OVERVIEW
Lenin’s Mausoleum:
A Haunted House
on Red Square 1
Siobhan Kattago
PhD, New School for Social Research
of the University of Tartu
“Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!”
Vladimir Mayakovsky
M
uch has changed since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. An empire has
vanished from the maps, while economic and social changes have proceeded
quickly but unevenly. Yet, in spite of such turbulence, one of the most iconic
places of Soviet memory still remains. Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet
Union, died in 1924 and has been lying in an open coffin in the centre of Moscow for over
ninety years. More than a Soviet curiosity for the occasional tourist; Lenin’s Mausoleum,
as the literal embodiment of state sovereignty, demonstrates the uneven patterns of
commemorating and dealing with the Soviet past in contemporary Russia.
Before he died, Lenin asked to be buried in a cemetery next to his mother in Petrograd.
Immediately after his death, opinions were divided as to where and how to bury him.
Although Lenin’s widow was opposed to embalmment and public viewing in Red Square,
Stalin prevailed. Lenin’s body was embalmed and prepared for his unusual afterlife. The
idea of a temporary mausoleum changed in an unprecedented way when the Funeral
Commission was renamed Commission for the Immortalization of the Memory of Vladimir
Ulyanov Lenin. With this bureaucratic change in July 1924, Lenin’s body was transformed
This is a shortened version of «Haunted House: Memory, Ghosts and Political Theology in Lenin’s Mausoleum,» that was published in Constellations: A Journal
of Critical and Democracy Theory, Vol 24, No 4, December 2017, 555-569.
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Observing Memories
ISSUE 3