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Stalin dreamed of seeing Lenin preserved even before he was gone. For centuries, the Russian Orthodox Church had built its legitimacy on the bones of dead saints, revering their earthly remains. If the Soviet state was to secure the faith of its citizens -- if it was to become a new opiate for the masses -- it needed relics of its own to flaunt. And so, in typical Soviet fashion, a Committee for the Immortalization of Lenin's Memory was formed within days of the dictator's death, presided over by Felix Dzerzhinsky, chief of the secret police. While a Soviet research institute studied Lenin's brain -- their orders were to determine that he was a genius -- the politicians debated whether to refrigerate his body or to embalm it. All the scientists consulted argued that refrigeration wouldn't stop the decaying action of enzymes. Tests conducted on spare corpses confirmed their claims. Alas, it was a high-ranking Bolshevik who had proposed putting Lenin on ice -- like any good Marxist, he was uninterested in irrefutable evidence -- so their advice was ignored. The committee voted to refrigerate Lenin. Unsurprisingly, the body began to rot. The left hand turned greenish-gray. The ears crumpled. Unsurprisingly again, the committee reversed its vote. The scientists were called back to Moscow and were offered whatever they wanted to save the dead father of communism.

Rememberances and Celebrations Lenin's Embalmers

What they wanted was a bath in which to soak the deteriorating corpse. Metal, they recognized, might react with the embalming fluid, so Lenin's embalmers opted for rubber. Of course, this being Russia, there wasn't a rubber bath to be had, but there was a rubber factory in Moscow's outskirts. Dzerzhinsky went to place the order himself. Zbarsky relates the tale in his Soviet deadpan: "He was disappointed -- to say the least -- to find that as it was a Saturday no one was working. He therefore scoured the whole neighbourhood until he found the manager, and then made him sound the factory alarm. This brought the workers who lived nearby running, thinking there was a fire. They were taken aback to find themselves being ordered to make a rubber bath by the head of the secret police, but the order was at once carried out."

Zbarsky's father was one of the scientists charged with preserving Lenin's corpse, and Zbarsky chose to follow him to the mausoleum largely because for decades it remained the most generously-funded research institution in the Soviet Union, a place of ever-growing bureaucracy where alcohol purchased for the purpose of embalming was imbibed late at night and, more scandalously, scientists on staff could get away with conducting their own research -- pure science frowned upon by true Bolsheviks -- when they weren't tending to the corporeal needs of their savior. Technically speaking, "Lenin's Embalmers" is Zbarsky's autobiography, but in the end it has as little to do with his legacy as Susan Lowder's tombstone has to do with Sedlitz Powder. Zbarsky is, like his father and even Stalin himself, a pawn in the tale of Lenin's afterlife, one more sap enlisted to reduce the communist system to absurdity on behalf of its endlessly mischievous founder. As the years passed and terror became its own ideology, Lenin's flights grew more fanciful: At the end of World War II, the Soviet government ordered Zbarsky to wander the blackened streets of Berlin in a borrowed Red Army uniform, pillaging university classrooms for chemicals needed to replace the morticians' depleted supplies. By the 1990s, the mausoleum was supplementing its income by servicing murdered local gangsters.

Lenin's corpse undoubtedly served Stalin's ends in the public sphere -- for decades millions of Soviet citizens paid tribute to the system by visiting his final resting place -- but to those who served him, Lenin offered an unforgettable lesson in communism's hypocrisy. Lenin was a genius once his brain was removed; like the picture of Dorian Gray projected across an entire country, his body survived even as his philosophy deteriorated.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin laughed last. Laughter is our end.
salon.com | July 2, 1999

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