ALEXEI YURCHAK, Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty

ALEXEI YURCHAK
Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden

Science of Communist Sovereignty
The Form
D U R I N G D I S C U S S I O N S A F E W Y E A R S ago in the Duma about the

fate of Lenins body, which is displayed in the Lenin Mausoleum on Red
Square, Vladimir Medinsky, then a Duma deputy (and now Russias minister
of culture), suggested that it was time to take this body out of the mausoleum and bury it in the ground. Do not fool yourselves, he explained,
with the illusion that what is lying in the mausoleum is Lenin. Whats left
there is only 10 percent of his body. The respected political weekly Vlast
decided to check this figure. During the autopsy in January 1924, wrote the
weekly, Lenins brain and organs had been removed. When Lenin was
embalmed, his internal liquids were replaced with embalming fluids. Since
organs constitute about 17 percent of human body mass, and liquids about
60 percent, Lenins body had lost 77 percent of its original matter. Therefore, concluded the weekly, the Duma deputy had gotten it wrong: what is
lying in the mausoleum is 23 percent of Lenins body, not 10 percent as
Medinsky had suggested.1
Such half-ironic calculations point to a widespread misconception about
the nature of the body lying in the mausoleum. It is assumed that the
authenticity of this body can be measured in terms of the percentage of its
original biological flesh. The generations of scientists who have worked on
preserving Lenins body for the past ninety years, however, have measured
its authenticity differently. They have been concerned with maintaining not
the bodys biological flesh, but its physical form. This form includes the
bodys look, shape, weight, and color, as well as its dynamic characteristics
its overall suppleness, elasticity of skin, flexibility of joints, internal pressure
in muscle tissues, and so on. For decades, scientists have worked on maintaining this dynamic form intact, while letting the original biological matter
a b s t r a c t This essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Lenin
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Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years. It focuses on the materiality of this particular body,
the unique biological science that developed around the project, and the peculiar political role this body
has performed. Rep re s en ta t i on s 129. Winter 2015 The Regents of the University of California.
ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 11657. All rights reserved. Direct requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2015.129.5.116.
of the body change and even actively substituting it with new materials.
I will refer to the research institute that has conducted this work as the
Mausoleum Lab or the Lab, as the scientists call it, although in fact it
consists of several labs and scientific groups. The actual activities of this
research institute today, as in the past, are disguised behind a euphemistically cumbersome name: Center for Scientific Research and Teaching
Methods in Biochemical Technologies (fig. 1).2
figure 1. Center for

Scientific Research and
Teaching Methods in
Biochemical Technologies,
Krasin Street, Moscow
(part of VILAR Institute).
Authors photo.
The Lab has worked to preserve the dynamic form of every part of
Lenins body, including parts that have never been visible to the public or
intended for display. Scientists have maintained not only the features of
Lenins face but also the shape of his heels, the pigmentation around his
armpits, the strength of hair attachment on his chest, and the flexibility of
his knee joints, for example. What bodily preservation amounts to in this
case is different from that in other cases of preservation, both natural (bodies preserved in permafrost, ice, salt, sandy soil) and artificial (bodies subjected to mummification, cryogenics, plastination).3 In these other cases the
form of the body changes in multiple ways: mummified bodies dry up,
stiffen, change color, become unrecognizable; frozen and plastinated bodies may preserve their external appearance but lose flexibility and elasticity.
Unlike those bodies, Lenins continues to maintain its dynamic form, which
includes but is not limited to its external appearance. This means that the
Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty
117
work on the body can never cease; the body cannot be allowed simply to lie
there in an embalmed state. It must be continuously examined, fixed, resculpted, and reembalmed.
The extraordinary results of this project have never been known to the
public; in fact, they have been actively hidden from public view. Visitors to
the mausoleum see Lenin lying in a glass sarcophagus dressed in a dark suit;
only his head and hands are uncovered and visible (figs. 2, 3). They never
learn that the bodys joints remain flexible, the internal pressure of its skin is
maintained, and its invisible surfaces are painstakingly and continually resculpted. No one has ever been able to appreciate these extraordinary
achievements. No one, that is, with the exception of a small group of scientists and state leaders.
figure 2. Sarcophagus in the

Lenin Mausoleum on Red
Square, Moscow. Photo:
http://www.comtourist.
com/history/leninmausoleum/photos-leninmausoleum/page/2/.
figure 3. Lenin lying in the

sarcophagus. Photo: http://
www.n-tv.de/panorama/
Lenin-soll-unter-die-Erdearticle2419961.html.
Why has Lenins body been maintained in this way? What is the significance of the effort to preserve its dynamic form and not its biological flesh?
Why have its invisible parts been maintained with such precision? What kind
of science has emerged around the project, and why have its remarkable
results been kept secret? To answer these questions we must understand the
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complex political role that Lenins body played during the Soviet period
and, to some extent, continues to play today. This paper attempts such an
understanding by analyzing the unique materiality of Lenins body, the
scientific procedures that developed as part of this work, and the political
debates that accompanied the project from its inception.4
Despite appearances, the political role of Lenins body is anything but
obvious. Of course, it is well known that during the Soviet period this body
functioned as a central propaganda symbol of the Communist system and
that its public display was supposed to inspire devotion to the Communist
project. However, settling for this interpretation does not explain the emergence of the unique scientific practice focused on maintaining this bodys
dynamic parameters and invisible parts. In fact, the political role of Lenins
preserved body goes far beyond that of propaganda. To understand this
extended role we must first travel to the pastto the last years before
Lenins death, when the divergence between Lenin and his cult began.
Leninism
In spring 1922, feeling quite ill and exhausted, Lenin relocated to

the Gorki estate outside Moscow to improve his health. He continued to be
active in the party leadership, wrote a few theoretical articles, and participated in occasional political decisions. But his medical condition was worsening, and in May 1922 he had a stroke, which resulted in the temporary loss
of his ability to speak, read, and write.5 The politburo of the party reacted by
introducing strict rules designed to isolate Lenin from political life. This
decision was partially dictated by the real concern for Lenins health. The
strictness with which it was imposed, however, made some witnesses suspect
that the party leadership was also trying to eliminate a powerful political
rival. For example, a secretary of the partys Central Committee (CC) wrote
in a personal letter on June 10, 1922: Things with [Vladimir] Ilyich [Lenin]
are so bad that even we cant get any access to him. Dzerzhinsky and Smidovich guard him like two bulldogs and dont let anyone come close to him
or even into the building where he is staying.6 In late summer 1922,
Lenins condition somewhat improved and his speech gradually returned.7
In the fall, he felt so much better that he returned to Moscow to engage in
political work and gave several speeches at the meetings of the CC. However,
in December 1922 his condition again sharply deteriorated, and the party
leadership insisted that he move back to Gorki. From that moment Lenins
complete isolation from political life began.8
On December 24, the leading group in the politburo instructed the
medical doctors who looked after Lenin: All meetings are forbidden. . . .
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Neither friends nor family members should communicate to Vladimir Ilyich

anything about political life to avoid provoking any thought or anxiety.9
The order was extended to the staff at the Gorki estatethe cook, servants,
gardeners, technical workers and guards.10 Lenin was allowed to dictate
from 5 to 10 minutes a day, but only on the condition that these texts
should not be treated as correspondence and Vladimir Ilyich should not
expect any response to them.11 Lenin experienced his isolation as imprisonment, complaining to his closest friends and relatives: I havent died
yet, but under Stalins supervision they are already trying to bury me.12
Lenins wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and a few members of the staff who
remained faithful to him continued passing occasional notes and texts of
Lenins to trusted people outside the Gorki estate. In late December 1922
and early January 1923, sensing that the end was near, Lenin dictated several
substantial texts and letters that later became collectively known as Lenins
political testament.13 Among them was Lenins now-famous Letter to the
Congress addressed to the delegates of the Thirteenth Congress of the
Russian Communist Party, which was scheduled to meet in late spring
1924. These were highly sensitive documents in which Lenin critically
assessed the political views and moral traits of several leading figures in the
party: Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, and
Georgy Piatakov. He reserved his strongest critique for Joseph Stalin, the
current first secretary of the party. Stalin had a dangerous tendency to be
authoritarian, intolerant of the opinions of others, and rude in private
interactions, all of which made him inappropriate for the position of the
party leader, wrote Lenin.14
Lenin gave strict instructions about these documents to his secretary,
L. A. Fotieva, and to his wife. They were to be hidden for the time being and
only made available to the party congress if Lenin died. Lenin did not
realize that Fotieva was serving as an informer for the troika (the partys
top three leaders, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin, who opposed the other
leader, Trotsky).15 She promptly communicated to them the contents of
Lenins Letter to the Congress.16 In May 1924, four months after Lenins
death, his Letter was indeed read to the delegates of the Thirteenth Party
Congress. However, it was soon after suppressed by Stalin and omitted from
the final published transcript of the congress that appeared a few months
later.17 Starting from the early 1930s, when Stalin emerged as the partys
single leader, the letter was officially described as a forgery produced by the
enemies of the party to undermine its unity. Possessing a copy was now
treated as evidence of ones participation in antiparty activities, which at
the height of the Stalinist purges could mean a death sentence.18
The Letter to the Congress was temporarily rehabilitated in 1956,
three years after Stalins death, when it was read in closed sessions to the
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delegates of the Twentieth Party Congress. However, this document

remained unknown to the wider Soviet public, and under Leonid Brezhnev
it was again suppressed. The letter was finally published in widely circulating
Soviet papers only at the end of Perestroika.19 As the fate of this letter and
other important documents that Lenin dictated at the end of his life demonstrates, starting in fall 1922 and until the end of Soviet history, Lenins voice
was effectively censored by the party leadership.
In spring 1923, Lenins condition turned for the worse. A third stroke, in
March, caused almost complete loss of speech, reading, writing, and basic
motor functions.20 Lenins progressing disabilities led to the intensification
of the political rivalry among party leaders.21 Lenin was now completely
isolated from the world, and, in the words of Professor Viktor Osipov, a doctor on Lenins medical team, During that final period of his illness, from
spring 1923, [Lenin] saw himself as a person who had been deleted from the
list of active political figures of the USSR.22 The Soviet public read about
Lenins health problems regularly in Soviet newspapers, but these reports
were selective and tightly controlled by the politburo, and in the final
months they disappeared altogether. To the public it seemed that Lenin
remained politically active and in close communication with party leadership. His name was frequently invoked, but not in relation to his actual
condition.23
While the politburo was isolating the living Lenin from the political
world, it was simultaneously engaged in canonizing Lenins public image.
It was at that time, [from 1922 and] until Lenins death in January 1924,
that most mythological images and institutions that were formed around
Lenins cult were created. A precondition for this was the loss by Lenin at
that time of his unmatched personal aura.24 More than a year prior to
Lenins death, and in spite of his active protestations, the party leadership
introduced the term Leninism into public circulation.25
From early 1923, the leading party propagandists started insisting on
the necessity to pledge party allegiance to Leninism.26 On March 31,
1923, nine months prior to Lenins death, the party established the Lenin
Institute in Moscow.27 In the summer of 1923, Pravda appealed to its readers:
Every scrap of paper bearing an inscription or mark made by Lenin could
provide an important contribution to an understanding of the great man.28
Later the newspaper added: Any bit of paper typed on a typewriter, if it
carried the signature of V. I. Lenin, should be sent in to the Institute.29
The party leadership was now actively constructing Lenin as a particular object of political iconography that was not connected in any way with
the real living Lenin.30 While Lenins every word from the past was
publicly collected, much of what Lenin was in fact saying and writing after
the fall of 1922 was pointedly erased from that image. Now Lenin was not
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allowed to edit his own earlier texts, change his earlier positions, or protest
against misinterpretations of his statements. Now it was the politburo that
controlled what Lenin was really sayingnot Lenin himself. Lenin the
political figure was now doubledinto one Lenin banished from the political world, and another Lenin canonized within it. The double process was
projected into many areas of political practice, including party discourse. In
November 1923, Pravda wrote that Lenin was not just the name of a beloved
leader but something biggera program, a tactic, a philosophical
world viewin a word, Leninism.31 Leninism as a teaching was bigger than
the flesh-and-blood person called Lenin and could therefore even be
different from the ideas of Lenin (the person).
The banishment of the real Lenin extended not only to the writings of
the final two years of his life but also to much of his legacy and the facts of his
personal life.32 When, in the mid-1930s, the famous Soviet writer Marietta
Shaginian tried to include into her acclaimed trilogy some previously
unknown facts of the ethnic origins of Lenins family, which she learned
from Lenins widow, the CC not only stopped the work from being published but also, remarkably, adopted a resolution in which Shaginian and
Krupskaya were harshly criticized for turning the important public
endeavor of composing works about Lenin into a private and even family
affair designed to control how the life and work of Lenin and his family
are interpretedsomething that the Central Committee has never allowed
anyone to do.33
The doctrine of Leninism was the result of these banishments, omissions, and alternations of Lenins ideas and the facts of his life and the
canonization of other facts and ideas. In 1924 Trotsky warned the CC that
Leninism had little to do with Lenin and was at risk of becoming a collection
of dead quotes that would be used out of context to legitimate all decisions,
even diametrically opposing ones. It was not just Lenins immortalityhis
cult statusthat preceded his death, as Nina Tumarkin suggests, but rather
the substitution of Lenin with Leninism that went on through the simultaneous canonization of the ideal and banishment of the man.34 In the
1920s, these two processes transformed the Russian revolutionary state into
a Leninist polity.35
From that time until the end of Soviet history Leninism, as the unquestionable doctrine, became a central element of the Soviet political system.
The doctrine was not static; it was constantly being reshaped to fit the
current political context by canonizing and censoring Lenin, reinterpreting
his previously published texts and criticizing their earlier interpretations,
omitting facts of his life and inventing new ones. Every Soviet leader, from
Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev, produced his own version of Leninism. This
process was possible because every version of the doctrine, regardless of its
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current meaning, occupied the position of the unquestionable, foundational truth of the Soviet political system. The central unquestionable tenet
of this truth was the understanding that all human history would inevitably
arrive at Communism. The truth was articulated outside and beyond the
Soviet system. No Soviet leader, not even Stalin during the height of his
power, could occupy that external position; it could be occupied only by the
constructed voice of Leninism.
In 1990, less than two years before the Soviet state collapsed, the
Communist Party publicly admitted that Lenins works had always been
distorted. A professor of Marxist-Leninist philosophy complained in a central newspaper: Our tragedy is that we do not know Lenin. We never read
his original texts in the past, and we still do not do this today. For decades we
have perceived Lenin through mediators, interpreters, popularizers, and
other distorters.36 A party historian bitterly remarked in a widely read daily
that Nikita Khrushchev and Brezhnev were obviously not Leninists. For
them Lenin was only an icon behind which they could hide.37 Another
historian wrote in a popular monthly that even the Institute of MarxismLeninism in Moscow, the countrys definitive authority on Lenins work,
for seventy years since its founding has been fulfilling an absurd function . . . legitimizing for publication those [Lenins] texts that matched the
canon [of the day], however different from the real Lenins words they were,
and altering or modifying those [Lenins] texts that did not fit that
canon.38 Gorbachev began his April 1990 speech at the celebrations for
the one-hundred-twentieth anniversary of Lenins birth with the words:
Lenin still remains with us as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.
But he quickly added: We must rethink Lenin and his theoretical and
political work, and we must rid ourselves of the distortions and canonizations of his conclusions. . . . It is time to end the thoughtless and absurd
manipulation of Lenins name and image that turns him into an icon.
In fact, suggested Gorbachev, to preserve the real Lenin we must abandon
the concept of Leninism altogether, because it reduces Lenins complex
thought to a collection of canonized statements. This unprecedented claim
by the party leader put the audience at the meeting into a visible state of
shock.39
In a revealing publication in 1990, Fyodor Burlatsky, a former advisor
and speechwriter to Khrushchev and Yuri Andropov, described how Lenins
quotes were manipulated in the politburo. In the Kremlin office of the
powerful Secretary of Ideology Mikhail Suslov, wrote Burlatsky, there was
a large file cabinet with little drawers that contained thousands of quotes
from Lenin. The quotes were organized by themes and were written on small
library cards. When the politburo introduced a new political campaign, economic measure, or international policy Suslov found an appropriate phrase
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from Lenin to support it, ensuring that even incompatible policies and campaigns appeared equally legitimate. Once, in the early 1960s, Burlatsky
showed Suslov a draft of a speech he had prepared for Khrushchev that
contained a discussion of reforms. Suslov read it carefully and in one place
said, It would be good to illustrate this point with a quote from Vladimir
Ilyich [Lenin]. When Burlatsky replied that he would look for an appropriate quote, Suslov responded: No, I will do this myself. Burlatsky writes:
Suslov dashed to the corner of his office, pulled out one drawer and put it on the
table. With his long, thin fingers he started very rapidly flipping through the cards.
He pulled out one card and read it. No, thats not it. Then he pulled out another
one. No, still not right. Finally he took another card out and exclaimed with satisfaction, Ok, this one will do.40
These admissions by party ideologues, advisors, and historians at the end of

Soviet history exposed something that had been the case from the early
1920s: that the doctrine of Leninism had been produced continuously,
as much by drawing on Lenins thought as by distorting it. In 1924, the dual
process by which Lenin was transformed into Leninism became crucial to the
final decision to preserve the mans body for posterity. To understand how
this happened, let me return to the time of Lenins death.
Preservation
Lenin died on January 21, 1924. There was no longer a need to

banish the real Lenin from the political world to prevent him from interfering with his canonized image. The banished Lenin and the canonized
Lenin were now reunited in one dead body. It is clear from discussions
between the party leaders and medical doctors in the weeks following
Lenins death that the decision to preserve his body forever was not planned
beforehand but emerged gradually and somewhat unexpectedly. Immediately after Lenins death, Professor Alexei Abrikosov conducted an autopsy
and performed the usual short-term embalming procedure to preserve the
body temporarily, allowing it to be publicly displayed for a few days before
the funeral. Because no plan to preserve Lenins body for posterity existed,
Abrikosov cut major arteries and blood vessels in Lenins body during the
autopsy. Later Abrikosov explained that had the plans for long-term preservation existed at the time, he would not have cut the arteries, because they
are crucial for delivering embalming liquids to all corners of the body
during long-term preservation.41
For the first six days after Lenins death his body lay in state in the House
of Trade Unions in Moscow; huge crowds of people from all over the country
waited for hours in extra-cold temperatures to bid farewell to the leader.42
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Then, on January 27, the body was officially buried in a grand ceremony. In
fact, the funeral amounted to moving the body to a temporary wooden mausoleum built on Red Square, where it was to lie for a few weeks longer in
a glass sarcophagus, allowing more people to see it before its burial. The body
was in an intermediate state: the burial that began on January 27 had not yet
been completed, its final stage still pending. Temperatures in Moscow continued to be extremely cold, and the medical commissions that examined the
body every several days between late January and late March found no signs of
decomposition.43 But in late March the weather turned warmer, and on
March 26, 1924, the examination commission noticed the first threatening
signsthe drying and softening of body parts and a sharp change in the
color of the head, hands and shins.44 Irreversible changes would not be far
away.
The extended period of almost two months when the body remained
intact gave the Soviet leadership a chance to discuss the body again and
again. It was during these discussions that the plan to preserve it for posterity gradually emerged. Although the idea itself had been voiced earlier in
the press and among laypeople, many party leaders considered it scientifically unrealistic and contradictory to the materialist worldview of Communism.45 For Trotsky and Bukharin, preserving Lenins body was comparable
to treating it as a religious relicunthinkable for communists.46 Kliment
Voroshilov similarly claimed that if Lenins body was preserved, we will
cease to be Marxists-Leninists.47 Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich suggested creating a closed tomb, which would function as a public memorial but without
a publicly displayed body. The majority in the politburo supported this
idea.48
In the meantime it was decided that the temporary preservation of the
body should be extended to allow more people to bid farewell to the
leader.49 But there was no consensus among the leadership on how to
preserve Lenin or for how long. This fact was reflected in the remarkable
cacophony of opinions voiced by the party leadership and scientists during
the meeting of the Commission for the Organization of Lenins Funeral on
March 5, 1924. At the meeting, Leonid Krasin, a Central Committee member with an engineering degree, suggested placing the coffin containing
Lenins body inside a metal box with a glass top and filling it all the way
up to the brim with embalming liquid [that] would be absolutely transparent and invisible from outside.50 But the powerful Felix Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the funeral commission and the OGPU (future KGB), disagreed:
instead of submerging the body in liquid, as though it were some kind of
dead meat, he said, it would be better to freeze it.51 Several members of the
commission pointed out, however, that freezing had its problems tooit
would preserve not only the body but also its current defects, while liquid
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embalming might allow one to fix the latter. Moreover, added Grigory
Belenky, a recent experimental freezing of a human body demonstrated
that as soon as the temperature changed just a little, the body turned
black. So, if something breaks downsay, the freezer is not working for
half an hourit will all turn black and everything will be lost. Central
Committee member Vyacheslav Molotov opposed both freezing the body
and submerging it in liquid but had no alternative suggestions. Doctor
Maksimilian Savelev proposed putting the body in a transparent capsule
filled with pure nitrogenneutral gas that would prevent biological processes and stop decomposition, he argued. But Krasin was skeptical:
I have my doubts. . . . As far as I know, apart from the bacteria that live
in oxygen there are also anaerobic bacteria that successfully function in
nitrogen. Having listened to these opinions, Avel Enukidze, member of
the Central Executive Committee, summarized: We should certainly
understand that we will not be able to preserve Vladimir Ilyich for a long
time. . . . We will freeze the body without promising to anyone that this is
done for posterity. If disaster strikes and it continues changing even when
its frozen, we will have to enclose it. Then Kliment Voroshilov, member
of the Revolutionary Military Council, made the final suggestion: I propose doing nothing. If the body holds up for another year without change,
this is already good enough.52
Members of the Commission for the Organization of Lenins Funeral
were clearly not of one mind on whether the preservation was possible or
even necessary, so no decision was reached that day. However something
important emerges from this and other discussions in March 1924. The
manner in which the party leaders spoke about Lenins body when they
were given a chance to discuss it for an extended period of time was reminiscent of how Lenin was treated during the final two years of his life, when
he was simultaneously banished from political life and canonized as a cult
figure. The discussions from January to March 1924 also focused simultaneously on burying Lenins body and preserving it, closing it and displaying it, embalming it for posterity and denying that posterity was important
(the final remarks by Enukidze and Voroshilov on March 5 drove that
paradoxical point home). Even the fact that these discussions were regularly conducted in two different commissions reflected this duality: one of
them was called Commission for the Organization of Lenins Funeral,
the other,Commission for the Preservation of Lenins Body.53 Many
party leaders took part in the work of both commissions. This duality
reflected the two different views of Lenins body between which the leadership was oscillatingfrom the decomposing corpse of a flesh-and-blood
person called Lenin to the embodiment of something that was different
from and bigger than Lenin the man. And although at that moment these
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two bodies were still made out of the same biological flesh, they would
not, as we will see, continue to be the same much longer.
In late March, after endless discussions and disagreements, it was
decided to subject Lenins body to an experimental embalming procedure
proposed by Professor of Medicine Vladimir Vorobiev and the biochemist
Boris Zbarsky. No one was certain whether the experiment would succeed
and, if it did, how long the body could be displayed after that. The plan was
to attempt to preserve it for as long as possible.54 Vorobiev and Zbarsky
worked nonstop for four months, moving slowly and carefully and inventing
much of their method in the process. In late July 1924 they reported their
success to the leadership, claiming that if Lenins body was continuously
treated according to their method it might remain in its current state for
a long time. For how long they did not specify. When, following Vorobievs
report, Nikolai Semashko asked him, How long can we expect Lenins body
to hold up according to this method? Vorobiev responded: I will allow
myself not to answer this question.55
Vorobiev and Zbarsky did not simply embalm the body once and for all,
but developed a dynamic method of preservation that required regular
reembalming, submerging the body in baths with special solutions for long
periods of time, filling it with new liquids and substances, substituting its
original organic materials with artificial ones, and regularly resculpting its
shapes and surfaces. On July 24, 1924, the commission, now renamed for the
occasion The Commission for the Immortalization of Lenins Memory,
issued a public statement, explaining in retrospect why it had been decided
to preserve Lenins body. The statement was read by Enukidzethe same
person who four and a half months earlier, before the experiment began,
had suggested, We will freeze the body without promising to anyone that
this is done for posterity. Now he said:
We did not want to turn the body of Vladimir Ilyich into some kind of relic, by
means of which we could popularize and preserve his memory. He had already
immortalized himself enough with his brilliant teaching and revolutionary activities. . . . We wanted to preserve the body of Vladimir Ilyich . . . [because] it is of great
importance to preserve the fizicheskii oblik [physical guise, physical appearance] of
this remarkable leader for the next generation and all the future generations.56
It is clear again from this explanation that the party leadership saw
Lenins body in a dual way: as the biological remains of an actual person
and as a physical entity that had transcended individual biology. Consider
the difference between this kind of dual body and a Christian relic: in the
case of the relic it is crucial that the authentic biological substance of the
person (saint) is preserved.57 But in the case of Lenins body, whether or not
the authentic biological trace is preserved is not pivotal. As Enukidze put it,
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We did not want to turn the body . . . into some kind of relic. In other
words, it is more important to maintain the form of this body (its physical
appearance) than its individual biology. The distinction between the biology and the form of a body is like that between a person and the representation of a personin the same way that a sculpture or a doctrine might
represent an individual.
How Enukidze described this task in 1924 is strikingly similar to how the
Lab scientists talk about it today. According to academician Valery Bykov, the
director of VILAR Institute (Russian Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic
Plants), the task of this work is to preserve Lenins anatomical image (anatomicheski obraz).58 Anatomical image, like physical appearance, implies
a specific focus on the bodyone in which the bodys particular form is more
important than its particular biological matter. A veteran scientist of the Lab,
academician Yuri Lopukhin, uses the phrase living sculpture (zhivaia skulptura), which he coined to convey a number of ambiguities.59 After years of
reembalming, resculpting, and substituting, this body today contains so many
artificial materials and has changed so much from its original biological
composition that in some sense it is closer to a wholly constructed representation of Lenins dead body than to the original, once living man.60 At the
same time, says Lopukhin, this is different from external representation, as in
sculpture, because it is the actual body itself. This body both is and is not
a representation. The phrase living sculpture is meant to convey this paradox, as if to say this is a sculpture of the body that is constructed out of the body itself.
The work directed at achieving this goal over the years led to the emergence of a unique quasi-biological science that is different from other known
approaches to embalming and bodily preservation. In fact, the practitioners
of this science insist that the terms preservation and embalming do not
adequately describe their work because they refer to static dead bodies,
whose forms are fixed, static, and therefore inevitably distorted. But Lenins
body is differentits form is dynamic, flexible, emergent. To remain undistorted its form must constantly change. Preservation in this case is not
a state but a never-ending process. It is synonymous not with conservation,
but with cultivation. And its criteria are not just scientific but also artistic.
Twinned Beings
The political reasons for this peculiar kind of preservation can be

illuminated by comparing the treatment of Lenins body with those of rulers
in other cultural and historical contexts. An obvious place to start is with the
bodies of Western European kings famously analyzed by Ernst Kantorowicz,
whose work focused on the late medieval and early modern legal theories
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linking monarchic sovereignty and the kings body.61 Sovereign power is

absolute, not only spatially, within sovereign borders, but also temporally.62
By perpetually reproducing itself, it survives the demise of any concrete
agent of sovereignty. But what is the mechanism of this reproduction, and
what form does the temporal dimension take in practice?
With the shift toward an increasingly secularized institution of monarchy, writes Kantorowicz, the legitimation of the king was no longer dependent on the approval or consecration on the part of the Church, but was
purely dynastic.63 The kings legitimacy was now grounded not in grace
but in nature (kinship, familial biology). While the ritual of royal succession
still referred to the Holy Spirit as the source of legitimation, in practice that
spirit had become naturalized, seated in the royal blood itself, making
royals biologically different from othersa royal species of man. 64
According to this doctrine, the physical body of the king, unlike that of
other mortals, was doubled, consisting of a mortal body (body of nature)
and immortal body (body of grace). The kings death was the demise of the
mortal body; but the immortal body survived and, after the interregnum,
reinhabited the flesh of the next king.
In European monarchies this corporeal doubling was understood in
explicitly material terms, which came to be reflected, for example, in the
construction of an effigy of the king upon his death. The effigy was a full-size
model that looked uncannily similar to the dead king. While sculptures and
images of the dead are common in many funeral ceremonies around the
world, they usually function as external representations of the deadthat is,
as substitutes for the corpse. But the effigy functioned differently from these
other sculptures and imagesinstead of substituting for the corpse of the
king, the effigy appeared alongside it, coexisting with the corpse in time and
space.65 The corpse and the effigy together functioned as the twinned materiality of the kings body.
Great artistic efforts were summoned for the production of effigies.
They were made with extreme realism, using wax, leather, and wood; their
faces were modeled on the death mask of the monarch, carefully chiseled
and painted to look as lifelike as possible (figs. 4, 5, 6).66 Often real hair and
eyelashes were used to add a natural look; the fingers and limbs had moving
joints, and the torso was supple, allowing it to acquire different positions
(sitting, lying, holding a scepter) in different contexts.67 In sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century France and England, during preparations for the
kings funeral the effigy was dressed in the kings clothes and seated on the
throne in the Hall of Honor. Medics pretended to take its pulse and listen to
its breath; food and wine were placed in front of it; and after meals stewards
washed its hands and wiped its mouth.68 During royal funeral processions,
members of the French Parliament walked close to the effigy, and courtiers
129
jostled with each other for the position nearest to it, practically ignoring the
corpse of the kings real body.69 The latter lay naked in the coffin, while the
effigy was attired in royal robes, crowned with an imperial crown, and holding
the sceptre and hand of justice.70 At that moment the effigy represented the
king in splendor, in contrast to the mortal remains of the dead king,
which had lost much of their relevance.71 Proximity to the effigy symbolized
a closer connection to perpetual sovereign power as such. But after the king
was buried and the next king crowned, the kings two bodies became once
again reunited in one living body; the effigy could no longer be publicly
displayed and was usually hidden in the royal crypt or a distant abbey.72
figure 4. Effigy of Charles II (d. 1685), wax

and wood. Westminster Abbey Museum.
figure 5. Effigy of Frances, Duchess of

Richmond (d. 1702), wax and wood.
Westminster Abbey Museum.
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figure 6. Effigy of William III of Orange (d.

1702), wax and wood. Westminster Abbey
Museum.
But is the theory of the kings two bodies relevant to the Soviet political
system? This question should be divided into two. First, is this theory unique
to Western European monarchies, or have comparable theories emerged
elsewhere? Second, when the absolutist monarchies in Europe were dismantled by modern revolutions or reforms, did this doctrine survive in some
altered form, and if so, how might it be manifested today?
Kantorowicz seems to suggest that the theory of the kings two bodies
was specific to late medievalearly modern Christian Europe. However, as
anthropologists and historians have demonstrated, remarkably similar
rituals of the perpetual regeneration of sovereign power have developed
in many other sociocultural and historical contexts. One of the earliest
accounts is provided in Sir James Frazers 1890 The Golden Bough: A Study
in Comparative Religion.73 In the third edition of the book, in 1916, Frazer
included a detailed description of the rituals of royal succession in the
Shilluk kingdom of South Sudan, including rituals that performed a doubling of the royal body using a wooden effigy, which are remarkably reminiscent of those described by Kantorowicz.74 Comparable doctrines and
rituals have been described in many other parts of the world and periodsfrom South Sudan and East India to premodern Japan; from ancient
Imperial Rome to the modern Vatican.75 It appears that a general divergence between the impermanence of the mortal sovereigns body and the
permanent perpetuity of the sovereign office has led to the development of
comparable cosmologies and rituals.
The case explored by Kantorowicz was just one significant instance among
comparable cultural models. In the Leninist system, I will argue, a distinct
political cosmology that linked a doubling of the foundational body with
131
sovereign perpetuity had also emerged. Importantly, this political cosmology

not only influenced the decision to preserve Lenins body for posterity but
also shaped the peculiar scientific practice according to which this body has
been treated ever since. The Leninist model of sovereign perpetuity did not
develop as a direct genealogical transformation from the previous Russian
monarchy. In fact, according to Michael Cherniavsky, a student of Kantorowicz, a doctrine comparable to that of the kings two bodies in France and
England never existed in the Russian tsarist state.76 This fact, however, did not
prevent the emergence of a comparable model of sovereign perpetuity in the
Bolshevik Communist state after Lenins death. The development of this
model was encouraged not by the previous institutional structures of the
Russian monarchy or religious rituals of the Russian orthodoxy, but by
the general revolutionary ethos of modern European states that focused on
the sovereign body as the central site of their democratic transformation. The
Bolsheviks imagined themselves heirs to the French Revolution who had
created the ultimate modern state, severing all links to Russias traditional
past and opening itself completely to the future. Liberal democratic revolutions in Europe and North America influenced the political imagination of
the Bolshevik state far more than did those of the Russian monarchy and
orthodoxy.
Neotraditional Sovereignty
As Claude Lefort demonstrated in his Democracy and Political Theory, the political institution of sovereign perpetuity in modern liberal
democracies is indeed directly related to that institution as it existed in the
absolutist monarchies that liberal democracies replaced.77 In European
monarchies, the sovereigns legitimacy was guaranteed by his or her link
to another placea place that was external to the political world of the
monarchy, where the eternity of the sovereign power was anchored. It was in
that external place that the physical body of each monarch was locatedbut
only temporarily, until he or she died.78 In contemporary liberal democracies, according to Lefort, the locus of sovereign power continues to be
anchored in that external other place; however, now that place is
empty. No one in a liberal democracy can occupy it, as the absolutist
monarch once did, but every democratically elected official must serve in
the name of that empty place and must refer to it for legitimacy.79 The
foundational truth of liberal democracy, on which its legitimacy is based,
emanates from that empty place.
Recently Eric Santner has also argued that, with the disappearance of
the body of the king . . . as the primary incarnation of the principle and
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functions of sovereignty, the locus of sovereignty in liberal democracy

migrate[d] into a new location.80 However, unlike Lefort, who defines
that location as an empty place, Santner defines it as a particular kind of
flesh of the people or nation, which remains after the monarchy is gone.
This flesh inhabits the body of every member of the people, existing as
a sublime, immortal, extrapersonal surplus to his or her mortal biology. This
leads, Santner argues, to the states obsessive management of that flesh of
the population through techniques of biopolitics.
Despite the seeming difference in Leforts and Santners arguments,
they should be united into one model as its two different parts: the locus
of sovereignty is not in one or the other of these locations, but in their
twinned coexistence. Santners flesh of the people and Leforts empty
place together constitute the very duality of perpetual sovereign power in
liberal democracy that was once manifested in the kings twinned body.
Santners extrapersonal flesh is the modern equivalent of the uninterrupted
succession of kings mortal bodies that in the monarchy constituted the
perpetual dynasty and in modern liberal democracy constitutes the undying nation, the perpetual we, the people. And Leforts empty place is
the modern equivalent of the immortal body of the kingthe political
systems foundational truth, which is located outside of and prior to the
system, legitimizing it from that external place. In different modern systems,
the foundational truth variesfor example: the truth of the Founding
Fathers and the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the doctrine of Communism, and so on.81
Let us now return to the Leninist polity, where the structural organization of sovereignty differed from both absolutist monarchy and liberal
democracy. Comparing the Soviet case with both systems will be helpful.
Lefort even offers such a comparison, arguing that if the leader in a liberal
democracy reoccupied the empty place of sovereign power, democracy
would slide into totalitarianism, which is what happened, according to
him, in Germany after 1934 and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However,
while Lefort is right about the Nazi German state, where the Fuhrers body
indeed coincided with the center of sovereign power, his assessment of the
leaders position in the Soviet Union is inaccurate.
No Soviet leader could occupy the locus of sovereign power, because the
relation of every leader to that power was mediated by the figure of Leninism. Every Soviet leaderincluding Stalin at the height of his powershad
to refer to Leninism for legitimacy. Any political idea or individual in Soviet
history could be granted legitimacy if their loyalty to Leninism could be
demonstrated; and any idea or individual could be delegitimized in an instant
if they were shown to violate Leninism.82 Two striking phenomena of Soviet
historyfirst, the emergence of Stalins unique power and personality cult
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and, second, the complete collapse of Stalins cult after his death, which did
not lead to the collapse of the partydemonstrate this point. At first, Stalin
was celebrated as the most faithful Leninist, a leader who had unique access
to the truth of Leninism.83 But after his death in 1953, he was accused of
precisely the oppositeof having distorted the truth of Leninism. The process of de-Stalinization that followed was framed as a return to the true,
undistorted Leninism, which allowed the party to be disconnected from Stalin, survive the critique, and even re-emerge stronger than before his rise to
power.84 In other words, Stalin (like any other leader in the Soviet system, but
unlike Hitler) did not occupy the locus of sovereign power.
Ken Jowitt, in an insightful analysis of Leninism, argues that what made
the Leninist system qualitatively different from both absolutist monarchy
(traditional) and liberal democracy (modern) is that in Leninism the center of
sovereign power was located neither in the traditional charismatic leader
nor in depersonalized modern bureaucracy, but in an institution that is
constructed as a combination of the two. This institutionthe so-called
party of the new typeJowitt calls neotraditional, because it emerged when
two seemingly incompatible principles were absorbed into one organizational structure: the traditional principle of individual heroism and the
modern principle of organizational impersonalism.85 Both Leninism and
Nazism emphasized a heroic ethic, argues Jowitt, but what agent each
system designated as heroic was different. In the Nazi case that agent was
the individual charismatic leaderthe Fuhrer. Nazism was based on the
Fuhrerprinzipthat is, on the personal charisma of the leader, who claims
authority because he incorporates the idea in his person.86 In the Leninist
system that agent was not an individual, but the Communist Party of the
Leninist type (henceforth, Leninist party), whose heroism is defined
in organizational, not individual, terms, and therefore its principle of organization is charismatic impersonalism.87
The Leninist party was founded upon and held together by what was
called the correct line (the foundational truth mentioned earlier). Every
leader in the Leninist system claimed authority on the basis of his or her
knowledge of the correct line, and no leader could question it. After
Lenins death the correct line became articulated as the doctrine of Leninism. Stalins unique power and cult of personality were founded on the
successful and often violent claim that, as the alleged chosen heir, he had
the best command of Leninism.88 Since that doctrine was impersonal (no
one could claim it as their own or question it, but everyone had to refer to
it), however, differing interpretations proliferated.89 This is why the Leninist party always generated many more internal factions than the Nazi
Party.90 And this is also why the Leninist party always had a legitimate potential to criticize any leader, including the general secretary, if a group in the
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party leadership made a successful claim that that leader had violated Leninism. This was what Khrushchev claimed when he attacked Stalins cult of
personality at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.91 And Khrushchev was
accused of the same violation when he was deposed by the politburo in
1964.92
The center of sovereign power in the Leninist polity, then, was located
not in the body of the current party leader, but in the body of the party. But
what kind of a body was it? That body was twinned between mortal and
immortal parts. The first quasi-biological mortal body of the party transcended the individual biology of every party member and leader, becoming
perpetually renewed in every new incarnation of the party throughout
Soviet history. This was the Soviet equivalent of Santners undying people
in a liberal democracy and of the perpetual succession of the mortal bodies
of kings in a monarchy. The second immortal body of the party was the
external foundational truth of Leninism. This was the Soviet equivalent of
Leforts empty place in a liberal democracy and of the kings immortal
body in a monarchy. The material body of Lenin lying in the mausoleum was
one side of this twinned party-sovereignits immortal body.
In liberal democracy the foundational truth is located outside and prior
to the polity (for example, the US Constitution had to be written by the
Founding Fathers before the nation could be constituted). The truth of
Leninism was also external and prior to the Soviet Leninist system. But
in practice, Leninism was not only produced after Lenin himself died (or
when he became incapacitated in the early 1920s) but was even continuously
refashioned and reinterpreted by others throughout subsequent Soviet history, although as a foundational truth it was presented as Lenins own word.
While Leninism occupied the position of the external unquestionable truth,
what that meant in practice changed somewhat from period to period (from
Stalins Short Course, to Khrushchevs anti-Stalinist Thaw, to Brezhnevs conservative turn, to Gorbachevs attempt to return to the unknown Lenin,
and so on).93
To elaborate the function of Lenins body in this model, let us consider
the doubling of Lenin in the canonized and banished versions that produced Leninism. This doubling involved not only constantly manipulating and reinterpreting Lenins texts and the facts of his life but also
constantly resculpting and reconstructing Lenins physical body. That body
was maintained at the level of anatomical form (its shape, weight, color,
mechanical characteristics, moving joints, liquid balances), but changed at
the level of biological matter (with its biological substance continually
substituted). In this process Lenins body was itself doubled into mortal and
immortal bodies. Lenins immortal body was reminiscent of the kings
effigy. This body-effigy of Lenin was visible only to the gaze of the Soviet
135
political regime that looked at it from the external point of sovereign

perpetuity. It was this gaze of the polity that the scientific and party commissions performed over the years when they examined the body and described
its condition in secret reports. It was in relation to this gaze that the bodys
examinations were conducted, defects were corrected, and scientific procedures were invented. But to the common public this body-effigy was invisibleany information about it or the procedures to which it was subjected
was always top secret. What members of the Soviet public saw when they
visited the mausoleum was Lenins other, banished, mortal body, which is
akin to the kings corpse. The body-corpse they saw appeared fixed, immobile, unchanged, as if it had been embalmed at the moment of death and
remained intact ever since.94
Lenins physical body was literally doubledinto a dynamic body-effigy
visible only to the gaze of the political regime and a static body-corpse
looked at by millions of visitors to the mausoleum. But there is an important
difference between Lenins body and the doubled bodies of medieval kings.
The physical doubling of the king into two separate bodiesthe corpse and
the effigyoccurred only during the short period of the interregnum. Conversely, a comparable doubling of Lenins body was produced inside that
body itself and as a perpetually renewed condition. As in the case of the
canonization and banishment of Lenins written works, the material doubling of his body was produced through regular procedures of reembalming
and reconstruction. These procedures can be compared with the regular
alternation of kings on the throneboth function as mechanisms of sovereign perpetuity.
The precise regularity, complexity, and secrecy of the procedures performed upon Lenins body are striking. Some procedures are repeated
daily, some weekly, and the most complex and lengthy (taking about two
months) are repeated every one and a half years. They are part of an elaborate science of the body that is located between art and biology. It is to this
peculiar science that I now turn.
Between Art and Biology
Recollect the way in which Lopukhins description of Lenins

body as a living sculpture invokes its numerous ambiguities. One such
ambiguitythat Lenins body both is and is not a sculpturesuggests that it
is suspended between the two modes of art and biology. To continuously
resculpt its form and dynamic properties, explains Lopukhin, one must not
only know the basics of anatomy, physical chemistry, and how to maintain
the water balance. . . . One must also possess an artistic sense. This is very
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important. This is why not everyone is capable of doing this work.95

Another veteran scientist of the Lab, Professor V. L. Kozeltsev, elaborates:
Every new wrinkle, cavity or protrusion must be fixed. We are talking about
tiny dimensions. Some amount of artificial substitutes has to be introduced
[in these places], which is quite difficult. One needs experience and artistic
sense to perform this work.96
What this artistic sense might entail is illustrated by several problems
posed by Lenins body in different periods. During the initial embalming
conducted by Vorobiev and Zbarsky, Lenins eyelashes were inadvertently
destroyed. For the few first years the body had no eyelashes. To regular
visitors, who can never come too close to the body, this fact was not obvious;
however, it was still a clear aberration, says Lopukhin, and needed to be
addressed:
We had a very good histologist. He was buying artificial eyelashes, which were sold in
regular [cosmetic] shops. And he managed to slide them under [the eyelids], so
that there were at least some kind of eyelashes.97 Without eyelashes it did not look
good.98
The story of the eyelashes may remind us of the techniques for constructing
kings effigies described earlier. Similar quasi-artistic work has been conducted on the parts of the body that are invisible to the public. For example,
Lenins feet: during the original experiment in spring 1924, Vorobiev and
Zbarsky covered the feet with large amounts of gelatin in an attempt to fix
their shape and position, which had changed after their exposure to the
cold. However, it later turned out, explains Lopukhin, that with time
gelatin changes color, becoming dark. As a result the feet no longer looked
so good. In addition, Zbarsky and Vorobiev covered them with very hot
gelatin, which made things even worse, creating additional deformation.
Later these defects had to be corrected, and the surfaces of the feet had to
be rebuilt.99 This was done with the help of artificial materials that were
applied to the surface or injected under the skin. Suggesting that the feet
no longer looked so good, Lopukhin refers to the gaze of the political
regime (the scientists and party leaders involved in the project) on the
immortal body-effigy that would never be seen by the public.
By the mid-1930s, when it became clear that Lenins body could be
maintained for an indefinite period of time, the medical team around the
project expanded, and in 1939 a special laboratory was created. There was
new funding; new equipment; new, well-educated personnel. The Lab
started working on more nuanced problems, which Lopukhin calls the illnesses of embalming (bolezni balzamirovania), again animating the body,
stressing its emergent nature. These included the changing of pigmentation,
stiffening of joints, decalcification of bones, hydrolysis of fats, fluctuation of
137
liquid ratios and bodily weight, changing landscape of skin surfaces, and so
on. In the early years, solutions for such problems were developed as each
new problem arose. With the establishment of the Lab, however, it became
possible to develop new methods before they were needed. The work now no
longer focused exclusively on Lenins body but also included basic research
on human postmortem anatomy. By the early 1950s, the Lab was transformed
into a large research institute, which at its peak between the 1960s and 1980s,
employed a couple of hundred scientists, researchers, and technicians who
were organized into several research departments, labs, and teams.100
During the Soviet period party commissions regularly examined Lenins
body and issued detailed reports on its condition.101 As the science developed, the reports show that greater attention was increasingly paid to individual parts of the body. On January 19, 1939, a Commission of the
Peoples Commissariat of Health for the Examination of Lenins Body
reported that persistent problems with Lenins nose (which had lost its
original form in the first month after Lenins death, after exposure to
extreme cold) were finally solved. The nose was completely rebuilt and was
now in a very good condition. The report also stressed that the elasticity
of the eyelids is quite impressive, and the face makes a complete impression of a sleeping person, rather than a corpse.102
But there were also some problems. Alexei Busalov (Director of the
Medical Administration of the Kremlin) remarked: On the soles and toes
there are some signs of mummification. In the pelvic area there are hints of
wrinkling and thinning [of the skin]. They should be photographed and
described.103 Professor of Medicine Nikolai Burdenko pointed to new
spots that had appeared on the outer side of the left forearm and in the
lower part of the body, especially in the pelvic area. He added: I am
particularly interested in the origin of these spots. They are not located in
the places where pressure is applied, which means that they are likely to have
appeared due to [internal] change in the tissues or in the chemical
[embalming] agent, or, perhaps, under the influence of light.104
Lab scientists worked around the clock to address these problems. On
July 19, 1942,105 the body was again inspected by a high-ranking Commission of the Soviet of Peoples Commissars. The commission reported that
most of the problems mentioned earlier had been successfully fixed, the
color of the skin in various parts of the body, compared to 1939, has much
improved. The spots that had earlier appeared on the closed parts of the
body, especially on the back and sides, have been successfully removed.
The elasticity of the tissues and the flexibility of small and large joints, has
improved, and the remarkable flexibility of the shoulder and elbow
joints has been successfully maintained.106 The report also stressed that
the wrinkles that were previously observed on the skin, especially in those
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areas where limbs bend and under the armpits . . . have been smoothed
out, and the development of parchment skin (pergamentatsiia) on both
feet had been interrupted.107 The loss of weight, which had been a constant
problem due to the evaporation and outflow of liquids, and which in 1940
amounted to almost two kilos, had been finally stopped by successfully
maintaining the liquid balance in different tissues.108
Another source of constant headache for the scientists was hydrolysis
the process by which solid lipids (fats) in skin and muscle tissues gradually
liquefy and flow out of their areas, causing noticeable changes in the profile
of the skins surface and creating new wrinkles, cavities, and folds. To avoid
hydrolysis the Lab developed special materials to substitute for organic fats.
These have physical characteristics similar to those of fats (they are soft and
malleable and can be sculpted) but are chemically neutral (they do not
undergo hydrolysis). In the early 1940s, Zbarsky explained this work to the
politburo:
After many experiments we developed a mix of paraffin, glycerin, and carotene with
the melting point of 57 degrees Celsius. This mix in liquefied form can be injected
under the skin, where it quickly hardens into a solid mass that can be easily shaped.
After experiments in the lab it became possible to substitute hydrolyzed fats with
this new mass. From the chemical point of view this mass is inert and can be
preserved without change. . . . Two years of experiments in this area produced such
good results that they could be applied to fixing defects in Lenins body.109
The material is applied by microinjections to different parts of the body to

reconstruct the landscape of its surfaces. The places of depression or
change of volume in the hands and other parts of the body, continued
Zbarsky, were injected with the mixture that we developed as a substitution
for the fatty materials that underwent hydrolysis.110 The process was ongoing; original fat cells were continually replaced with artificial ones all over
the body, and the surfaces were manually reconstructed. When the body was
examined in November 1943, Georgii Miterev (peoples commissar of
health) turned to Zbarsky for clarification: So, you insert artificial mass
instead of them [natural fats]. Does this mean that after a period of time
all fats [in the body] will be replaced with this new artificial mass?111 Yes,
nodded Zbarsky. Miterev was satisfied and the commission continued its
inspection. The total substitution of the original biological cells with artificial ones did not bother the commission. It was concerned more with maintaining the nuanced form of the body, including a detailed profile of its skin
surfaces in visible and invisible places. In the case of Lenins face, this work
proceeded on a microscopic scale. Zbarsky explained:
At first, to identify the exact area and volume of the necessary injection we applied
our mass, a colored mix of wax and paraffin, to a given place [on the surface of the
139
face] and took a photograph. Changing the outlines and volumes of these patches
we compared the photographs with the pictures of Vladimir Ilyichs face during his
life and on his deathbed. Only after identifying in this way the exact boundaries and
volumes of the necessary injections did we carefully carry them out. As a result of
these injections facial resemblance greatly improved.112
Between 1952 and 1962, under Sergei Mardashev, the second director after
Zbarsky, the Lab grew further. Mardashev introduced new areas of research.
The problem of hydrolysis remained urgent. As years went by, it became
necessary to combat the hydrolysis in deeper tissues that could not be easily
reached using the existing methods. Lopukhin explains: Mardashev, as
a major biochemist[,] understood better than most the magnitude of the
problem caused by the hydrolysis and oxidation of fats that inevitably goes
on in fat cells. He identified that problem as among the most urgent.113
Every deviation of form anywhere in the body had to be addressed,
which often meant developing unique new materials. But in February
1945 a major crisis struck. On March 9, Lavrentii Beria, the dreaded director
of the NKVD (later KGB), who also supervised the Lab, sent an alarmed
letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, the chairman of the Council of Peoples Commissars (fig. 7). Beria reported that on February 15 and 16, Zbarsky and his
assistants Rafail Sinelnikov and Sergei Mardashev conducted
experimental work saturating with gelatin the right foot of V. I. Lenins body for the
purpose of strengthening its epidermis [outer layer of skin]. The foot was placed in
a special rubberized pouch filled with the solution. The work lasted about twenty
hours. In that time the solution was changed twice. After the work was finished at
eight in the morning on February 16 of this year, when the foot was released from
the pouch with the solution, Com. Sinelnikov and Mardashev discovered that
a piece of skin of this shape (in actual size) went missing from the foots back side.
Beria drew the missing piece. No trace of the missing piece of skin has been
found yet, he added. Zbarskys team received a strict order to conduct
a thorough medical investigation to identify the reasons for the disappearance of the aforementioned piece of skin and to report the results of their
investigation.114
The piece of skin was never found. It was probably inadvertently dissolved in the experimental procedure the group had conducted. To replace
the missing piece, the Lab developed special materials with the same flexibility, color, and liquid absorption as the skin on the soles of the feet, and
a patch of that material was applied to the area. Today even a close examination does not easily reveal the substitution. In his letter Beria mentioned
the measures that had been taken to avoid such incidents in the future:
Zbarskys team received strict orders that forbid anyone to conduct any
experimental work on Lenins body in the future without first checking its
methods and means on appropriate objects.115 What Beria called objects,
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figure 7. Letter from L. P. Beria to V. M. Molotov describing the disappearance of

a piece of skin from the back side of Lenins right foot, with a one-to-one scale
drawing of the missing piece. March 9, 1945. RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2s, ed. khr. 56, str.
12021.
and what scientists today call experimental objects (eksperimentalnye obekty),

comprise a bank of about two dozen anonymous bodies of different sizes,
shapes, and ages that were embalmed according to the same method as
Lenins (figs. 8, 9).
Once every eighteen months Lenins body is subjected to big procedures lasting two months, when it is thoroughly examined, tested, and then
completely reembalmed. All embalming liquids are drained from the body,
which is then submerged in a bath with a new embalming solution, where it
spends a couple of weeks. Then the body is examined and submerged in
a new bath of a different solution. And so on. Various solutions are designed
to affect different body partsthe skin, bones (which require calcium),
muscle tissue, and so on. All liquids that are drained from the body undergo
a variety of biochemical, anatomical, and physical tests to identify any microchanges in their composition (the presence of mildew and other microorganisms, biological and chemical processes).116 Similar procedures are
141
figure 8. A bank of experimental objects in the institute on Krasin Street.

Photo from I. B. Zbarsky, Ot Rossii do Rossii, in Pod kryshei Mavzoleia, ed. E. E.
Zaitseva.
performed on anonymous experimental bodies (figs. 1012). We take

samples [from the internal tissues] . . . and study their microstructure,
explains another scientist. Our research shows multiple changes that take
place all the time, especially in those tissues that were kept under bad conditions in the past (that is, in the early years of the project, when not all
procedures had been fully developed).117 Hundreds of microphotographs
of the bodys surfaces are taken with precision cameras. Specially designed
equipment compares these with the pictures taken during the previous
session, and any changes in the form are corrected.118
Speaking with the scientists and reading reports of the examination
commissions one is struck with the level of attention paid to the invisible
parts of the body. In July 1942, a party commission pointed out the remarkable mobility in the shoulder and elbow joints as well as in the neck and
wrist joints, which led to the conclusion that the head, neck, elbows,
forearms, and wrists remain mobile.119 In 1943, the report of another
commission emphasized that the flexibility of the system of joints and
tendons of the spine area in fact improved due to new treatments.120
If preserving the skeletal bone structure is crucial for the preservation of
the body as a whole, then maintaining functional joints has an additional
importance. They allow the body to remain flexible and supple, to change
poses. Such a body can be examined from a variety of angles, bent to undergo
complex procedures, painstakingly resculpted and reshaped in specific areas
without the risk of damage to the whole. Perhaps more important, on the
142
Representations
figure 9. Experimental
objects in the Institute. Photo
from Zbarsky, Ot Rossii do
Rossii.
level of form the body appears during examinations as authentic and

unchanged, a perpetually regenerating body, not a stiff corpse. (Recollect
the kings effigies with their flexible torsos, moving limbs, and bending
joints.) In these examinations, reports, and procedures, the gaze of the political regime sees a body that transcends the public space of ideology and the
role of a popular propaganda symbol. This is the immortal body of Lenin
the body-effigy that is constantly emerging, inhabiting a perpetual sovereign
unfolding.
143
figure 10. During a big procedure on an

experimental object (not Lenins body),
V. L. Kozeltsev is leaning over the bath.
Photo from the private archive of Professor
Kozeltsev.
figure 11. During a big procedure a body is submerged in a bath. Photo from
Zbarsky, Ot Rossii do Rossii.
figure 12. An experimental object taken out

of a bath during a big procedure. Photo from
Zbarsky, Ot Rossii do Rossii.
144
Representations
Conclusion:
The Afterlife of an Afterlife
Lenins body has been displayed in the mausoleum for ninety

years. Of them, the last twenty-five have been marked by a heated public
debate about that bodys future. Attitudes are split between those who consider it a sacred symbol of the heroic revolutionary past, an evil emblem of
a criminal regime, or a neutral monument of national history. Some argue
that the body should remain in the mausoleum on Red Square, some that it
should be buried elsewhere with state honors, and some that it should be
publicly disgraced.121
Most government officials, however, have avoided making categorical
statements about its fate. Instead they try to make the body appear normal. One way of doing this is to compare it with the bodies of religious
saints common to both the Christian and non-Christian worlds, and which
tend to have a positive connotation. In December 2012, President Putin was
asked what sounded like a rehearsed question: does he agree that having an
unburied corpse in the center of the country violates Russian religious
traditions? His response sounded equally rehearsed: Lenins body does not
violate any traditions because the dead bodies of saints have been publicly
displayed in Orthodox monasteries for centuriesfrom Kiev-Pechora Monastery in the Ukraine, to Pskov-Pechora Monastery in Russia, to Mount Athos
in Greece. The preservation of Lenins body in fact continues this practice,
although the Soviet Communist regime undeniably used this tradition in
its own interests, added Putin with a smile.122 The main point of this
commentary was to suggest that Soviet history should be seen as part of
normal human history, and that critiquing it from the position of a different
epoch or a different nation is inappropriate. This is why, the president
suggested, there is only one unbiased approach to the questionto leave
Lenins body as is. When asked whether the government plans to bury
Lenins body, Putins press secretary responded: At the present moment
this question is not on the agenda. It is irrelevant.123
Of course, there is nothing new about linking Lenins body with religious relics. In her study of the Lenin cult, Nina Tumarkin suggested that
the Bolshevik leadership could have preserved Lenins body as a sacred
relic that would continue to legitimate Soviet power and mobilize the
population, which was deeply Orthodox, largely illiterate, and familiar with
saints.124 However, the problem with this suggestion is that the party leaders,
during their discussions of Lenins body, never linked its preservation to the
relic tradition and in fact explicitly tried to distance it from religious connotations.125 Others have also suggested that the decision to preserve Lenin
could have been influenced by Nikolai Fedorovs philosophy of common
145
cause, in the early years popular among some Bolshevik intellectuals,

which sought human salvation in the physical resurrection of the flesh.126
This argument, however, is also problematic. As I have argued, the method
of preserving Lenins body has included constant substitution of Lenins
flesh with new inorganic substances. The result of such manipulations is
a kind of matter that is profoundly altered and would be quite incompatible
with the flesh that Fedorov sought to resurrect.
To understand the political meaning of Lenins body in the Soviet past
and the role it plays today, analysis of its symbolic representation is insufficient. Its materialityits tissues, cells, and joints; its visible and invisible
parts; the scientific procedures to which they have been subjected; and the
examinations that have focused on them over the yearsis equally important. By way of summing up, I will make the link between the symbolic and
the material explicit. The uniqueness of the Leninist polity lay in the novel
way in which the sovereignty of that regime was organized. Sovereignty here
was vested neither in the figure of the ruler (as in the premodern absolutist
monarchy or Nazi state) nor in the abstract populace (as in the modern
liberal democracy), but in the party. This model was not simply different
from the other two but also functioned as their peculiar combination. The
party was a collective agent that was neotraditional (in Jowitts terms)it
was institutionally organized according to the principle of charismatic
impersonalism. This agent transcended every one of its members, including its current leadereach member could turn out to be wrong and illegitimate, but the party was always already legitimate and right. The
correctness and legitimacy of this agent was guaranteed by the foundational
truth of Leninisma truth that was external and prior to the party and to
which the party had unique access.
But the party was not only a collective, charismatic, impersonal agentit
was also the sovereign of the Soviet system. Every utterance or opinion
expressed by the party not only transcended any utterance or opinion of
individual party members, including the party leader, but was also equivalent to the expression of the eternal, foundational truth. The immortal body
of this party-sovereign also transcended the individual bodies of every party
member, including the body of the leader. The material form of this immortal body was the perpetually reconstructed body of Lenin lying in the
mausoleum.
From this perspective, the ongoing practice of constructing, reconstructing, and cultivating Lenins bodyas a combination of body-effigy
(visible only to the political regime) and body-corpse (displayed to the
population)acquires a new significance. This practice was nothing other
than the material cultivation of the immortal, infallible, perpetually
renewed body of the sovereign-partythe body that transcended individual
146
Representations
mortal bodies of its every member and leader. Cultivating this body was
parallel to the practices of biopolitics in liberal democracy, where it was
directed at cultivating the perpetually renewed flesh of the population
(the sovereign) that transcends the individual bodies of its constitutive
members.127 It was also parallel to the practice of constructing an effigy of
the kings body (the sovereign) in absolutist monarchy, where it was
designed to maintain the perpetuity of the immortal sovereign form that
transcends the individual mortal bodies of kings.
As in these other cases, the underlying political meaning of the work
directed at Lenins body was to ensure that the party-sovereign remained
perpetually embodied and anchored in foundational truth despite all internal crises of the party organization, purges of its members, denunciation of
its leaders, and turns in its policy. In that process, preservation of the original biological remains of Lenins body (as opposed to the perpetual resculpting of its form) was not only unimportant but also problematic. This
approach to Lenins body meant that it could not be reduced to a mortal
individual biology. Instead, it literally transcended every individual body of
party members, leaders, and even Lenin himself; it was, in fact, the immortal
body of the sovereign.
The party leadership never clearly articulated, either internally or publicly, beyond general statements, why Lenins body was preserved in this
particular way, why so much attention was paid to its invisible parts and its
dynamic form, and why this project was kept in such secrecy. The project
emerged and took shape gradually, as part of a complex political cosmology
that most actors who lived it could not see in full. To some degree this is the
case with all models of sovereign power. Rituals of sovereign perpetuity vary
from regime to regime, and to external observers they may seem irrational
and bizarre. One state is constructing effigies of its kings, another is
cultivating the extrapersonal flesh of its nation, and the third is resculpting the form of Lenins body. More so than in most regimes, however, the
cultivation of the sovereign body in the Leninist polity was performed in
strict secrecy, behind closed doors, visible only to the abstract gaze of the
political regime but never explicitly analyzed by this regime either. The
reason for this secrecy and lack of analysis was the same as the reason party
leaders attempted to make invisible the perpetual manipulation of Lenins
words and thoughts and the facts of his life. This secret approach allowed
the truth of Leninism to appear to be the source rather than the product
of the partys actions and policies. It also made it possible to present every
new version of Leninism as the same, unchanging, consistent teaching of
a genius, and to represent the party, to itself and others, as its unwavering
implementernot its arbitrary creator.
147
With the demise of the party, the Communist project, and the Soviet
polity in 1991, Lenins body was severed from this complex political structure and lost its role as the immortal body of the party-sovereign. The new
state neither closed the mausoleum nor paid much attention to it. In the
1990s, the Lab lost much of its state funding and survived on private donations to the new Mausoleum Fund and by selling its expertise to foreign
clients (for example, for embalming the body of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang
and maintaining the body of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi).128 In the past several
years, state funding has improved but never reached its Soviet level. However, Lenins body remains on display and the Lab continues its work. Much
of this work has been going on by inertiainertia of state institutions,
political ideology, historical imagination, and scientific practice. The Russian state, it seems, cannot decide how to treat Lenins legacy. Leninism was
not just a personal creation of Lenin, and the body in the mausoleum is not
just his personal body. Both are complex productions of many people and
a long history; reducing them to the body and actions of one person, as do
many politicians and journalists today, is historically, politically, and ethically problematic.
Without the Soviet political context, one thing has become clear: for
many scientists of the Mausoleum Lab this project has long constituted, first
and foremost, a unique scientific experiment.129 Some of them say it has led
to a greater understanding of the nature of human tissues, creation of
artificial replacements, and even inventions in other areas of medicine.130
More important, the unprecedented nature of this project means that for
decades scientists have amassed knowledge that is thoroughly unique and
invaluable, even if no alternative application exists for it today. If this project
is never made public but simply vanishes, they argue, this knowledge will be
lost and nothing of the sort will ever be repeated. With these political,
scientific, and historical dilemmas in mind, the decision on the fate of
Lenins body continues to be deferred. Which brings me to my final point.
The dynamic science of reembalming and resculpting this body has
endowed it with a future-oriented, emergent, perpetual momentum. The
collapse of the Soviet project and the end of Communist history has not
automatically resulted in the end of that embodied momentum, has not
destroyed the bodys emergent nature, has not turned it into a corpse.
Notes
1. Vladimir Medinsky, quoted in Vlast 29, July 28, 2008, 782. Unless otherwise
noted, all translations are my own.
148
Representations
2. Administratively, this institute (Center for Scientific Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies) has functioned since the 1990s
under the auspices of VILAR (Russian Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic
Plants).
3. Anya Bernstein, Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism
(Chicago, 2013); Anya Bernstein, The Post-Soviet Treasure Hunt: Time,
Space, and Necropolitics in Siberian Buddhism, Comparative Studies in Society
and History 53, no. 3 (2011): 62353; Justin Buck Quijada, Soviet Science
and Post-Soviet Faith: Etigelovs Imperishable Body, American Ethnologist 39,
no. 1 (2012): 13854; Ichori Hori, Self-Mummified Buddhas in Japan: An
Aspect of the Shugen-Do (Mountain Asceticism) Sect, History of Religions 1,
no. 2 (Winter 1962): 22242. See also a 1997 BBC documentary: Ice Mummies:
The Ice Maiden, part of the Horizon series, season 33, episode 9 (scientists of the
Lenin Lab were involved in the attempts to conserve the body of an ancient
princess found in the permafrost). Uli Linke, Touching the Corpse: The
Unmaking of Memory in the Body Museum, Anthropology Today 21, no. 5
(2005): 1319; Tony Walter, Plastination for Display: A New Way to Dispose
of the Dead, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10, no. 3 (2004):
60327.
4. In this discussion I draw on my own ethnographic research at the institute that
has worked on Lenins body for many decades, interviews with the scientists of
Mausoleum Lab and with other people connected to the mausoleum, and
archival research in four historical archives in Moscow: Russian State Archive
of Social and Political History (RGASPI), State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), and
Central Moscow Archive-Museum of Personal Collections (TsMAMLS).
5. Boris Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni [A history of one illness], Znanie-sila 4
(April 1990).
6. Felix Dzerzhinsky, Peoples Commisar of Internal Affairs and Chairman of the
Main Political Administration (GPU), predecessor of the KGB; Petr Smidovich,
member of the Central Executive Committee of the Bolshevik party. Letter of
the Central Committee (CC) secretary L. P. Serebriakov to Peoples Commissar
on Social Welfare A. N. Vinokurov, July 10, 1922, quoted in Yu. G. Feltishinskii,
Taina smerti Lenina [The enigma of Lenins death], Rossiia i sovremennyi mir 4,
no. 21 (1998). Reprinted in Voprosy Istorii 1 (1999), see http://lib.ru/HISTORY/
FELSHTINSKY/f4.txt.
7. Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni.
8. Ibid.
9. Quoted in ibid., 62.
10. Because of the nature of their work at the estate, these people often found
themselves in the vicinity of Lenin. . . . As soon as they noticed that he was
approaching, they would leave, hide or fall silent; ibid.
11. A. I. Zevelev, Po povodu stati Yu. G. Felshtinskogo Taina smerti Lenina,
[Response concerning Felshtinskys article the enigma of Lenins death],
Voprosy Istorii 8 (1999).
12. V. I. Lenin quoted in V. Lelchuk and V. Startsev, Uroki dvukh publikatsii
[Lessons of two publications], Znanie-sila 11 (November 1990): 5052, 51.
13. Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni, 26.
14. For a description of the Letter to the Congress, see RIA Novosti, Istoriia
raboty Lenina Pismo k sezdu. Spravka, December 16, 2010, http://ria.
ru/history_spravki/20101216/309403217.html.
149
15. L. A. Fotievas role as an informer became known only after the partial opening
of the party archives in the post-Soviet period. See: Zevelev, Po povodu stati
Yu. G. Felshtinskogo Taina smerti Lenina.
16. Trying to protect herself, a few days later Fotieva wrote a note to Lev Kamenev,
explaining that she was not told by Lenins transcriber about his will to keep the
letter sealed. See Izvestiya TsK KPSS 12 (1989): 157.
17. Istoriia raboty Lenina Pismo k sezdu. Spravka.
18. Ibid.
19. In 1990 it appeared in a widely read weekly, Ogonek, whose circulation during
that time reached 3.5 million. See N. K. Gulbinskii, K 120-letiiu so dnia
rozhdeniia Vladimira Ilicha Lenina [To the 120th Anniversary of Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin], Ogonek 17 (1990): 3.
20. Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni, 2122.
21. L. E. Gorelova, Istoricheskoe rassledovanie [Historical investigation], Russkii
meditsinskii zhurnal 13, no. 7 (April 2005), http://www.rmj.ru/articles_3695.
htm.
22. Victor Osipov, quoted in Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni, 66.
23. Benno Ennker, Formirovanie kulta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze [The Formation of
Lenin Cult in the Soviet Union] (Moscow, 2011), 73.
24. Ibid., 66.
25. According to Tumarkin the term Leninism was first used publicly on January
3, 1923; Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge,
MA, 1997), 120. However, in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the
CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), argued that Leninism was used
even earlierit was coined by the Mensheviks to ridicule Lenins ideas; A Word
About Lenin, by the President of the USSR, the General Secretary of the Central
Committee of the CPSU, M. S. Gorbachev, Pravda, April 21, 1990, 1.
26. Ennker, Formirovanie kulta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze, 75.
27. Later it became known as the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. It was closed
down in 1991, when the Soviet state collapsed.
28. Quoted in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 123.
29. Ibid., 124.
30. Ennker, Formirovanie kulta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze, 84.
31. Quoted in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 132.
32. See Richard Pipes with David Brandenberger, Unknown Lenin: From the Secret
Archive (New Haven, 1996). Alexei Yurchak, Esli by Lenin byl zhiv, on by znal
chto delat: Golaia zhizn vozhdia, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 83 (2007); Alexei
Yurchak, If Lenin Were Alive Today, He Would Know What to Do, in Irina
Prokhorova, ed., 1990: Russians Remember a Turning Point (London, 2013).
33. Marietta Shaginian, Semia Ulianovykh [Ulyanovs Family], part 1 of the trilogy
Bilet po istorii [History Exam]. Part 1 was eventually published in 1938 in a shortened and censored form. Shaginians discussion of Lenins grandparents was
omitted from the publication. (In the omitted parts Shaginian wrote that
Lenins grandmother was Kalmyk and his grandfather was maloros [Ukrainian],
which was a veiled reference to the dangerous fact that Lenins grandfather,
Alexandr Blank, was Jewish, a fact Shaginian could not mention for fear of
being persecuted. This was publicly discussed only in 1991, before the Soviet
Union collapsed). See Yurchak, Esli by Lenin byl zhiv, and Yurchak, If Lenin
Were Alive Today. The CC resolution was adopted on August 5, 1936. See A. N.
Yakovlev, ed., Vlast i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia: dokumenty TsK RKP(b)
VKP(b) VChK/OGPU/NKVD o kulturnoi politike 19171953 [Power and creative
150
Representations
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
intelligentsia: documents of the CC RKP(b) VKP(b) VChK/OGPU/NKVD

on cultural policy from 1917 to 1953] (Moscow, 1999).
Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 130.
This polity was a departure from Lenin-style party leadership; eventually it
evolved into high Stalinism.
V. Melnichenko, Vera, nadezhda, Lenin [Belief, hope, Lenin], Rabochaia
tribuna, December 4, 1990.
R. Kosolapov, Ostorozhno martyshizm [Beware of monkey business], Leningradskaia Pravda, December 22, 1990.
Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni, 20.
A Word About Lenin, 1.
F. Burlatski, Vozhdi i sovetniki [Leaders and advisors] (Moscow, 1990).
Comment by Vladimir Vorobiev: Protokol zasedaniia Meditsinskoi Komissii po
sokhraneniiu tela V. I. Lenina ot 12 marta 1924 g [Protocol of the meeting of
the medical commission for the preservation of V. I. Lenins body of March 12,
1924]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52, papka 1, Dokumenty k voprosu o
balzamirovanii tela V. I. Lenina, str. 134. The absence of undamaged arteries
and major blood vessels in Lenins body constituted a substantial problem for the
Mausoleum Lab in the following years, forcing the scientists to develop alternative methods of delivering embalming liquids to remote parts of the body.
E.g., Akt N. 7 vneshnego osmotra tela V. I. Lenina/Ulianova/, 21-e fevralia
1924 g [Act n. 7 of the external examination of the body of V. I. Lenin/
Ulianov/February 21, 1924]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52, str. 23.
Protokol osmotra tela V. I. Lenina ot 26 marta 1924 g [Protocol of the examination of Lenins body, March 26, 1924]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52.
This was how the leadership treated numerous proposals to preserve Lenins
body that laypeople sent to the Central Committee. In a letter dated January 22,
1924 two rank-and-file party members proposed freezing Lenins body inside
a transparent block of ice, putting it in a state analogous to anabiosis that
would prevent it from decomposing for an indefinitely long period; Perepiska po voprosu sokhraneniia tela V. I. Lenina [Correspondence on the
question of preserving V. I. Lenins body], RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 54,
papka 5 and 6. In a letter dated February 19, an amateur chemist from Simbirsk
proposed covering Lenins body with transparent stone; Zasedanie Tsentralnoi Komissii Prezidiuma TsIK SSSR po organizatsii pokhoron V. I. Lenina
[Meeting of the Central Commission of the Presidium of TsIK of the USSR for
the organization of V. I. Lenins funeral], March 5, 2014]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c,
ed. khr. 52. These proposals were never seriously considered, but they demonstrate that the idea of preserving Lenins body for posterity had been circulating
in the public discourse.
Ennker, Formirovanie kulta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze, 191.
Ibid.
Ibid., 200.
Zasedanie tsentralnoi Komissii Prezidiuma Tsentralnogo Ispolnitelnogo
[Meeting of the Central Commission of the Presidium of CEC (Central Exectutive Committee) of the USSR for the organization of Lenins funeral]. March
5, 2014; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52.
OGPU: United State Political Administration (prototype of NKVD and later KGB).
Ibid.
151
53. Ibid. E.g., Protokol zasedaniia Meditsinskoi Komissii po sokhraneniiu tela V. I.

Lenina ot 12-go marta 1924 g. [Protocol of the meeting of the medical commission for the Preservation of V. I. Lenins Body. March 12, 1924]; RGASPI, f.
16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52 str. 123; italics added.
54. Statement of the Commission for the Organization of Lenins Funeral,
March 25, 1924 (quoted in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 185).
55. Stenograficheskii otchet zasedaniia Komissii TsIK Soiuza SSR po uvekovecheniiu pamiati V.I. Ulianova/Lenina. 26-go iiulia 1924 g. (prilozhenie k
protokolu N. 18) [Stenographic report of the meeting of the commission of
the CEC of the USSR for the Immortalization of V. I. Ulianov/Lenins memory July 26, 1924 (appendix to protocol n. 18) RGASPI, f. 16, op 2c, ed. khr.
48, papka 3, str. 73.
56. Istoriia balzamirovaniia tela V. I. Lenina [History of the embalming of the
body of V. I. Lenin], July 24, 1924; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 1, plenka 522.
57. See Alexei Yurchak, Netlennost formy: Leninism i materialnost mavzoleinogo tela [Incorruptibility of form: Leninism and the materiality of the mausoleum body], Neprikosnovennyi zapas 89, no. 3 (2013). The Catholic church,
according to Caroline Bynum, has usually insisted that dead bodies should not
be disturbed (changed, dismembered, fitted with new materials), since it is the
original biological matter of the body that would rise to heaven; Caroline
Bynum, Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalists Perspective, Critical
Inquiry 22 (1995): 23. The same was the case in the Russian Orthodox church:
even though dismemberment of sacred relics was tolerated, the original biological substance of the body was not supposed to be disturbed; S. A. Ivanov,
Blagochestivoe raschlenenie: paradoks pochitaniia moshchei v vizantiiskoi
agiografii [Graceful dismemberment: a paradox of relic veneration in Byzantine hagiography], in Vostochnoevropeiskie relikvii [Eastern European relics], ed.
A. M. Lidov (Moscow, 2003), 123.
58. Mavzolei Lenina snova otkroetsia dlia poseshcheniia 9 ianvaria 2007 goda
[Lenins Mausoleum will open again to the visiting public on January 9,
2007], Newsru.com, December 25, 2006, www.newsru.com/russia/25dec2006/
lenin.html.
59. Authors interview with Mikhail Lopukhin, August 2009, Moscow. Lopukhin
worked in the Lab from the late 1940s to the late 1980s and today, despite old
age, remains one of the Labs regular consultants. For twenty years he also
occupied the posts of rector of the Second Medical Institute in Moscow and
director of the Research Institute of Physical and Chemical Biology.
60. This is why occasional speculations in the media of the supposed fantastic plans
of the Soviet leadership to revive Lenin one day in the future produce nothing but laughter among the scientists of the Lab. This body is missing many vital
organs, including the brain, and most of its tissues are partially artificial. What
is there to revive? they ask; ibid.
61. Ernst Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies (1957; reprint, Princeton, 1996).
62. Sovereignty is something about which we have heard much in recent years, e.g.,
Carl Schmitt, Definition of Sovereignty, in Political Theology: Four Chapters on the
Concept of Sovereignty (1922; reprint, Chicago, 2004), chap. 1.; Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford,
1998).
63. Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, 330.
64. Ibid., 331.
152
Representations
65. This point was made by Elias Bickermann in his discussion of the imperial
funerals in ancient Rome; Elias Bickermann, Consecratio, in Le culte des souverains dans lempire romain, ed. E.J. Bickerman and W. den Boer, XIX (Geneva,
1972), quoted in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 95, and Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal
Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva, 1960), 151.
66. The face of the effigy for Henry VII (d. 1509) was modeled on his death mask
with such precision that even the slightly drooping left side of the mouth
faithfully reproduce[d] the physical contortions of the kings fatal stroke;
Julian Litten, The Funeral Effigy: Its Function and Purpose, in Anthony
Harvey and Richard Mortimer, eds., The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey
(Woodbridge, 1994), 319: 7. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, the face
of the effigy modeled on her death mask contained meticulously reproduced
wrinkles and other features of ageing; Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of
Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570
1625 (Woodbridge, 1997), 90.
67. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France, 11517; Woodward,
Theatre of Death, 16364; Monica Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation in
Hobbes (Leiden, 2009), 45. When Elizabeth of York died in 1502, her effigy was
made flexible and supple to allow for naturalistic posturing which, with the
life-like head, must have made a deep impression on the crowds who saw it on
its progress through the streets; Litten, The Funeral Effigy, 7.
68. Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, 426; Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in
Renaissance France, 144; Ralph Giesey, Funeral Effigies as Emblems of Sovereignty: Europe, 14th to 18th Centuries, lecture delivered to the Colle`ge de
France, June 10, 1987, 9, 17, www.regiesey.com/Lectures/Funeral_Effigies_as_
Emblems_of_Sovereignty_Lecture_[English]_College_de_France.pdf.
69. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France, 123.
70. Ibid., 11819.
71. Ibid., 40.
72. Richard Mortimer, The History of the Collection, in Harvey and Mortimer,
The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey, 2128.
73. Frazers book still remains influential to a large degree due to important critical
engagements with it over the years, among them those by Wittgenstein and
Evans-Pritchard: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazers Golden Bough (1931;
reprint, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1979); Edward Evans-Pritchard, The Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of Magic, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, King Fuad
1st University 1, pt. 2 (1933): 121.
74. In Frazers account the Shilluks king, known as reth, was believed to embody
a divine beinga god or at least a semi-godin the person of Nyikang, the
legendary founder of the Shilluk nation. Every king was Nyikang. However,
when the king died, Nyikangs spirit left him and entered a wooden effigy.
Once a new reth was elected, the candidate had to raise an army and fight a mock
battle against the effigys army in which he was first defeated and captured,
then, having been possessed by the spirit of Nyikang, which passed from effigy
back into his body, emerged victorious again and became the next king; David
Graeber, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk: On Violence, Utopia, and the
Human Condition, or, Elements for an Archaeology of Sovereignty, HAU:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1, no. 1 (2014): 3.
75. W. Arens, The Demise of Kings and the Meaning of Kingship: Royal Funerary
Ceremony in the Contemporary Southern Sudan and Renaissance France,
Anthropos 79 (1984): 35567; Burkhard Schnepel, Twinned Beings: Kings and
153
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
154
Effigies in Southern Sudan, East India and Renaissance France (Goteborg, 1995);
Graeber, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk. The body of Japans emperor
was viewed as a receptacle (iremono) for the immutable imperial spirit (tennorei) that attached itself to each new emperor and was the source of the
emperors extraordinary authority; Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power
and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley, 1996), 157. The wax effigy used during
the funeral of the Roman Emperor Antonius (2nd century AD) was made in the
emperors likeness, wore his clothes, and lay in his official bed. The emperors
life was transferred to the wax doll by means of . . . magic rites; Bickermann,
Consecratio, quoted in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 95.The principle of papal sovereignty, unlike that of monarchy, is not dynastic, which is why, despite some
structural similarities between them, the theory of a twinned body never developed in this case. This is also why the absent presence of eternal papacy that
survives each pope is invested not in an effigy, but in special objects and rituals
that exist only during the novena (the nine days between the popes). See Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, The Popes Body (Chicago, 1994); Gilbert O. Nations,
Papal Sovereignty: The Government Within Our Government (Cincinnati, 1917).
Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven,
1961).
Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis, 1988). At least one
reason for this was that the Russian monarchy did not experience the same
degree of secularization in the medieval and early modern periods as did those
of Western Europe. Although Lefort does not consider non-European examples, they may shed additional light on the principles of sovereign perpetuity
and their genealogical transformation in modern times.
Every king was temporarily immortal, in Schnepels nice formulation in
Twinned Beings. See also Graeber, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk.
Claude Lefort, The Question of Democracy, in Democracy and Political Theory,
920; Claude Lefort, The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism, in The
Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 292306. See also an excellent discussion in Bernard Flynn,
introduction to The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston,
2005), xiiixxx.
Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The Peoples Two Bodies and the Endgames of
Sovereignty (Chicago, 2011), 3334.
In the United States, for example, that unquestionable foundational truth is
articulated in the voices of the Founding Fathers, who are located in the other
place (which predates the actual polity they founded), and in the words of the
Declaration of Independence, which refers to the foundational truths that,
according to the declaration, we hold . . . to be self-evident (i.e., to be prior to
any proof). To be seen as legitimate, any politician in the United States must
imply that this truth is unquestionably right.
In the Nazi political system there was no external figure of truth that could be
used to delegitimize Hitler in the name of true Nazism. As Christopher
Hitchens wrote, There were no dissidents in the Nazi Party, risking their lives
on the proposition that the Fuhrer has betrayed the true essence of National
Socialism; Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Pub zek, Barbarism with a Human
lic Sphere (London, 2000), 281; see also Slavoj Zi
Face, London Review of Books 36, no. 9 (May 8, 2014): 3637.
See chap. 2 in Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The
Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006).
Representations
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
Yurchak, If Lenin Were Alive, and Yurchak, Esli by Lenin byl zhiv.
Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, 1992), 16.
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 34, 8, 10.
Stalin was considered the Great continuer of Lenins cause rather than the
originator of a different cause. Contrary to Jan Plampers argument, Stalin
depended on Lenin as the source of his own legitimacy and could not supersede Lenin as the locus of truth; see Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the
Alchemy of Power (New Haven, 2012), 85. See discussion in chap. 2, Yurchak,
Everything Was Forever.
89. For a major shift in the interpretation of the doctrine after Stalins death
see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, on the performative shift of ideology
(chap. 2).
90. Joseph Nyomarkey, Factionalism in the National Socialist German Workers
Party, 19251926: The Myth and Reality of the Northern Faction, Political Science
Quarterly 80, no. 1 (March 1965): 45; see also note 82 and Jowitt, New World
zek, The Two Totalitarianisms, London Review of Books
Disorder 78 and Slavoj Zi
27, n. Kern 6 (March 17, 2005).
91. In his Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev
said, We sharply criticize today the cult of the individual which was so widespread during Stalins life and . . . which is so alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism; Nikita S. Khrushchev, The Secret SpeechOn the Cult of Personality,
1956, in Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University, http://www.
fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html, italics added.
92. The short text of the Decision of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the
CPSU of October 14, 1964, laconically subtitled, On Comrade Khrushchev
N. S., stated: As a result of the mistakes and wrong actions of Comrade Khrushchev, which violate the Leninist principle of collective leadership, an utterly
unhealthy situation has developed in the Presidium of the CC; RGANI (Russian
State Archive of Contemporary History), f. 2, op. 1, d. 749, l. 78, italics added. The
statement was as unsubstantiated as it was damningthe Presidium of the CC
had ruled that Khrushchev had violated Leninism. After that, every sentence in
the decision was superfluous.
93. See Yurchak,If Lenin Were Alive, and Yurchack, Esli by Lenin byl zhiv.
94. Not surprisingly, in popular slang Lenins body is called a mummy, which
connotes a stiff, dried-up corpse. But the Lenin Lab scientists frequently point
out that this is a gross misrepresentation.
95. Authors interview with Mikhail Lopukhin, October 22, 2009, Moscow.
96. Authors interview with V. L. Kozeltsev, July 2009, Moscow.
97. The eyelashes were replaced during every major reembalming procedure,
once every year and a half.
98. Authors interview with Lopukhin, October 22, 2009, Moscow.
99. They melted gelatin at a temperature much higher than room temperature in
order to increase the gelatins density after it cooled and hardened.
100. Shtatnoe raspisanie (Personnel chart) of the Research and Scientific Lab
of V.I. Lenins Mausoleum, GARF, f. 8009, op. 51, ed. khr. 873.
101. The commissions included 10 to 20 people, members of the party leadership
and leading medics and biochemists.
102. Comments by Nikolai Burdenko and A. A. Deshin; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2, d. 110.
As this comment suggests, one objective for the maintainance of Lenins body
155
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
122.
123.
156
is to avoid an appearance of a corpse. This reminds us of the emergent quality

of this body and of Lopukhins phrase living sculpture.
Protokol zasedaniia komissii Narkomzdrava Soiuza SSR po osmotru tela V. I.
Lenina, sostoiavshegosia 19-go ianvaria 1939 goda v Mavzolee [Protocol of
the Meeting of the Commission of the Peoples Commisariat of Health Care of
the USSR on the examination of V. I. Lenins Body that took place on August
19, 1939 in the mausoleum]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2, d. 110.
Ibid.
By that time, during WWII, Lenins body had been evacuated from Moscow to
the town of Tyumen in the Urals.
Comment by Burdenko, Protokol zasedaniia Komissii, obrazovannoi
soglasno rasporiazheniiu SNK SSSR, N 12115/s, 29.06.42, po osmotru tela
V. I. Lenina, sostoiavshemusia 13 i 14 iiulia 1942 g. v gorode Tiumeni [Protocol of the meeting of the commission formed in accordance with the directive of Soviet of Peoples Commisars of the USSR, N 12115/s, of June 29, 1942,
on the examination of V. I. Lenins body that took place on July 13 and 14,
1942 in the town of Tiumen]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, papka 5, ed. khr. 54.
The loss of underlying connective and elastic tissues or rapid loss of water from
the skins horny layer gave it a glossy appearance.
Comment by Burdenko, Protokol zasedaniia Komissii.
Doklad zasluzhennogo deiatelia nauki professora B. I. Zbarskogo 29 noiabria
1943 goda [Report of the honored scientist Professor B. I. Zbarsky on November 29, 1943]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2s, papka 5, ed. khr. 54.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Yu. M. Lopukhin, Bolezn, smert i balzamirovanie V. I. Lenina. Pravda i mify
[Illness, Death and Embalming of V. I. Lenin] (Moscow, 1997), 126.
Sovershenno sekretno. Tovarishchu Molotovu I. M. [Top secret. To Comrade Molotov I. M.]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2s, ed. khr. 56, str. 12021.
Ibid.
Some tests occur in the Center for Scientific Research on Krasin Street,
others are conducted in medical institutes around Moscow. A whole network
of research institutes is regularly involved in this ongoing work. Authors
interview with Lopukhin, October 22, 2009.
Ibid.
Ibid. See also interview with a photo technician in Pavel Lobkovs film Mavzolei, shown on NTV television, Moscow, 1999.
Comments by Burdenko (who in late 1939 was promoted to the rank of Academician, partly in recognition of his work in the Mausoleum), Protokol
zasedaniia komissii.
Comment by Nikolai Burdenko, Acts and Conclusions of the Government
Commission for the Examination of Lenins Body in the Town of Tyumen,
November 29December 3, 1943; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 56, str. 7.
For a number of opinions see, e.g., Medinskii predlagaet pokhoronit
Lenina [Medinskii proposes to bury Lenin], Interfax, June 9, 2012; http://
www.interfax.ru/russia/249940.
S. Bychkov, Putin i moshchi Lenina [Putin and Lenins relics], Moskovskii
komsomolets, December 11, 2012, http://www.mk.ru/politics/article/2012/
12/11/785670-putin-i-moschi-lenina.html.
Ibid.
Representations
124. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 179. This argument is also made in a number of other
studies: e.g., G. Graeme, The Soviet Leader Cult: Reflections on the Structure
of Leadership in the Soviet Union, British Journal of Political Science 10 (1980):
16786.
125. See Ennker, Formirovanie kulta Lenina, 371.
126. See also Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 179. See also George M. Young, The Russian
Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford, 2012);
V. A. Kozhevnikov, Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (opyt izlozheniia uchenia) [Nikolai
Fedorovich Fedorov (an attempt to present the teaching)] (Moscow, 1908).
127. As discussed by Santner.
128. Authors interview with historian Aleksei Abramov, director of the Mausoleum
Fund, Moscow, September 9, 2008. Recently it has been reported that in the
1990s the Lenin Lab funded itself by performing temporary embalmings of
members of Russian organized crime slain in criminal wars. These rumors
were probably started after the publication of two books by Ilya Zbarsky (Boris
Zbarskys son and himself a one-time member of the mausoleum group): Ilya
Zbarsky, Obekt N. 1. (Moscow, 2000); Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson,
Lenins Embalmers (London, 1998). However, these reports are inaccurate.
Lenin Lab was never involved in such projects and would not be the right
place for them, since the work it performs is different from the temporary
embalming of bodies that are prepared for burial. Several junior scientists who
worked in the institute where Lenin Lab is located, but who themselves were
not members of the Lab, left the institute in the late 1980s to form two large
private companies in Moscow that offer funerary services. One service is
temporary embalming (which in the 1990s was indeed frequently commissioned by organized crime members). The work of these anatomists is different from the scientists of the Lenin Lab, and the two groups have not been
affiliated; authors interview with Alexandr Tkachenko, currently of the Ritual
Medical-Embalming Service (Moscow) and formerly a Junior Medical Scientist
in the mausoleum. Moscow, August 5, 2009.
129. One also heard open criticism of this project from at least one leading scientist, Ilya Zbarsky; I. B. Zbarsky, Ot Rossii do Rossii [From Russia to Russia], in
Pod kryshei Mavzoleia [Under the roof of the mausoleum], ed. E. E. Zaitseva
(Tver, 1998). Russian word krysha (roof) is used here in two sensesto mean,
first, inside the mausoleum and, second, under the protection of the
mausoleum (the latter referring to protection rackets of the mafia); Zbarsky
and Hutchinson, Lenins Embalmers.
130. For example, the Soviet technique of kidney transplantation (which Lopukhin
developed with scientists of the Institute of Surgery in Moscow in the 1960s)
was influenced by Lopukhins work on Lenins body. This work also led to the
development of a noninvasive three-drop test designed to measure cholesterol levels in the skin of living patients. The test was patented in the United
States in 2002 and its variants are widely used in US medicine; Alexei Yurchak,
unpublished manuscript.
157

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ALEXEI YURCHAK

Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden

D U R I N G D I S C U S S I O N S A F E W Y E A R S ago in the Duma about the

figure 1. Center for

figure 2. Sarcophagus in the

figure 3. Lenin lying in the

In spring 1922, feeling quite ill and exhausted, Lenin relocated to

Neither friends nor family members should communicate to Vladimir Ilyich

delegates of the Twentieth Party Congress. However, this document

These admissions by party ideologues, advisors, and historians at the end of

Lenin died on January 21, 1924. There was no longer a need to

The political reasons for this peculiar kind of preservation can be

linking monarchic sovereignty and the kings body.61 Sovereign power is

figure 4. Effigy of Charles II (d. 1685), wax

figure 5. Effigy of Frances, Duchess of

figure 6. Effigy of William III of Orange (d.

sovereign perpetuity had also emerged. Importantly, this political cosmology

functions of sovereignty, the locus of sovereignty in liberal democracy

political regime that looked at it from the external point of sovereign

Between Art and Biology

Recollect the way in which Lopukhins description of Lenins

important. This is why not everyone is capable of doing this work.95

The material is applied by microinjections to different parts of the body to

figure 7. Letter from L. P. Beria to V. M. Molotov describing the disappearance of

and what scientists today call experimental objects (eksperimentalnye obekty),

figure 8. A bank of experimental objects in the institute on Krasin Street.

performed on anonymous experimental bodies (figs. 1012). We take

level of form the body appears during examinations as authentic and

figure 10. During a big procedure on an

figure 12. An experimental object taken out

Lenins body has been displayed in the mausoleum for ninety

cause, in the early years popular among some Bolshevik intellectuals,

Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty

Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty

intelligentsia: documents of the CC RKP(b) VKP(b) VChK/OGPU/NKVD

Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty

53. Ibid. E.g., Protokol zasedaniia Meditsinskoi Komissii po sokhraneniiu tela V. I.

Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty

Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty

is to avoid an appearance of a corpse. This reminds us of the emergent quality

Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty

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