Lenin Mausoleum outside the walls of the
Kremlin in Moscow (2011) | CaritasUbi via
Wikimedia Commons
of state mourning suspends Lenin’s body in between As a grave with human remains, it is not easy to
revolutionary time and that of post-Soviet Russia. dismantle or relocate.
At present, Lenin is waiting for burial, yet is viewed
as if buried in an open coffin. Lying in state, in an
Jacques Derrida’s attention to the unintended
extended wake of more than ninety years, his body ways that the past haunts the present is relevant
has a ghostly liminal presence. for understanding how the commemoration of
Lenin’s role in the Soviet Union is a complex
The grave as a sacred and
haunted place of memory
mixture of restoration, borrowing, rupture and
continuity. Complementing the work of Etkind and
Oushakine, Derrida reflects on the spectral legacy
of Karl Marx and the relationship between past and
present generations. Of particular importance is
If the grave marks the passage from life to
Derrida’s argument that living in the present means
death – what could a body that is perpetually waiting living with the inheritance of the past. «And this
for burial signify? Moreover, if the regime that being-with-specters would also be, not only but
the leader founded no longer exists, why is he still also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of
revered as a modern-day relic? After all, Vladimir generations» (1994: xviii-xix). In reflecting on the
Ilyich Ulyanov was not just any political leader, but complex legacy of Marx, Derrida suggests there is a
the first leader of the USSR and father of the Russian different kind of relation to the past. If ontology is
Revolution. Graves are one of the most primal concerned with presence and existence, hauntology
places of memory, linking generations together and focuses on the presence of that which is absent.
reinforcing the social need to commemorate the dead
(Ruin 2019). Although many statues to Lenin have
been torn down, Lenin’s Mausoleum is different.
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