Embalming Lenin: Why Was the Soviet Founder Permanently Preserved?

At the edge of Moscow’s Red Square, by the walls of the Kremlin, stands a stone mausoleum that is home to the preserved body of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union. While other world leaders throughout history were embalmed and later buried, Lenin’s remains can still be viewed today over a century after his death. Read on to discover why the Soviet Union decided to embalm its leader and explore how Lenin’s embalming was performed and maintained throughout a series of political upheavals, from Stalin’s purges to the end of the Soviet Union itself.

Born in April 1870, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to history as Vladimir Lenin, is widely considered the most influential political leader of the 20th century. He was the driving force behind the most momentous political event in modern times: the Bolshevik Revolution. He led the Soviet Union to victory during the Russian Civil War that followed. Many historians consider him the greatest revolutionary leader and statesman in history, as well as the greatest political thinker since Karl Marx.

However, Lenin was not without his enemies. In 1918, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt that left a bullet lodged in his neck. In early 1922, after surgery to remove the bullet, Lenin became seriously ill; he was partially paralyzed by a stroke and lost the power of speech. After a brief recovery, he had another stroke in March 1923, after which Lenin lost his ability to communicate completely. Throughout the following year, Lenin showed signs of partial recovery that were soon followed by a series of health complications. He paid his final visit to the Kremlin at the end of 1923, and just a few months later, on January 21, 1924, Vladimir Lenin died at the age of 53.

Lenin’s State Funeral

Once on Red Square, Lenin was placed in a newly built temporary mausoleum. On the afternoon of the 27th, Lenin’s state funeral was held. Soviet dignitaries such as Joseph Stalin and other leading figures gave speeches commemorating Lenin, and huge crowds gathered to say goodbye to the father of the nation.

However, Leon Trotsky, who many saw as Lenin’s heir to the Soviet Union, was conspicuously absent. Later, Trotsky claimed he had received the incorrect date for the funeral; this was corroborated by Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s secretary, who said Stalin had provided Trotsky with the wrong date to diminish his rival and solidify his own bid for power.

To accommodate the huge crowds of public mourners, Lenin’s remains were interred in a makeshift wooden monument next to the Kremlin Wall. Throughout the period of mourning, Tens of thousands of people traveled from across the Soviet Union and paid their respects to the leader of Bolshevism despite the freezing winter temperatures.

After the period of mourning was over, Soviet leaders ordered that Lenin’s body be embalmed so that it may be shown in Red Square for an even longer period. The embalming went directly against the wishes of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who had requested that Lenin be buried alongside his mother. In an act of modern mummification, Lenin’s brain and organs were removed during the embalming process, and an institute was founded in 1925 to research them. In their research, the scientists discovered that Lenin had severe sclerosis, which may have contributed to his death.

Pathologist Alexei Ivanovich Abrikosov was first responsible for embalming Lenin’s remains; later, Boris Zbarsky and Vladimir Vorobiev took charge of maintaining the body. A major issue that the embalmers had to deal with was the dark patches that developed on Lenin’s body, particularly on his hands and cheeks. Using a range of various chemicals, they were able to fix the problem. Every year, the remains of Lenin are immersed in a glycerol and potassium acetate solution. To keep Lenin’s eye sockets from collapsing, artificial eyeballs were inserted into his skull to maintain the overall shape of the Soviet leader’s face.

Lenin’s embalmed body was placed in a coffin and deposited into a temporary wooded tomb on Red Square, next to the Moscow Kremlin Wall. More than 100,000 Soviet citizens visited the mausoleum during the next six weeks. After the previous construction was damaged during the harsh winter months, a new wooden mausoleum was built and opened to the public on August 1, 1924.

Because of the continuing decomposition of Lenin’s body due to frequent problems with mold and humidity, Soviet authorities held a competition to design a more permanent stone mausoleum for Lenin’s remains. A total of 117 submissions were received for the competition, featuring creative concepts like a ship with Lenin’s likeness, a mausoleum shaped like a globe, a reproduction of an Egyptian pyramid, and a mausoleum shaped like a five-pointed star. The commission ultimately chose to preserve the shape of the wooden tomb. After making changes to his previous drawings, architect Alexey Shchusev produced a granite model that was given the go-ahead.

Construction of the permanent stone tomb lasted sixteen months and finally finished in October 1930. The new mausoleum stood three meters taller than the old wooden one, had an interior volume of 2,400 cubic meters, a twelve-fold increase in volume, and an exterior volume of 5,800 cubic meters, a four-fold increase. At ten thousand tons in total weight, it remains the highest point on Red Square.

Inside the mausoleum, a set of two grand staircases lead to the mourning hall, where a colossal granite block engraved with the Soviet emblem stands opposite the vestibule entrance. Another set of staircases leads on from the vestibule.

When visitors enter Lenin’s tomb, they are ushered to the left-hand staircase, which leads to the funeral hall containing Lenin’s embalmed body. The walls of the funeral hall are constructed from black labradorite, a stone that shimmers in the light and is supported by pillars of red porphyry. The combination of these two materials creates the optical illusion that Lenin is surrounded by red flags fluttering in the wind.

At the center of the funeral hall is Lenin’s colossal stone sarcophagus, designed by Alexey Shchusev. The upper section of Lenin’s coffin is held in place by four carefully placed metal columns, which give the illusion that the upper part of the sarcophagus is suspended in mid-air. The inside and outside of the coffin are emblazoned with intricately carved stone symbols depicting various aspects of the Soviet state. Visitors can view Lenin’s embalmed body through four glass windows, which are tilted to minimize reflections. The entire funeral hall is dimly lit, with Lenin himself given a special spotlight that appears to illuminate him as if from the inside. The intended effect is to give prominence to the significance of Lenin and lend the entire experience a somewhat religious feel.

Initially, Lenin’s body was embalmed for purely practical reasons; millions of mourners from across the Soviet Union were traveling to Moscow to pay their respects to the founder of the nation as he lay in state. To give the huge amount of mourners time to see Lenin before he decomposed, embalming was the best option.

However, even before he passed away, the Soviet authorities made the decision to embalm Lenin for three main reasons—to keep his cult of personality alive, uphold Soviet legitimacy, and prevent the necessity for an extraordinarily lavish funeral. It was intended for Lenin—who founded the formidable communist state—to be regarded as a revolutionary saint who had not died but still remained somewhat living; therefore, the Soviet nation he founded would not fade with him. Over time, consecutive Soviet regimes used Lenin’s mausoleum as a platform for their own speeches in an effort to emulate Lenin and connect their leadership to his.

Furthermore, the ideals of the Soviet Union were embodied by the corpse of Lenin himself. As the “miraculous” corpse never decayed despite the ravages of time, the message to those who saw him was that the ideals of communism were also unchanging. As Lenin lay silently, the Soviet people were told to look forward to a bright future where everyone could enjoy the fruits of communist labor. In the very heart of Moscow, Lenin’s mausoleum became an important symbol of Soviet power, and today, the unburied body epitomizes modern Russia’s inability to properly address its Soviet past or lack of a convincing future of its own.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the idea of moving Lenin to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, where other Soviet figures are buried, has been openly debated. With the backing of the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian President Boris Yeltsin planned to demolish the mausoleum and place Lenin beside his mother, Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova, in St. Petersburg’s Volkov Cemetery. However, Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s successor, objected, saying that reburying Lenin would suggest that people had adhered to the wrong ideals during the seventy years of Soviet rule and that those years were somehow wasted.

Today, more than 100 years after his death, Lenin remains undisturbed in his granite tomb on Red Square. His resting place still serves as a rallying point for Russian communists to gather and protest. During Russia’s annual Victory Day parades, his tomb is still used as a platform for Russia’s leaders to observe the procession of military forces and give speeches of their own.