Body language: the many afterlives of Lenin, from art object to science experiment

It took Lenin a long time to die; 93 years later, some would say he’s still not at rest. Sequestered in his Gorky estate from the summer of 1921 – where 26 doctors worked to keep the “heart of the Revolution” beating – between May 1922 and his death in January 1924 he suffered three severe strokes, temporary paralysis and loss of speech. In a way, these final two years served as a forewarning of what was to come for the late Vladimir Ilych: a man of ferocious intent and charisma no longer able to impose his will on the world, he became an object to be deployed by others. What should we do with this object today?

In his terminal illness Lenin was shut out of state business by former acolytes jostling to gain influence in the reshuffled Party. The idea of Lenin became more important as his physical self waned into insignificance: whoever had the most credible claim to represent the continuation of the great man’s great plan would gain in prestige. In a sense, “Leninism” was invented at precisely the moment Lenin died.

Alexei Yurchak, an anthropologist at Berkeley, has recently shown that the no one in the Party really knew what to do with Lenin’s body. After his death the body was transported to Moscow and laid in state at the House of Trade Unions for six days. Thousands visited in freezing temperatures. Then the dearly departed was “interred” in a temporary wooden mausoleum on Red Square. Meanwhile, former colleagues anxiously debated what to do next, relying on the bitter Moscow winter to hold off the decomposition process until a decision had been made. Should they bury him? Freeze him? Submerge him in embalming fluid like a pickled gherkin? The eventual solution – an experimental embalming procedure designed on the fly by Drs Vladimir Vorobiev and Boris Zbarsky – was an unexpected compromise. Later that year, the body was moved to a new, sturdier mausoleum designed by constructivist luminary Alexey Shchusev, who also designed the building’s final ziggurat form in 1930. Six years dead, Lenin had a new home.

A new body, too. Vorobiev and Zbarsky’s procedure was dynamic, requiring regular re-embalming, bathing, re-sculpting and the replacement of original organic materials with artificial or grafted replacements. Yurchak cites Vladimir Medinsky (now Culture Minister), arguing several years ago for the removal of Lenin’s body from Red Square: “Do not fool yourselves with the illusion that what is lying in the mausoleum is Lenin. What’s left there is only 10 per cent of his body.” (The political weekly Vlast subsequently estimated the figure at a more generous 23 per cent.) His brain was removed during an initial autopsy and a research centre established to study it. At one point, scientists in fact claimed to have discovered the neurological basis for Lenin’s political genius – something dubious about electrical activity that I can’t claim fully to understand.

Kulik’s may be an anti-communist line, but it resonates with a classic Soviet-era slogan: “Lenin lived, lives, and will live on!” The notion that Lenin never really died is as old as his embalmed waxwork-corpse, an endlessly repeated justification for what came after in Soviet society. The journalist Mikhail Koltsov, describing his old friend at his public funeral, wrote: “There he is! He hasn’t changed a bit. How much he looks like himself! His face is calm, it almost smiles that unrepeatable, inexpressible, childishly arch smile, comprehensible only to those who saw it; his top lip with its stubbly beard is raised just as in life, provocatively. As if he himself can’t believe what has happened.” The great avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov used archival footage from Lenin’s lying in state in his 1932 elegy Three Songs about Lenin, and at points that smile does seem to play across the dead man’s lips, as crowds of women and children file past him. In one shot, workers hold up a banner reading: “Lenin is our immortality”.

It’s tempting, as Yurchak does, to read the whole process of embalming and display as a kind of pre-modern ritual of power, the body of the leader imbued with a kind of magical authority undimmed by death – almost saintly, in its way. The architectural writer Owen Hatherley, describes his own visit to the “deathly, unearthly” crypt as a “minutely choreographed intersection of architecture and ritual.”