Lenin: We Will Bury You?

When Lenin’s body was still warm, a special emergency committee was formed to keep him “more alive than the living”, in the words of Mayakovsky. It was called the Immortalisation Commission.

The Soviet Union’s top scientists were assembled to work against all odds. As one remarked, when Lenin was shown to them, “the left hand was turning a greenish-grey colour; the ears had crumpled up completely.”

But the gleaming product of their labour, which so horrified Lenin’s widow Krupskaya (who felt that mummifying her late husband may not be classiest way to honour him) may be nearing its sell-by date, if  www.goodbyelenin.ru is any indication.

Launched by a senior United Russia politician, the rigged site invites people to vote on whether to finally bury Lenin – one of the world’s last remaining embalmed statesmen. In the aftermath of the 87th anniversary of his death, Russia’s ruling party is edging towards the liberal policy of burying Lenin – something it has traditionally opposed along with the Communists. Typically, Gorbachev finds himself on the fence.

My longstanding morbid fascination with mummified Lenin compelled me to go on goodbyelenin.ru and vote against burying him.  I’ve been to see old Vlad many times (my dad even remembers going when Lenin and Stalin were lying there side by side, Mausoleum flatmates) and let me tell you: he looks so real!

Shuffling hurriedly past him in that hushed, chilly dimness, you really do feel like he will wake up at any time.  Keeping him this way is a triumph of Russian science – and the group of experts responsible for him are the last of their kind in the world. (Watch this rare video of them washing Lenin!)

In fact, they have recently been awarded medals by the Vietnamese government for their work on mummified Uncle Ho. They have even appeared on Broadway! They are Nobel Prize material, and the government wants to make them unemployed.

And whatever the misguided reasons for putting him there, mummified Lenin is here; the damage has already been done.

Plus, however grotesquely, he represents the country’s link with its utopian, modernist past – the memory of an impulse, however bloody, wasteful and fanatical, that built modern Russia as we know it.

Lenin’s embalmed body symbolises an epoch whose architects believed they could not only remake history and humanity, but cheat death itself. Just because that particular dream turned out badly does not discredit audacity; or its cautionary power. It reminds us just how circumscribed and shallow are the limits of our current thinking: Lenin is keeping Utopianism alive.

But the vote is also against Russia’s peculiar obsession with rewriting its history for short term political gain. It’s clear that burying Lenin is a cheap pre-election ploy by a party desperate to seem modern and progressive without offering any such meaningful policies.

Embalming Lenin may have been a folly, but burying him would be an even bigger one.