Lenin’s hold on Russia’s heart is still strong enough that three years ago, the Union of Russian Architects succumbed to a public outcry and canceled a competition soliciting suggestions for how the Red Square mausoleum could be repurposed. That competition did not even specifically call for the removal of Lenin’s body.Lenin died on Jan. 21, 1924, at age 53, severely weakened by three strokes. His widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wanted him to be buried in a conventional grave.Lenin’s close associates had feared his death for months. Artist Yuri Annenkov, summoned to do his portrait at the dacha where he was convalescing, said he had “the helpless, twisted, infantile smile of a man who had fallen into childhood.”Amid those concerns, Josef Stalin told a Politburo meeting of a proposal by “some comrades” to preserve Lenin’s body for centuries, according to a history by Russian news agency Tass. The idea offended Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s closest lieutenant, who likened it to the holy relics displayed by the Russian Orthodox Church — a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks— that had “nothing in common with the science of Marxism.”But Stalin, once a divinity school student, understood the value of the secular analogue to a saint.The weather may have tipped the scales. Temperatures were reportedly as low as minus 30 C (minus 22 F) when Lenin’s body was displayed during a wake in Moscow, stalling decomposition and inspiring authorities to hastily build a small wooden mausoleum in Red Square and make further efforts to preserve the body.A later version, a more modernist take on ancient stepped pyramids clad in somber deep red stone, opened in 1930. By that time, Trotsky had been forced into exile and Stalin was in full control, bolstered by a determination to portray himself as absolutely loyal to Lenin’s ideals.In the end, the cult of “Lenin After Lenin” may have worked against the Soviet Union rather than strengthening it by enforcing a rigid mindset, in the view of some historians.”In many ways the tragedy of the USSR lay in the fact that all subsequent generations of leaders tried to rely on certain ‘testaments of Lenin,'” Vladimir Rudakov, editor of the journal Istorik, wrote in this month’s issue.The Mayakovsky poem that proclaimed Lenin’s immortality was “a parting word, or a spell, or a curse,” Rudakov said.About 450,000 people file past Lenin’s corpse per year, according to Tass, about a third of the number of Moscow Zoo visitors and a sharp contrast from the Soviet era when seemingly endless lines shuffled across Red Square.The honor guards whose goose-stepping rotations fascinated visitors were removed from outside the mausoleum three decades ago. At the annual military parade through Red Square, the structure is blocked from view by a tribune where dignitaries watch the festivities.Lenin is still there — just harder to see.
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