The mausoleum in the Kremlin is 100 years old, but only 23% of Lenin remains in it: the history of the strangest political monument in the world

On August 1, 1924, six months after the death of Vladimir Lenin, a mausoleum was opened on Red Square in Moscow, where the body of the Bolshevik leader was put on display. Since then, the mausoleum has served as the main tribune of the country; the leader’s body was evacuated during the war and then returned to its place. For several years, the dead Stalin was “settled” with Lenin. With the collapse of the USSR, Lenin’s body was demanded to be buried, but for a hundred years now the unburied body has been in the very heart of the country of once “victorious socialism,” writes Air force.

Фото: Depositphotos

Marxist relics

It is interesting that the question of building a mausoleum was first raised during the life of the Bolshevik leader. Historians and publicists Alexei Abramov and Nikolai Zenkovich write that Stalin convened a meeting of party leaders in November 1923, where this topic was raised. Lenin was still alive, but it was obvious that death was about to come.

It was Stalin who suggested embalming and preserving Lenin’s body. The opposition opposed it. Leon Trotsky said that relics and Marxism have nothing in common. Nikolai Bukharin insisted that mummifying the “leader of the revolution” would be an insult to his memory.

In the 1930s, Trotsky, Bukharin and other oppositionists will be destroyed.

By the way, Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya also asked not to turn her husband’s body into an object of worship.

But Stalin, who dreamed of absolute power, referred to letters from “working collectives” (real or written by Stalin’s entourage - it is no longer possible to determine). They said that “Lenin must always be with us.”

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Endless goodbye

The first mausoleum was small, only three meters high. Its author was the architect Alexey Shchusev. The structure was erected for Lenin’s funeral in less than three days.

Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Until the end of March, millions of people wishing to say goodbye to the Bolshevik leader passed through the first mausoleum.

This is how this tradition began: an eternal line of mourners passing by the coffin. A farewell that lasts for years and decades.

By the summer of 1924, the idea of ​​embalming Lenin’s body and putting it on public display had finally taken shape.

Architect Shchusev began designing a larger-scale structure for the leader’s final resting place. At this time, scientists Alexei Vorobyov and Boris Zbarsky began work on a technology for embalming Lenin’s body, which would allow it to be preserved for decades.

On August 1, 1924, the mausoleum opened. It was still wooden, but the size and shape resembled the current one. The granite mausoleum was built by the fall of 1930. He became the object of a new “cult” of sorts. This kind of deification of power corresponded to the views and tastes of the new sovereign leader of the USSR.

Interestingly, the day of Lenin's death was celebrated by the Soviet nomenklatura even more than his birthday on April 22. In approximately the same way, in the Orthodox tradition, the days of death of saints are valued, because it was not for nothing that Stalin studied at the theological seminary at one time. This tradition changed only a few years after the death of Stalin himself in March 1953.

Stalin's settlement

The mausoleum soon turned into one of the sacred symbols of the USSR. Standing on its podium, Stalin and his entourage received parades. In July 1941, Lenin's corpse was evacuated to Tyumen, where scientists worked on even more durable recipes for embalming the body. Dead Lenin stayed in Tyumen until the winter of 1945, and then he was returned to Moscow.

The scientist Alexei Vorobyov died of natural causes in 1937, Boris Zbarsky served a year and a half in prison in the 1950s for the “Doctors’ Case,” the last repressive Stalinist campaign. But since 1924, the team of specialists monitoring the condition of Lenin’s body has already grown to a whole laboratory, which is still working today.

In 1953, after Stalin’s death, it was decided to embalm and display his body in the mausoleum. But the tyrant was unlucky from the very beginning: the skin on the body, especially on the face, was in very poor condition, and this interfered with embalming.

He was nevertheless placed in a mausoleum. The new inscription “LENIN STALIN” was put on top of the old one in a hurry. Sometimes it was washed away by the rains and the letters “LENIN” appeared under it.

After the 1961th Congress of the CPSU, at which Khrushchev’s historical report on the cult of personality and mass repression was made, Stalin’s body was taken out of the mausoleum in XNUMX and buried near the Kremlin wall.

After the war and until the collapse of the USSR, the mausoleum was a place of pilgrimage and a kind of tourist attraction (which, however, remains to this day).

In 1945, at the Victory Parade, Soviet soldiers threw Nazi Germany flags at the foot of the mausoleum. In the 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev received the first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the podium of the mausoleum.

After the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, a joke was born: the inscription “LENIN” on the mausoleum will now be replaced with “LENIN”.

In the period from the 1950s to the late 1970s, people dissatisfied with the Soviet system threw stones, a hammer and a sledgehammer, and Molotov cocktails at the sarcophagus containing Lenin’s body more than a dozen times. Each time it ended with the capture of the attacker and sending him for compulsory treatment. In 1973, an explosive device killed several visitors to the mausoleum. After this, the glass above the sarcophagus with Lenin’s body was replaced with bulletproof glass.

Save the mausoleum

The proposal to bury Lenin's body was first made in 1989 at the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR. This idea was supported by famous politicians and public figures of those times: the ideologist of perestroika Alexander Yakovlev, the mayor of Leningrad (later St. Petersburg) Anatoly Sobchak, director Mark Zakharov, singer Igor Talkov and many others.

Over the next ten years, the fight for Lenin’s mausoleum and body will become one of the main tasks of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the successor to the CPSU. First Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and then President Boris Yeltsin insisted on its demolition, who, as a matter of principle, spoke on Red Square not from the podium of the mausoleum, but from the podium built next to it.

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The laboratory that monitored the condition of Lenin’s body began to experience difficult times in the early 1990s. Funding dried up, the laboratory became part of the Russian Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants.

Since the mid-1990s, Russian television channels have broadcast several documentaries about the mausoleum and the preservation of Lenin’s body. Some facts were shocking. For example, it turned out that after almost 100 years, 23% of the original body remained, the rest was replaced by artificial parts. As Yegor Letov sang, “And our father Lenin is completely dead. It decomposed into mold and linden honey.” By the way, formalin, alcohol and glycerin are still used among the main substances for embalming. In the last 20 years, the body has not undergone any noticeable physical changes.

By the end of the 1990s, the idea of ​​​​reburying Lenin's body lost relevance. Vladimir Putin at least three times - in 2001, 2010 and 2016 - repeated the idea that there is no need to take any actions with the mausoleum that could lead to a split in society. In 2017, a similar position was expressed by the Russian Orthodox Church, which previously often advocated burial.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is still trying to protect the mausoleum even in conditions when no one attacks it. In May 2024, deputy party chairman Yuri Afonin said that the building had become “a symbol of the fight against fascism” now that Russia is fighting “modern fascism.”

There are still excursions to the Lenin Mausoleum to this day. On Google Maps and the travel site Tripadvisor, it has an average rating of more than four out of five. Reviews range from “my child was scared because of his yellow face” to “this place is worth visiting for everyone who has heard first-hand, or at least from their grandfathers or fathers, what the Soviet era is.”

Leaders, heroes, presidents

In the modern world, there are about 100 different mausoleums on all continents. In the vast majority of them, the remains are either buried or cremated.

The oldest mausoleum dates back to the 300s BC. It is located on the territory of modern Turkey, the remains of King Mausolus rested in it, and the word “mausoleum” came from his name.

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In the 21st century, mausoleums are built mainly for new dictators and authoritarian rulers. For example, the first president of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, and the first head of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, are buried there.

In the socialist countries of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century they tried to continue the Soviet tradition, but it did not last long. The mausoleum of the “leader of the Bulgarian people” Georgi Dimitrov stood from 1949 until the 1990s, then the body of the leader of the Bulgarian communists was buried, and the mausoleum building itself had to be blown up due to its massiveness.

The body of the leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald, lay in a mausoleum in Prague from the mid-1950s until 1962. During this time it decomposed and he was cremated.

Mausoleums containing the embalmed bodies of leaders are now popular in communist countries in east and southeast Asia. The bodies of the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong, and the creator of modern Vietnamese statehood, Ho Chi Minh, are on public display.

In North Korea there is a mausoleum of the founder of the state, Kim Il Sung, as well as his son and successor Kim Jong Il.

Perhaps only the mausoleum in Ukrainian Vinnitsa is worth mentioning separately. It contains not a tyrant and dictator, but the great doctor Nikolai Pirogov, who was the founder of military field surgery and one of the first in the world to use anesthesia. His body was allowed to be put on public display with the consent of the church, “so that students and successors... could contemplate his bright appearance.”

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