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.
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