Exactly 102 years ago, Soviet doctors embalmed the body of the deceased leader of the world proletariat. On January 23, the casket with Lenin’s remains was brought from the Moscow region to the capital. Within a few days, over a million people took part in the solemn farewell. Thereupon, letters from “the workers” were published in newspapers, calling for Lenin’s body to be preserved for future generations.
In fact, these letters were initiated by Stalin. He insisted on preserving Lenin “with the most modern methods for many years” and placing him in a specially erected glass mausoleum.
Lenin’s comrades spoke out against it—Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin called it an “insult to Lenin’s memory.” Nadezhda Krupskaya was also against it. Yet Stalin prevailed: The sacralization of the dead Lenin was politically useful to him and gave the slogan “Stalin is Lenin today” additional weight.
is the chairwoman of the organization “Future Memorial.” Her book, “The Key Would Still Fit: Moscow Memories,” is currently published by Droemer.
The marble mausoleum, erected in place of the provisional tomb, became the country’s most important sacred site. From here, Stalin and his successors greeted cheering crowds and oversaw military and sports parades.
For half a century Lenin became a symbol to which both perpetrators and their victims referred. In the Great Terror, many appealed to the “good Lenin” in contrast to his supposed counterpart Stalin, who had “usurped” the ideals of the revolution. This image of the benevolent Lenin, the guardian of the people, persisted for a long time. After Stalin’s death, the changes in the country—the abandonment of mass terror, the dissolution of the Gulag, the rehabilitation of victims—were described in party language as a “return to Leninist norms.” However, this formula served to preserve the party and state system.
The Honor Guard Was Abolished
In the 1990s, it seemed as if society was ready for a farewell. The line in front of the first McDonald’s in Moscow was noticeably longer than the line in front of the mausoleum – and that was a sign. Desacralization began: The Honor Guard was abolished, Lenin’s figure turned into a tourist souvenir – in a Matryoshka doll from which Stalin “emerged,” followed by other Soviet leaders.
With the onset of Perestroika, Lenin’s image took on new contours. Published archival documents showed the brutality with which Lenin acted from the outset of his rise to power – in the Civil War as well as in the creation of the system on which later Stalinism was built. It seemed that the real farewell had finally begun. Yet it did not come to pass.
Not only out of Boris Yeltsin’s fear of protests by the Communists. In the mid-1990s, a growing nostalgia for the Soviet era became visible – and with it, the Leninist-Stalinist tradition revived. Putin’s historical mythology rests on this nostalgia.
Part of an Imperial Construct
Putin, who presents himself as an Orthodox Christian, condemns the October Revolution of 1917 and supports the cult around the Tsarist family – thus affirming all that Lenin fought against – would have supported removing Lenin from the mausoleum. Yet Lenin is – albeit to a lesser extent than Stalin – part of the Soviet memory that Putin is restoring today, as part of a national-imperial construct.
Therefore the mausoleum is not a museum, but remains as a symbol of the mythologized Soviet memory the most important – though not the only – Lenin monument in Russia: there are around 30,000 in total.
