I have just fulfilled a childhood dream," says Liubov, smiling like a girl despite the intense cold of the Moscow winter, after visiting the necropolis of the Kremlin wall and entering the mausoleum where the protagonist of this historic place rests: the mummy of Vladimir Lenin, whose death marks one hundred years today.
The news was a hard blow to the young country of the Soviets. But for the Soviet leader's inner circle it was no surprise. Three years earlier he had begun to suffer from dizziness, fainting, insomnia and severe headaches. The illness worsened and he finally died of a cerebral hemorrhage on January 21, 1924.
The Bolsheviks feared that with the disappearance of their popular and charismatic leader, they would lose the trust of the people. So they decided to make him a kind of demigod. That image had already begun to be cultivated during his lifetime, promoted by his personal secretary, Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich. It had especially been reflected in school books. In one of them, Preschoolers about Lenin, published in 1925, testimonies are collected from children who attended the funeral with their parents, which lasted three days in the Moscow House of Unions, near the Kremlin. Little Sasha, six years old, says: “You can't live without Lenin. As Lenin has died, the whole world will soon die, the sun, the moon and the stars.”
That fervor endured in Soviet times, recalls Talib, a middle-aged man from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, who is sightseeing with two friends in the Russian capital. “I was already here during the times of the USSR and then the queue was miles long. Now in about fifteen minutes you can see everything very calmly and, what's more, for free,” he points out after going down to the red crypt and surrounding the glass sarcophagus. Lenin's head illuminated like a light bulb, black suit on which both hands rest: the right one semi-closed, the left open. Wearing a black tie with white dots, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov has smooth skin, as if he could still inflame the masses from a platform, nothing like the last photographs of him during his lifetime, wrinkled and prostrate in a wheelchair.
After his death, the Soviet leadership decided to keep him embalmed, despite the opposition of his own wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. The mission was entrusted to the architect Alexei Schusev, who was called to the Kremlin one day after the death. The first place to expose the Bolshevik leader was built in just three days with pine wood. Then the first mausoleum was built, made of oak and olive wood. Five years later, the current version was built, made of red and black granite.
The day Liubov visits his childhood hero, Thursday, January 18, it is bitterly cold, 14 degrees below zero. But that hasn't interrupted his plans. She lives in Kurgan, a city “on the other side of the Urals”, but she is visiting her daughter, with whom she has gone to Red Square. “I'm impressed, I think it's a very important place for our country,” she says.
Few visitors, mostly Russians and from outside Moscow, begin arriving before ten in the morning. The trickle is regular during the three hours that the monument is open five days a week, but queues do not usually form. In Soviet times, the founder of the USSR received more than a million visits a year.
A path flanked by beautiful fir trees, snow-covered at this time, leads to the first inhabitants of the necropolis, buried in the Kremlin wall or underground. Members of the politburo or illustrious foreign communists, such as the Hungarian Jenö Landler; the American John Reed, witness of the Bolshevik revolution that he captured in Ten Days that Shook the World, or Sen Katayama, co-founder of the Communist Party of Japan. And relevant personalities of the time, such as astronaut Yuri Gagarin. And all the leaders, from Dzerzhinsky to Chernenko, with their corresponding bust. Only Nikita Khrushchev, dismissed in 1964, and Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom the USSR ended in 1991, are missing.
Of course there is Stalin, whom after his death in 1953, attempts were also made to preserve for eternity. The mausoleum thus became a home for two, and the name of the second tenant was added to the inscription at the entrance: “LENIN AND STALIN.” It lasted only nine years, because after the de-Stalinization led by Khrushchev he was removed from the mausoleum. “This is history, coming here and seeing Lenin is a must for anyone who is in Moscow,” says Talib.
Periodically the idea arises of dismantling the mausoleum and giving Lenin an underground burial. This was strongly raised in 2017, the centenary of the Russian revolution. Several candidates for the presidential elections the following year and the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, among others, said in public that it had to be done. As always, the Communist Party argued that Lenin left an indelible mark on Russia and the entire world. And he attacked the proposals, born to attack the party and “distract attention from social problems.”
In 2022, Sergei Mitrokhin, a deputy in the Moscow Assembly for the liberal Yabloko party, said that Lenin should have long been buried with his relatives. And from the ultranationalist Liberal-Democratic Party, Boris Chernishov assured that the tombs of all former Soviet leaders and personalities of that time also had to be removed from the Kremlin walls. “Let them take care of their own families. And let them read the law. All state decisions were made a long time ago. What needs to be discussed now?”, reacted Sergei Obukhov from the leadership of the Communist Party.
A survey indicated in 2017 that 63% of Russians would be in favor of burying Lenin, compared to 31% who said no. On all occasions, the Kremlin has discreetly put the matter aside, stating that “the right time will come,” and the ruling United Russia party has avoided commenting.
Already at the end of 2021, the Kremlin said that there were no plans to take advantage of the centenary and empty the mausoleum. Russian President Vladimir Putin once said that this measure will not be taken until there are “many people” who feel that this is important for their lives. That moment has not arrived yet. A survey published on Friday by the Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) indicates that 47% of Russians have a positive opinion of the founder of the USSR.
For communists, this is also a practical question. Russia's main opposition party has become a troupe of the Kremlin in recent years, and with that it has been losing voters. Appealing to the most iconic figures of the past helps him recover it. In fact, in recent months he has organized several conferences on Lenin and Stalin. Any demand or protest of a socio-economic or political nature could provoke the confrontation with the Kremlin that the formation, led by Gennadi Zyuganov, wants to avoid. But historical memory is allowed.
What's more, it suits Putin's Kremlin, even if it avoids remembering everything related to the Bolshevik revolution. In fact, on this occasion, as happened in 2017, it has tiptoed around the anniversary, without exhibitions, souvenirs or any other type of official commemoration. Furthermore, Putin has criticized the figure of Lenin in recent months for the mistakes made when founding the USSR. In November he insisted on the role that Lenin had in the founding of Ukraine, no small issue in the midst of the current war with the neighboring country.
Who Putin's Kremlin has taken to the altars is Stalin, praising him as a symbol of a strong and vertical State, and turning him into a heroic figure for the victory in the Second World War. But overlooking his revolutionary life, his role in the creation of the USSR and totally forgetting the repression of the 1930s and the gulag. Statues of Lenin are countless and in Russia they are everywhere. There are fewer of Stalin: more than a hundred monuments, but the majority were erected during Putin's government.
