Evict Lenin from his tomb

Writing in Saturday’s Guardian John Gray, or a sub-editor acting on his behalf asked “can there be life after death?” It was a more a reflection on Victorian spiritualism and the weird attempts to preserve Lenin’s corpse.

A reader unfamiliar with either Lenin’s personal view, or the opinion of most Marxists on the subject would have come away with the feeling that the quest for individual immortality is as much a part of Marxism as trying to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Gray writes:

“The poet Mayakovsky captured the mood among Bolsheviks when Lenin’s death was announced on 21 January 1924: “Lenin, even now,” he wrote, “is more alive than all the living.” For Krasin this was more than a poetic conceit. Soon after Lenin’s funeral he published an article in the communist newspaper Izvestia entitled “The Architectural Immortalisation of Lenin”.”

He follows this up with a statement by Shchusev , the architect who designed Lenin’s tomb: “Vladimir Ilyich is eternal . . . In architecture the cube is eternal. Let the mausoleum derive from a cube.”

At least one of those statements is self-evidently bonkers. Mrs Lenin or Krupskaia thought so. She said “if you want to respect Lenin’s name , then build crèches, kindergartens, houses, schools and so on.” Lenin himself had wanted to be cremated and not embalmed. It’s hard to believe that he would have had any patience with the plans to resurrect him in a couple of centuries as Krasin predicted:

“”I am certain that the time will come when science will become all-powerful, that it will be possible to recreate a diseased organism and resurrect great historical figures.”

Krupsakaia’s r timing was a little bit out. The cult of Lenin was one of the major tools the Stalinist bureaucracy was to use for decades to reinforce its own prestige and suppress any form of dissent in the Communist movement, itself a very anti-Leninist idea.

In terms of domestic Russian politics at the time the grotesque Lenin mummy cult was a bit of a shrewd move for the Stalinists. Having repressed religion they were offering their largely peasant society a brand new shrine for the new age.  Isaac Deutscher described it as the “queer Mecca of an atheistic creed which needed a prophet and saints”, reminding us all how words change their meaning over the decades.  It’s also a reminder of how the backwardness and isolation of Russian society produced a travesty of a socialist society.

According to Gray the last refurbishment of Lenin’s mummy left him looking younger than ever. That would be a silly waste of money in any society but in Putin’s Russia, where life expectancy keeps on dropping it’s doubly ludicrous preserving that effigy. Throw in a crematorium and give Lenin his last wish.