The mausoleum, erected on the main square of the Russian capital, keeps within its walls a mummy that has long survived the regime established by the one whose flesh and blood she once was. Despite active discussions about the need to bury Lenin's body, since mummification does not correspond to either the current Christian tradition, or even the ancient pagan one, and it has lost its ideological significance, this symbol of political utopia still remains where it was placed in 1924.
Disagreements related to the burial of the leader
Materials published during the years of perestroika allow us to recreate the picture of those days when the country said goodbye to the man who managed to reverse the course of its history. The unreliability of the official version, which asserted that the decision to preserve Lenin's body, was made as a result of numerous appeals to the Central Committee of the Party of labor collectives and individual citizens, becomes obvious. They simply didn't exist. In addition, both individual leaders of the state headed by L. D. Trotsky, who then held the second most important government post, and Lenin’s widow, N. K. Krupskaya, opposed the mummification of the leader.
The initiator of the honors, more fitting for pharaohs than a statesman of the 20th century, was I. V. Stalin, who wanted to make his former opponent in the inner-party struggle some kind of icon of a new religion, and turn his resting place into a kind of communist Mecca. He succeeded in this to the full, and the mausoleum in Moscow for many decades became a place of pilgrimage for millions of citizens.
Hurry funeral
However, in that winter of 1924, the future “father of nations” had to assure her that the widow of the deceased leader had to agree that it was not about long-term preservation of the remains. According to him, it was only necessary to protect Lenin's body from decay for the period necessary for everyone to say goodbye to him. This could take several months, and it was for this reason that a temporary wooden crypt was needed.
The funeral, or rather, the laying of the body in a temporary mausoleum, was performed on January 27, and happened with great haste, since it was necessary to finish everything before the main opponent of mummification, Lev Trotsky, returned from the Caucasus. When he appeared in Moscow, he was faced with a fait accompli.
Problem that required immediate solution
To embalm the body, a group of scientists was involved, who applied in their work the method developed by Professor Abrikosov. At the initial stage, they injected a mixture of six liters of alcohol, glycerin and formaldehyde through the aorta. This helped to hide the outward signs of decay for some time. But soonLenin's body began to crack. The relics, which, according to their status, were supposed to be incorruptible, disintegrated before everyone's eyes. Immediate action was required.
A very remarkable initiative was shown at that time by a major party functionary Krasin. It occurred to him to freeze the body of the leader, similar to how it happened with the carcasses of mammoths, which have survived intact to this day. The proposal was accepted, and its implementation was not carried out only due to the fault of the German company, which delayed the delivery of the freezing equipment ordered by it.
Creation of Zbarsky's scientific group
The solution to the problem was under the personal control of F. E. Dzerzhinsky, who, on behalf of Stalin, was in charge of the funeral commission. It was quite obvious that in case of failure, scientists could pay for it with their lives. Their situation was further complicated by the fact that the classical technology of embalming was not suitable in this case, and none of the known methods was suitable. I had to rely only on my own creative thought.
Despite all the risk, the head of the group, Professor Boris Zbarsky, assured the government that, thanks to the developments of his friend, the head of the Department of Medicine at the Kharkov Institute, Professor Vorobyov, he and his colleagues would be able to stop the smoldering process. Since Lenin's body was by that time in critical condition, and there was no choice, Stalin agreed. This responsible, from an ideological point of view, work was entrusted to Zbarsky and a group of his employees, which included the Kharkov professor Vorobyov.
Later, a young student of the Medical Institute, the son of Boris Zbarsky, Ilya, joined them as an assistant. By the beginning of perestroika, he, an eighty-eight-year-old academician, remained the only living participant in those events, and thanks to him many details of the process are known today, as a result of which Lenin's mummy for decades was the object of worship of millions of people drugged with utopian ideas.
Start of the mummification process
Specially for the work, a basement located under the temporary mausoleum was equipped. Embalming began with the removal of the lungs, liver and spleen. Then the doctors thoroughly washed the chest of the deceased. The next step was the application of incisions throughout the body, necessary for the balm to penetrate into the tissues. It turned out that this operation required special permission from the Party Central Committee.
After receiving it and completing all the necessary procedures, Lenin's mummy was placed in a special solution consisting of glycerin, water and potassium acetate with the addition of quinine chlorine. Its formula, although considered secret at that time, was discovered at the end of the 19th century by the Russian scientist Melnikov-Razvedenkov. This composition was used by him in the anatomical preparation.
In the new laboratory
The granite mausoleum in Moscow was erected in 1929. It replaced the old wooden one built four years earlier. During its construction, they also took into account the need for premises for a special laboratory, in which Boris Zbarsky and his colleagues from now on worked.colleagues. Since their activities were of a particularly politically important nature, strict control was established over the scientists, carried out by specially assigned agents of the NKVD. The operating mode of the mausoleum was established taking into account all the necessary technological measures. They were then only in the development stage.
Scientific research
The preservation of Lenin's body required continuous research, since there were no proven technologies in the scientific practice of those years. In order to establish the reaction of body tissues to certain solutions, countless experiments were carried out on nameless dead people delivered to the laboratory.
As a result, a composition was developed that covered the mummy's face and hands several times a week. But caring for Lenin's body was not limited to this. Every year it was necessary to close the mausoleum for a month and a half, so that, having immersed the body in a bath, it was thoroughly impregnated with a special embalming preparation. Thus, it was possible to maintain the illusion of the incorruptibility of the leader of the world proletariat.
Correction of the appearance of the deceased
In order for the mummy of Lenin to have a fairly presentable appearance in the eyes of visitors, a lot of work was done, the results of which amazed everyone who first entered the interior of the mausoleum and involuntarily compared what they saw with the image of the leader in his last lifetime photographs.
Shortly before his death, Ilya Borisovich Zbarsky said that the dying thinness of Lenin's face was hidden with the help of specialfillers injected under the skin, and a “lively” color was given to it by red filters installed on light sources. In addition, glass balls were inserted into the eye sockets, filling their emptiness and giving the mummy an outward resemblance to the appearance of a leader. The lips under the mustache were sewn together, and in general, Lenin in the mausoleum, the photo of which is presented in the article, looked like a sleeping person.
Evacuation to Tyumen
The war years were a special period in the work to preserve Lenin's body. When the Germans approached Moscow, Stalin ordered the evacuation of the leader's remains to Tyumen. By this time, a small team of scientists involved in the conservation of the mummy suffered an irreparable loss - in 1939, under very mysterious circumstances, Professor Vorobyov died. As a result, Zbarsky, father and son, had to accompany the box with the body of the leader to Siberia.
Ilya Borisovich recalled that despite the importance of the mission entrusted to them, the difficulties caused by wartime constantly complicated the work. In Tyumen, it was impossible to get not only the necessary reagents, but even for ordinary distilled water, a special plane had to be sent to Omsk. Since the fact that Lenin's body was in Siberia was strictly classified, the laboratory for conspiracy was placed at a local school that trained agricultural workers. The mummy stayed there until the end of the war, guarded by a detachment of forty soldiers led by the commandant of the Mausoleum.
Questions related to Lenin's brain
In a conversation about the mummy of the leader preserved for many decadesa special place is occupied by questions connected with Lenin's brain. People of the older generation, of course, remember the legends about its uniqueness that once circulated. It should be noted that they have no real grounds for themselves. It is known that in 1928 the brain of the leader, extracted from the skull, was divided into parts, which were stored in the safe of the Institute of the Brain of the USSR, pre-coated with a layer of paraffin and placed in a solution of alcohol with formaldehyde.
Admission to them was closed, but the government made an exception for the famous German scientist Oscar Focht. His task was to establish those features of the structure of Lenin's brain, which served as a prerequisite for his so prolific thinking. The scientist worked at the Moscow Institute for five years, and during this time he conducted large-scale research. However, he did not find any structural differences from the brain of ordinary people.
Was that mythical gyrus?
It is believed that the reason for the emergence of subsequent legends was the statement, allegedly made by him at one of the conferences, that he had discovered one gyrus that exceeded the standard dimensions. However, another German scientist, the head of the Department of Neuropathology at the University of Berlin, Professor Jordi Servos-Navarro, who had the opportunity to study samples of Lenin's brain in 1974, said in an interview that his colleague, if he made his sensational statement, was only to please the Bolsheviks, to whom he had sympathy for.
However, the same scientist dispelled another commonthe legend that Lenin allegedly suffered from syphilis, which was carefully concealed by the communists. After conducting the most thorough study, he came to the conclusion that this assertion was untenable, noting that only a slight scar was discernible on the brain tissues, which arose as a result of a wound received during the assassination attempt on Lenin in 1918 by Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan.
Attempt on a mummy
It is curious to note that Lenin's mummy itself in the subsequent period repeatedly became the object of assassination attempts. For example, in 1934, a certain citizen Mitrofan Nikitin, having arrived at the mausoleum, fired several shots from a revolver into the body of the leader, after which he committed suicide. Several attempts were also made to break the glass sarcophagus, after which it had to be made of a particularly durable material.
Price List Immortality
With the advent of perestroika, when the halo of holiness around the man who became the evil genius of an entire era was dispelled, the secrets of the mausoleum related to the technology of embalming became the trade secret of the Ritual company, created by scientists who worked with Lenin's body. This company was engaged in embalming and restoring the appearance of mutilated corpses. The price list was so high (12 thousand euros for a week of work) that it allowed mainly relatives and friends of crime bosses who died during the bloody showdown to use her services.
In 1995, the North Korean government added to the company's client base, paying more than a million euros to embalm the body of their deceased leader, Kim Il Sung. Here they preparedthe eternal worship of the body of the head of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, Georgy Dimitrov, and his ideological brother Choibalsan, the leader of socialist Mongolia. The body of each of them in their homeland has become the same object of worship, like Lenin in the mausoleum, whose photo serves as a kind of advertisement.
Queue on Red Square
Today, discussions about the burial of this most famous mummy in the world do not stop. The annual cost of maintaining the Lenin Mausoleum is estimated at millions of dollars and is very burdensome for the budget. The cult of the leader of the proletariat, which once reached colossal proportions, is now supported only by small groups of tourists nostalgic for the communist past. The secrets of the mausoleum, so zealously kept for almost eight decades, have become available to everyone who is interested in this side of our history. History put everything in its place.
However, in spite of everything, a queue is forming on Red Square. The working hours of the mausoleum are limited these days, the admission of visitors is carried out only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 to 13:00. What will be the fate of the mummy, time will tell.
