Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square celebrates its centenary this Thursday, August 1.
Since its inauguration, the mausoleum has been the scene of numerous ceremonial and military parades.
Over the years, Lenin’s embalmed body has been evacuated and returned, and for a time, Joseph Stalin’s body was also buried there, but was subsequently removed.
In the 1970s, bulletproof glass was installed over Lenin’s sarcophagus to protect it from vandalism.
During the 1990s, there were significant demands for Lenin’s body to be buried.
Here are five things you may not know about Lenin’s Mausoleum.
1. Whose idea was it?
Historians agree that the idea of preserving Lenin’s body first occurred to Joseph Stalin in the summer of 1923.
At that time, a leader of the Soviet Cheka (the predecessor of the KGB and FSB security agencies) died while on a mission in Kharkiv and was embalmed by a young scientist named Vladimir Vorobyov.
The communists who saw the body in Moscow were impressed by its good state of preservation.
In November of that same year, Stalin called a meeting of party leaders to discuss Lenin’s impending death, although he was still alive but terminally ill.
Stalin argued that Lenin’s body was to be embalmed and preserved.
The opposition, all of whom were later assassinated in the 1930s, rejected this idea.
Leon Trotsky declared that relics had no place in Marxism, while Nikolai Bukharin insisted that mummifying the leader of the revolution would be an insult to his memory.
Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, also asked that Lenin’s body not be made an object of veneration.
However, Stalin, who was on the way to absolute power, was more insistent.
He cited letters from workers’ groups, although it is now impossible to determine whether these were genuinely popular initiatives or orchestrated by Stalin’s entourage.
The main idea expressed in these letters was that Lenin had to always be with them.
2. Who built it?
The first version of Lenin’s mausoleum, only 3 meters high, was erected in less than three days for his funeral. The architect was Alexei Shchusevwho also designed later versions.
Lenin died on 21 January 1924 and the farewell ceremony lasted until the end of March. It is believed that millions of people passed by the first mausoleum.
In the summer of 1924, the idea of embalming Lenin and exposing his body to public view was in full swing.
Shchusev began designing a new building, while scientists Alexei Vorobyov and Boris Zbarsky worked on embalming.
On August 1, 1924 the mausoleum was opened to the public.
It was built of wood, but its size and shape were similar to the current version.
The granite mausoleum was completed in the autumn of 1930.
Its pantheon-like form was the one that most closely matched Stalin’s vision, emphasizing the uniqueness and greatness of the Soviet Union.
People stood in long queues to solemnly pass before the body of the leader of the world proletariat.
3. Lenin shared his mausoleum with Stalin
In 1953, after Stalin’s death, it was decided that his body would also be buried in Lenin’s mausoleum.
There were problems from the beginning: the skin on Stalin’s body, especially on his face, was in very poor condition, which complicated the embalming process.
A new inscription was placed “LENIN STALIN” on the old one, which the rain sometimes washed away, revealing the historic letters “LENIN” underneath.
Following the curtailment of Stalin’s personality cult and the massive repressions of his time, the Soviet leader’s body was removed from the mausoleum in 1961 and buried near the Kremlin wall.
When Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, a popular joke spread: the inscription “LENIN” on the mausoleum would be replaced by “LЁNIN” (a pun on Brezhnev’s name).
4. A place of ideological warfare and vandalism
After the war and until the collapse of the USSR, The mausoleum was a place of pilgrimagevisited by both foreign dignitaries and Soviet schoolchildren.
In May 1945, during the Victory Parade, Nazi flags of the German army were thrown to the ground in front of the mausoleum to signify the USSR’s victory in World War II.
The world’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, was welcomed by then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on the podium of the mausoleum.
From the 1950s to the late 1970s, Lenin’s body was the target of more than a dozen attacks with stones, a hammer and sledgehammer, and even Molotov cocktails.
Typically, the culprits were caught and sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment.
In 1973, an explosive device killed several visitors. The glass above Lenin’s sarcophagus was then reinforced with bulletproof glass.
5. Lenin’s remains
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, President Boris Yeltsin, who despised communist ideas, chose to deliver his speeches in Red Square not from the mausoleum but from a specially installed platform nearby.
In the early 1990s, the laboratory responsible for maintaining Lenin’s body lost its special funding.
Since then, several documentaries about the mausoleum and the preservation of Lenin’s body have been broadcast on Russian television channels.
These films claimed that Lenin’s body had only retained 23% of its original size, with the remainder replaced by artificial additives.
Today, Lenin’s Mausoleum remains Russia’s most popular tourist attraction.
On Google Maps and the tourist website TripAdvisor, it has an average rating of more than four stars out of five.
Reviews range from “my son was scared by its yellow face” to “this place is worth a visit for anyone who has heard about Soviet times, either firsthand or from their grandparents or parents.”
Mausoleums with embalmed bodies of leaders remain only in communist countries in East and Southeast Asia. These include those of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh.
In North Korea, the bodies of Kim il-Sung and his successor Kim Jong-il are also kept embalmed in a mausoleum.
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