in the (re)construction of overall social structure, including kinship (pp.37-8).


The article we read for class seems to be attempting to determine from mortuary evidence simply that some sort of kinship system existed at Hawikku and that this system was used for cemetery consideration. The article that I've discusses here, however, does something different: it recognizes a widely agreed upon and evidenced kinship system and its importance but uses its own study of mortuary evidence to determine how this kinship system was both created and reinforced in mortuary contexts rather than merely reflected (shows mortuary practices as an important and active part in the dynamic process of cultural creation as opposed to inactive cultural reflection). 


From this article it seems that a more recent trend in the study of kinship in archaeology is more towards the importance of mortuary practices in creating kinship and larger social systems, as opposed to the old method of using mortuary evidence as a way to simply determine the structure of kinship and looking at mortuary practices as a product of social structure rather than an actor in the creation of social structure. Recent scholarship accepts more the idea that mortuary rituals are a highly important and active part of forging society and are not merely a product of society.

Practice What You Preach: Evaluating A Website Based On Our Rubric

The group project that I am a part of deals with mass graves resulting from atrocities committed during WWII as well as the memorialization of such atrocities. SO the website I will be evaluating based on my group's rubric is this: http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/index.html. This site is titled "Lesser-Known Facts of WWII" and it has a large section dedicated to the atrocities of WWII.  For some sections I won't evaluate it completely based off our rubric because the rubric was created for an academic, archaeological project and therefore includes sections geared toward this (I will, for instance, not evaluate it based on method/approach because its approach is completely different than the one we need to take for our project and I will ignore the "research questions" part of our rubric because this site isn't about answering specific questions, it's about presenting general information).

In terms of organization presentation, I would classify this site as "Poor". The full site menu does not appear at the top but rather appears at the bottom of the home page, which takes a while to get to as there is a lot of information on the home page. The overall layout doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This all makes it somewhat difficult to navigate and means that information can be difficult to locate. The site, overall, is just not visually/aesthetically appealing -- too many different colours are used for text, there is no balance between images and text (way too much text for the sparse amount of images), and the site just looks outdated.

In terms of sources, I would also give this site a "Poor" because it doesn't give any. Forget thinking about the scholarly integrity of any sources because this is impossible to assess when no sources are cited, listed, or referenced in any way (what if you want more information?!).

For content and data I will not assess the site based on our rubric because the site is meant simply to give information to the public, not to assess or analyze it in any sort of academic way. For its own purposes, the site would actually receive an "Excellent" from me in terms of data because there's lots of it, it's interesting, it covers various areas, and it's easy to understand.

Written communication is "Good" -- it's easy to understand and presented fairly well. It doesn't flow particularly well though and contains some obvious mistakes.

Overall, this website is certainly interesting and thorough, but it is not an especially good website. It could definitely use a design update and some listed information sources. It's great if you want to learn a lot of simple, lesser-known (and some not so lesser-known) facts about WWII, but if you care about aesthetics at all, I would not recommend it.

Children and Death: What do they learn and what should they (not?) learn?

Obviously my personal experience is going to colour the way in which I believe children learn about death -- what it is, how it works, what it means, how to respond to it, and how to deal with it. Because my own experience influences how I think about these things, I'll begin by discussing my childhood connection(s) with death.

The most intimate experience I have with death -- but, paradoxically, also the least intimate -- is that of my father. He died in a skiing accident when I was six months old, an age where I could not notice or comprehend, let alone appreciate, the notion of death (of my father or anyone else). I grew up knowing that my father had died, that the family had experienced a loss and that they grieved. I, however, did not experience a loss nor did I grieve. I went through childhood going to visit my father's grave with my granny, taking flowers and cards to a person I never knew. Since growing up, I've realized that this was incredibly strange. I feel nowadays that I did these things because people expected it of me, that it was the right thing to do when someone had died, but it was never for me and it never felt right for me to be doing it. I was investing time in falsely "grieving" a person I never knew, I person I did not and could not miss. I couldn't say these things as a child because I had not yet realized that I felt them (although I did feel somewhat awkward and strange whenever I went to the cemetery -- a feeling whose source I was fully unaware of at the time -- where my granny would also take me to the grave of a family friend, a grave I felt more comfortable visiting than that of my own father because I had met this family friend at least twice...). As an older child/young adolescent -- let's say about 11/12 or so -- I started to realize why I had these strange feelings whenever I went to the cemetery, and it started to feel inappropriate of me to be going to this person's grave and leaving him flowers. I realized that cemeteries and graves were supposed to be places of memory -- something that had been taught to me unconsciously by observing my granny and my aunt grieve over my father and put time into selecting flowers, going to the cemetery, maintaining the grave, etc. However, there was nothing that the cemetery represented for me in terms of memory because I was supposed to be remembering a person it was impossible for me to remember. I was supposed to be remembering and getting over a loss I'd never experienced, grieving a person I'd never known. I stopped going to the cemetery around this age.

One of the more uncomfortable kinds of places I encountered during childhood. It's not that I was uncomfortable with death, rather that I had no reason and felt I had no right to be here (photo courtesy of http://www.vdfhs.com/cemeteries/north_okanagan/vernon/vernon_municipal_pleasant_valley/images/inside.jpg)

Throughout the years in which I did go to the cemetery, I'd only ever gone with my granny. I was taught the usual "cemeteries are places of remembrance and respect" and these usual practices we have regarding death, loss, and memory by my granny. It was taught to my by my granny that it's okay to talk about death sometimes (not that I ever did -- what would I have said?). This, however, was only one way I learned about death. My mother had (and has) a completely different approach to my father's death than my granny did. My mom takes the "I'm not going to talk about this or show feelings towards it" approach. My mom rarely talked about my father when I was a kid, and she still rarely does so (she does it more now). I understand this -- my mom doesn't like to cry in front of people and talking about her memories of my father's life and death would have caused her to be more emotional in front of my brother and I than she would have liked. The one exception to this was, and still is, the anniversary of my father's death. This is the one day a year that my mother openly grieves still.

 I also don't think I've known my mom, in the entire time since my father died, to have visited his grave. This confused me a lot as a child, especially since I was made to go to the grave of a person to which I had no real connection other than a biological one. For years and years I could not figure out why my mom never visited her husband's grave when people like my granny and my aunt did. When I got to that weird age when I started realizing why I felt awkward going to the cemetery, I finally asked my mom why she didn't go. Her answer was simple: "Because I don't believe your dad is there." This was the first time I had ever encountered the notion of the cemetery not being the main place of interacting with the souls of the dead.

The fact that I was taught two very different versions of how to deal with death -- my granny's approach of active commemoration and my mother's approach of private remembrance -- and the fact that I was forced into recognizing a death that I had not personally felt combined to give me a fairly confused outlook on death, grief, and remembrance. I've had to figure out a lot of things relating to these on my own over the last few years. I came to fully realize that it was odd and somewhat wrong of me to pretend to grieve for someone that it was impossible for me to do this for. I now feel like that was an infringement on the real right to grief and commemoration that the rest of my family has. I've realized that I only acted in that manner as a child because people taught me to do that, people expected it of me so that's how I was supposed to behave. I've also realized that my family's pressure on me to feel that loss was probably not the best approach in teaching me about death. It has fostered in me some strange thoughts on death and has reduced my sentimentality because I now have a mental connection between grief practices and false intent behind them. I can intellectually comprehend the fact that there is real intent behind grief practices and that they are usually motivated by a legitimate sense of loss. All my activities surrounding death, however, have not been motivated by this. They have been motivated by a childhood desire to do what people expect of me, to behave like a good little kid. I have a newfound cynicism regarding these topics now, and it leads me to think things like going to the cemetery and buying flowers for the dead, big expensive funerals, and burial with things in the coffin and a headstone can be somewhat useless and, sometimes, too mushy.

These ideas are also coloured by the fact that no one I've ever been close to has died yet. I haven't had the real feeling of deep loss in my entire almost 20 years. I'm sure when this does happen, my cynicism about death and funerary/remembrance practices will fade, but for now my concrete views on death, a weird mixture of my mom's distant approach to death and my own weird feelings on my childhood visits to the cemetery, are as follows: do something useful with the body (science, coral reef, etc.), and have a funeral as a form of closure but don't spend extravagant amounts of money. Basically, since the messages I received about exactly how to grieve were so jumbled,  grief is something that I think people should practice however they feel is right for them. Having a mode of loss forced upon me as a child and realizing that grief is one of the most personal things people can experience had led me to believe that individualized grief practices are the way to go. People should demonstrate their mode of grief to their children, but they should also think about how their kids go through these experiences because kids experience things differently than adults. Parents, I think, should make sure their kids know that there is more than one way to grieve and more than one way to handle and view death. Kids should know about different ways of doing this so that they can figure out whatever works best for them with as little confusion as possible.

photo courtesy of  www.all-about-psychology.com/ grief-and-loss.htm

This gets to my thoughts on the "100 Fact About Mummies" books for kids and Ericka's question of whether or not kids should be seeing these kinds of images and reading about things such as human sacrifice in ancient cultures. My answer to this is: why the heck not? This kind of book can help to show kids that there are ways to deal with death other than what they're used to, and also show them that other people do things differently than we do in general, leading to (hopefully) and early acceptance of other, very different cultures (and possible cultivate some future anthropology students?). I find that death can be kept at a great distance from children in our society unless people they are very close to die. This can make the death of others an extremely traumatizing experience (which, yes, death should be affective, but should it cause as much emotional turmoil as it tends to for us). I think teaching children about death and the different ways of dealing with it can make them better equipped to do so and could give them a richer understanding of what death means to them as well as others. My view that children should be taught that there are different ways of dealing with death may seem odd given the fact that I've expressed some frustration with how my exposure to two different styles of dealing with death caused me some confusion. However, I feel like I was never actually taught that these other methods (other than my mom's and my granny's) existed and I always felt like I wasn't supposed to make a synthesis between the ways I was taught. I rather felt like I was being pulled between the two approaches, not that it was okay to pick one, the other, a mixture of both, or something completely different. I think telling kids about various modes of grief while performing one yourself, explaining to them that your method is only one of many and that grief is too personal to be practiced because you think it's expected of you, and being openly discursive about death with kids (while still being sensitive to the fact that they're little kids...) is a good approach to teaching kids about death.

The idea that children shouldn't be exposed to the more graphic kinds of death and dealing with it, such as mummification, seems a little silly to me. While I don't necessarily approve of exposing kids to things such as violent video games and graphic movies, I think dealing with something as pervasive, personal, important, and influential as death and grieving requires us to be less squeamish. Our mode of teaching kids about death by telling them, for instance, that a person isn't "dead" but is just "gone now" or "passed away" -- a very euphemistic method -- teaches kids that death needs to be kept at an extreme distance and that open dialogue about death can't occur. I know I never really felt like I could talk about death as a kid, and if I did it had to be in such euphemistic and softened terms because using words like "dead" and "death" were seen by my older families members as too harsh and, I think, too realistic. This attempt at keeping death at as much of a distance as possible leads, I think, to death being more emotionally traumatizing and shocking because we refuse to deal with it.

photo courtesy of http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/uploaded_images/euphemism_gif-743732-720565.png