People queue in front of the Lenin Mausoleum
on Red Square, in the background St. Basil’s
Cathedral and Kremlin. March 1925 | Bunde-
sarchiv via Wikimedia Deutschland
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from being prepared for burial to having his remains preserved for
immortality, remembrance and veneration. The Mausoleum assumed a life
of its own in the power vacuum that immediately followed his death. After
Stalin’s death in 1953, his body was also embalmed and interred next to that
of Lenin. However, after Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin, his
etched name was removed from the marble façade of the Mausoleum, and he
was buried at a gravesite in front of the Kremlin wall in 1961.
Remarkably durable, Lenin’s remains have survived the various
permutations of the Soviet empire and its subsequent collapse. With the
exception of his removal for safekeeping during the Great Patriotic War,
and regular periods of re-embalming, Lenin’s preserved body has resided
continuously in the Mausoleum since his death. Throughout the twentieth
century, and into the twenty-first, Lenin lives. Although it was possible to
bury Stalin’s embalmed remains in 1961, burying Lenin proves to be more
difficult because his removal from Red Square entails a re-thinking of the
October Revolution of 1917, Leninism, the role of the Communist Party and
the creation of the Soviet Union. As a place of memory and long-standing
artefact on the necropolis of Red Square, it is an iconic part of the memorial
landscape of the capital city.
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