Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
a b s t r a c t This essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Lenin
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Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years. It focuses on the materiality of this particular body,
the unique biological science that developed around the project, and the peculiar political role this body
has performed. Rep re s en ta t i on s 129. Winter 2015 The Regents of the University of California.
ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 11657. All rights reserved. Direct requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2015.129.5.116.
of the body change and even actively substituting it with new materials.
I will refer to the research institute that has conducted this work as the
Mausoleum Lab or the Lab, as the scientists call it, although in fact it
consists of several labs and scientific groups. The actual activities of this
research institute today, as in the past, are disguised behind a euphemistically cumbersome name: Center for Scientific Research and Teaching
Methods in Biochemical Technologies (fig. 1).2
The Lab has worked to preserve the dynamic form of every part of
Lenins body, including parts that have never been visible to the public or
intended for display. Scientists have maintained not only the features of
Lenins face but also the shape of his heels, the pigmentation around his
armpits, the strength of hair attachment on his chest, and the flexibility of
his knee joints, for example. What bodily preservation amounts to in this
case is different from that in other cases of preservation, both natural (bodies preserved in permafrost, ice, salt, sandy soil) and artificial (bodies subjected to mummification, cryogenics, plastination).3 In these other cases the
form of the body changes in multiple ways: mummified bodies dry up,
stiffen, change color, become unrecognizable; frozen and plastinated bodies may preserve their external appearance but lose flexibility and elasticity.
Unlike those bodies, Lenins continues to maintain its dynamic form, which
includes but is not limited to its external appearance. This means that the
Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty
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work on the body can never cease; the body cannot be allowed simply to lie
there in an embalmed state. It must be continuously examined, fixed, resculpted, and reembalmed.
The extraordinary results of this project have never been known to the
public; in fact, they have been actively hidden from public view. Visitors to
the mausoleum see Lenin lying in a glass sarcophagus dressed in a dark suit;
only his head and hands are uncovered and visible (figs. 2, 3). They never
learn that the bodys joints remain flexible, the internal pressure of its skin is
maintained, and its invisible surfaces are painstakingly and continually resculpted. No one has ever been able to appreciate these extraordinary
achievements. No one, that is, with the exception of a small group of scientists and state leaders.
Why has Lenins body been maintained in this way? What is the significance of the effort to preserve its dynamic form and not its biological flesh?
Why have its invisible parts been maintained with such precision? What kind
of science has emerged around the project, and why have its remarkable
results been kept secret? To answer these questions we must understand the
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complex political role that Lenins body played during the Soviet period
and, to some extent, continues to play today. This paper attempts such an
understanding by analyzing the unique materiality of Lenins body, the
scientific procedures that developed as part of this work, and the political
debates that accompanied the project from its inception.4
Despite appearances, the political role of Lenins body is anything but
obvious. Of course, it is well known that during the Soviet period this body
functioned as a central propaganda symbol of the Communist system and
that its public display was supposed to inspire devotion to the Communist
project. However, settling for this interpretation does not explain the emergence of the unique scientific practice focused on maintaining this bodys
dynamic parameters and invisible parts. In fact, the political role of Lenins
preserved body goes far beyond that of propaganda. To understand this
extended role we must first travel to the pastto the last years before
Lenins death, when the divergence between Lenin and his cult began.
Leninism
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allowed to edit his own earlier texts, change his earlier positions, or protest
against misinterpretations of his statements. Now it was the politburo that
controlled what Lenin was really sayingnot Lenin himself. Lenin the
political figure was now doubledinto one Lenin banished from the political world, and another Lenin canonized within it. The double process was
projected into many areas of political practice, including party discourse. In
November 1923, Pravda wrote that Lenin was not just the name of a beloved
leader but something biggera program, a tactic, a philosophical
world viewin a word, Leninism.31 Leninism as a teaching was bigger than
the flesh-and-blood person called Lenin and could therefore even be
different from the ideas of Lenin (the person).
The banishment of the real Lenin extended not only to the writings of
the final two years of his life but also to much of his legacy and the facts of his
personal life.32 When, in the mid-1930s, the famous Soviet writer Marietta
Shaginian tried to include into her acclaimed trilogy some previously
unknown facts of the ethnic origins of Lenins family, which she learned
from Lenins widow, the CC not only stopped the work from being published but also, remarkably, adopted a resolution in which Shaginian and
Krupskaya were harshly criticized for turning the important public
endeavor of composing works about Lenin into a private and even family
affair designed to control how the life and work of Lenin and his family
are interpretedsomething that the Central Committee has never allowed
anyone to do.33
The doctrine of Leninism was the result of these banishments, omissions, and alternations of Lenins ideas and the facts of his life and the
canonization of other facts and ideas. In 1924 Trotsky warned the CC that
Leninism had little to do with Lenin and was at risk of becoming a collection
of dead quotes that would be used out of context to legitimate all decisions,
even diametrically opposing ones. It was not just Lenins immortalityhis
cult statusthat preceded his death, as Nina Tumarkin suggests, but rather
the substitution of Lenin with Leninism that went on through the simultaneous canonization of the ideal and banishment of the man.34 In the
1920s, these two processes transformed the Russian revolutionary state into
a Leninist polity.35
From that time until the end of Soviet history Leninism, as the unquestionable doctrine, became a central element of the Soviet political system.
The doctrine was not static; it was constantly being reshaped to fit the
current political context by canonizing and censoring Lenin, reinterpreting
his previously published texts and criticizing their earlier interpretations,
omitting facts of his life and inventing new ones. Every Soviet leader, from
Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev, produced his own version of Leninism. This
process was possible because every version of the doctrine, regardless of its
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current meaning, occupied the position of the unquestionable, foundational truth of the Soviet political system. The central unquestionable tenet
of this truth was the understanding that all human history would inevitably
arrive at Communism. The truth was articulated outside and beyond the
Soviet system. No Soviet leader, not even Stalin during the height of his
power, could occupy that external position; it could be occupied only by the
constructed voice of Leninism.
In 1990, less than two years before the Soviet state collapsed, the
Communist Party publicly admitted that Lenins works had always been
distorted. A professor of Marxist-Leninist philosophy complained in a central newspaper: Our tragedy is that we do not know Lenin. We never read
his original texts in the past, and we still do not do this today. For decades we
have perceived Lenin through mediators, interpreters, popularizers, and
other distorters.36 A party historian bitterly remarked in a widely read daily
that Nikita Khrushchev and Brezhnev were obviously not Leninists. For
them Lenin was only an icon behind which they could hide.37 Another
historian wrote in a popular monthly that even the Institute of MarxismLeninism in Moscow, the countrys definitive authority on Lenins work,
for seventy years since its founding has been fulfilling an absurd function . . . legitimizing for publication those [Lenins] texts that matched the
canon [of the day], however different from the real Lenins words they were,
and altering or modifying those [Lenins] texts that did not fit that
canon.38 Gorbachev began his April 1990 speech at the celebrations for
the one-hundred-twentieth anniversary of Lenins birth with the words:
Lenin still remains with us as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.
But he quickly added: We must rethink Lenin and his theoretical and
political work, and we must rid ourselves of the distortions and canonizations of his conclusions. . . . It is time to end the thoughtless and absurd
manipulation of Lenins name and image that turns him into an icon.
In fact, suggested Gorbachev, to preserve the real Lenin we must abandon
the concept of Leninism altogether, because it reduces Lenins complex
thought to a collection of canonized statements. This unprecedented claim
by the party leader put the audience at the meeting into a visible state of
shock.39
In a revealing publication in 1990, Fyodor Burlatsky, a former advisor
and speechwriter to Khrushchev and Yuri Andropov, described how Lenins
quotes were manipulated in the politburo. In the Kremlin office of the
powerful Secretary of Ideology Mikhail Suslov, wrote Burlatsky, there was
a large file cabinet with little drawers that contained thousands of quotes
from Lenin. The quotes were organized by themes and were written on small
library cards. When the politburo introduced a new political campaign, economic measure, or international policy Suslov found an appropriate phrase
Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty
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from Lenin to support it, ensuring that even incompatible policies and campaigns appeared equally legitimate. Once, in the early 1960s, Burlatsky
showed Suslov a draft of a speech he had prepared for Khrushchev that
contained a discussion of reforms. Suslov read it carefully and in one place
said, It would be good to illustrate this point with a quote from Vladimir
Ilyich [Lenin]. When Burlatsky replied that he would look for an appropriate quote, Suslov responded: No, I will do this myself. Burlatsky writes:
Suslov dashed to the corner of his office, pulled out one drawer and put it on the
table. With his long, thin fingers he started very rapidly flipping through the cards.
He pulled out one card and read it. No, thats not it. Then he pulled out another
one. No, still not right. Finally he took another card out and exclaimed with satisfaction, Ok, this one will do.40
Representations
Then, on January 27, the body was officially buried in a grand ceremony. In
fact, the funeral amounted to moving the body to a temporary wooden mausoleum built on Red Square, where it was to lie for a few weeks longer in
a glass sarcophagus, allowing more people to see it before its burial. The body
was in an intermediate state: the burial that began on January 27 had not yet
been completed, its final stage still pending. Temperatures in Moscow continued to be extremely cold, and the medical commissions that examined the
body every several days between late January and late March found no signs of
decomposition.43 But in late March the weather turned warmer, and on
March 26, 1924, the examination commission noticed the first threatening
signsthe drying and softening of body parts and a sharp change in the
color of the head, hands and shins.44 Irreversible changes would not be far
away.
The extended period of almost two months when the body remained
intact gave the Soviet leadership a chance to discuss the body again and
again. It was during these discussions that the plan to preserve it for posterity gradually emerged. Although the idea itself had been voiced earlier in
the press and among laypeople, many party leaders considered it scientifically unrealistic and contradictory to the materialist worldview of Communism.45 For Trotsky and Bukharin, preserving Lenins body was comparable
to treating it as a religious relicunthinkable for communists.46 Kliment
Voroshilov similarly claimed that if Lenins body was preserved, we will
cease to be Marxists-Leninists.47 Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich suggested creating a closed tomb, which would function as a public memorial but without
a publicly displayed body. The majority in the politburo supported this
idea.48
In the meantime it was decided that the temporary preservation of the
body should be extended to allow more people to bid farewell to the
leader.49 But there was no consensus among the leadership on how to
preserve Lenin or for how long. This fact was reflected in the remarkable
cacophony of opinions voiced by the party leadership and scientists during
the meeting of the Commission for the Organization of Lenins Funeral on
March 5, 1924. At the meeting, Leonid Krasin, a Central Committee member with an engineering degree, suggested placing the coffin containing
Lenins body inside a metal box with a glass top and filling it all the way
up to the brim with embalming liquid [that] would be absolutely transparent and invisible from outside.50 But the powerful Felix Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the funeral commission and the OGPU (future KGB), disagreed:
instead of submerging the body in liquid, as though it were some kind of
dead meat, he said, it would be better to freeze it.51 Several members of the
commission pointed out, however, that freezing had its problems tooit
would preserve not only the body but also its current defects, while liquid
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embalming might allow one to fix the latter. Moreover, added Grigory
Belenky, a recent experimental freezing of a human body demonstrated
that as soon as the temperature changed just a little, the body turned
black. So, if something breaks downsay, the freezer is not working for
half an hourit will all turn black and everything will be lost. Central
Committee member Vyacheslav Molotov opposed both freezing the body
and submerging it in liquid but had no alternative suggestions. Doctor
Maksimilian Savelev proposed putting the body in a transparent capsule
filled with pure nitrogenneutral gas that would prevent biological processes and stop decomposition, he argued. But Krasin was skeptical:
I have my doubts. . . . As far as I know, apart from the bacteria that live
in oxygen there are also anaerobic bacteria that successfully function in
nitrogen. Having listened to these opinions, Avel Enukidze, member of
the Central Executive Committee, summarized: We should certainly
understand that we will not be able to preserve Vladimir Ilyich for a long
time. . . . We will freeze the body without promising to anyone that this is
done for posterity. If disaster strikes and it continues changing even when
its frozen, we will have to enclose it. Then Kliment Voroshilov, member
of the Revolutionary Military Council, made the final suggestion: I propose doing nothing. If the body holds up for another year without change,
this is already good enough.52
Members of the Commission for the Organization of Lenins Funeral
were clearly not of one mind on whether the preservation was possible or
even necessary, so no decision was reached that day. However something
important emerges from this and other discussions in March 1924. The
manner in which the party leaders spoke about Lenins body when they
were given a chance to discuss it for an extended period of time was reminiscent of how Lenin was treated during the final two years of his life, when
he was simultaneously banished from political life and canonized as a cult
figure. The discussions from January to March 1924 also focused simultaneously on burying Lenins body and preserving it, closing it and displaying it, embalming it for posterity and denying that posterity was important
(the final remarks by Enukidze and Voroshilov on March 5 drove that
paradoxical point home). Even the fact that these discussions were regularly conducted in two different commissions reflected this duality: one of
them was called Commission for the Organization of Lenins Funeral,
the other,Commission for the Preservation of Lenins Body.53 Many
party leaders took part in the work of both commissions. This duality
reflected the two different views of Lenins body between which the leadership was oscillatingfrom the decomposing corpse of a flesh-and-blood
person called Lenin to the embodiment of something that was different
from and bigger than Lenin the man. And although at that moment these
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two bodies were still made out of the same biological flesh, they would
not, as we will see, continue to be the same much longer.
In late March, after endless discussions and disagreements, it was
decided to subject Lenins body to an experimental embalming procedure
proposed by Professor of Medicine Vladimir Vorobiev and the biochemist
Boris Zbarsky. No one was certain whether the experiment would succeed
and, if it did, how long the body could be displayed after that. The plan was
to attempt to preserve it for as long as possible.54 Vorobiev and Zbarsky
worked nonstop for four months, moving slowly and carefully and inventing
much of their method in the process. In late July 1924 they reported their
success to the leadership, claiming that if Lenins body was continuously
treated according to their method it might remain in its current state for
a long time. For how long they did not specify. When, following Vorobievs
report, Nikolai Semashko asked him, How long can we expect Lenins body
to hold up according to this method? Vorobiev responded: I will allow
myself not to answer this question.55
Vorobiev and Zbarsky did not simply embalm the body once and for all,
but developed a dynamic method of preservation that required regular
reembalming, submerging the body in baths with special solutions for long
periods of time, filling it with new liquids and substances, substituting its
original organic materials with artificial ones, and regularly resculpting its
shapes and surfaces. On July 24, 1924, the commission, now renamed for the
occasion The Commission for the Immortalization of Lenins Memory,
issued a public statement, explaining in retrospect why it had been decided
to preserve Lenins body. The statement was read by Enukidzethe same
person who four and a half months earlier, before the experiment began,
had suggested, We will freeze the body without promising to anyone that
this is done for posterity. Now he said:
We did not want to turn the body of Vladimir Ilyich into some kind of relic, by
means of which we could popularize and preserve his memory. He had already
immortalized himself enough with his brilliant teaching and revolutionary activities. . . . We wanted to preserve the body of Vladimir Ilyich . . . [because] it is of great
importance to preserve the fizicheskii oblik [physical guise, physical appearance] of
this remarkable leader for the next generation and all the future generations.56
It is clear again from this explanation that the party leadership saw
Lenins body in a dual way: as the biological remains of an actual person
and as a physical entity that had transcended individual biology. Consider
the difference between this kind of dual body and a Christian relic: in the
case of the relic it is crucial that the authentic biological substance of the
person (saint) is preserved.57 But in the case of Lenins body, whether or not
the authentic biological trace is preserved is not pivotal. As Enukidze put it,
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We did not want to turn the body . . . into some kind of relic. In other
words, it is more important to maintain the form of this body (its physical
appearance) than its individual biology. The distinction between the biology and the form of a body is like that between a person and the representation of a personin the same way that a sculpture or a doctrine might
represent an individual.
How Enukidze described this task in 1924 is strikingly similar to how the
Lab scientists talk about it today. According to academician Valery Bykov, the
director of VILAR Institute (Russian Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic
Plants), the task of this work is to preserve Lenins anatomical image (anatomicheski obraz).58 Anatomical image, like physical appearance, implies
a specific focus on the bodyone in which the bodys particular form is more
important than its particular biological matter. A veteran scientist of the Lab,
academician Yuri Lopukhin, uses the phrase living sculpture (zhivaia skulptura), which he coined to convey a number of ambiguities.59 After years of
reembalming, resculpting, and substituting, this body today contains so many
artificial materials and has changed so much from its original biological
composition that in some sense it is closer to a wholly constructed representation of Lenins dead body than to the original, once living man.60 At the
same time, says Lopukhin, this is different from external representation, as in
sculpture, because it is the actual body itself. This body both is and is not
a representation. The phrase living sculpture is meant to convey this paradox, as if to say this is a sculpture of the body that is constructed out of the body itself.
The work directed at achieving this goal over the years led to the emergence of a unique quasi-biological science that is different from other known
approaches to embalming and bodily preservation. In fact, the practitioners
of this science insist that the terms preservation and embalming do not
adequately describe their work because they refer to static dead bodies,
whose forms are fixed, static, and therefore inevitably distorted. But Lenins
body is differentits form is dynamic, flexible, emergent. To remain undistorted its form must constantly change. Preservation in this case is not
a state but a never-ending process. It is synonymous not with conservation,
but with cultivation. And its criteria are not just scientific but also artistic.
Twinned Beings
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jostled with each other for the position nearest to it, practically ignoring the
corpse of the kings real body.69 The latter lay naked in the coffin, while the
effigy was attired in royal robes, crowned with an imperial crown, and holding
the sceptre and hand of justice.70 At that moment the effigy represented the
king in splendor, in contrast to the mortal remains of the dead king,
which had lost much of their relevance.71 Proximity to the effigy symbolized
a closer connection to perpetual sovereign power as such. But after the king
was buried and the next king crowned, the kings two bodies became once
again reunited in one living body; the effigy could no longer be publicly
displayed and was usually hidden in the royal crypt or a distant abbey.72
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But is the theory of the kings two bodies relevant to the Soviet political
system? This question should be divided into two. First, is this theory unique
to Western European monarchies, or have comparable theories emerged
elsewhere? Second, when the absolutist monarchies in Europe were dismantled by modern revolutions or reforms, did this doctrine survive in some
altered form, and if so, how might it be manifested today?
Kantorowicz seems to suggest that the theory of the kings two bodies
was specific to late medievalearly modern Christian Europe. However, as
anthropologists and historians have demonstrated, remarkably similar
rituals of the perpetual regeneration of sovereign power have developed
in many other sociocultural and historical contexts. One of the earliest
accounts is provided in Sir James Frazers 1890 The Golden Bough: A Study
in Comparative Religion.73 In the third edition of the book, in 1916, Frazer
included a detailed description of the rituals of royal succession in the
Shilluk kingdom of South Sudan, including rituals that performed a doubling of the royal body using a wooden effigy, which are remarkably reminiscent of those described by Kantorowicz.74 Comparable doctrines and
rituals have been described in many other parts of the world and periodsfrom South Sudan and East India to premodern Japan; from ancient
Imperial Rome to the modern Vatican.75 It appears that a general divergence between the impermanence of the mortal sovereigns body and the
permanent perpetuity of the sovereign office has led to the development of
comparable cosmologies and rituals.
The case explored by Kantorowicz was just one significant instance among
comparable cultural models. In the Leninist system, I will argue, a distinct
political cosmology that linked a doubling of the foundational body with
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Neotraditional Sovereignty
As Claude Lefort demonstrated in his Democracy and Political Theory, the political institution of sovereign perpetuity in modern liberal
democracies is indeed directly related to that institution as it existed in the
absolutist monarchies that liberal democracies replaced.77 In European
monarchies, the sovereigns legitimacy was guaranteed by his or her link
to another placea place that was external to the political world of the
monarchy, where the eternity of the sovereign power was anchored. It was in
that external place that the physical body of each monarch was locatedbut
only temporarily, until he or she died.78 In contemporary liberal democracies, according to Lefort, the locus of sovereign power continues to be
anchored in that external other place; however, now that place is
empty. No one in a liberal democracy can occupy it, as the absolutist
monarch once did, but every democratically elected official must serve in
the name of that empty place and must refer to it for legitimacy.79 The
foundational truth of liberal democracy, on which its legitimacy is based,
emanates from that empty place.
Recently Eric Santner has also argued that, with the disappearance of
the body of the king . . . as the primary incarnation of the principle and
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and, second, the complete collapse of Stalins cult after his death, which did
not lead to the collapse of the partydemonstrate this point. At first, Stalin
was celebrated as the most faithful Leninist, a leader who had unique access
to the truth of Leninism.83 But after his death in 1953, he was accused of
precisely the oppositeof having distorted the truth of Leninism. The process of de-Stalinization that followed was framed as a return to the true,
undistorted Leninism, which allowed the party to be disconnected from Stalin, survive the critique, and even re-emerge stronger than before his rise to
power.84 In other words, Stalin (like any other leader in the Soviet system, but
unlike Hitler) did not occupy the locus of sovereign power.
Ken Jowitt, in an insightful analysis of Leninism, argues that what made
the Leninist system qualitatively different from both absolutist monarchy
(traditional) and liberal democracy (modern) is that in Leninism the center of
sovereign power was located neither in the traditional charismatic leader
nor in depersonalized modern bureaucracy, but in an institution that is
constructed as a combination of the two. This institutionthe so-called
party of the new typeJowitt calls neotraditional, because it emerged when
two seemingly incompatible principles were absorbed into one organizational structure: the traditional principle of individual heroism and the
modern principle of organizational impersonalism.85 Both Leninism and
Nazism emphasized a heroic ethic, argues Jowitt, but what agent each
system designated as heroic was different. In the Nazi case that agent was
the individual charismatic leaderthe Fuhrer. Nazism was based on the
Fuhrerprinzipthat is, on the personal charisma of the leader, who claims
authority because he incorporates the idea in his person.86 In the Leninist
system that agent was not an individual, but the Communist Party of the
Leninist type (henceforth, Leninist party), whose heroism is defined
in organizational, not individual, terms, and therefore its principle of organization is charismatic impersonalism.87
The Leninist party was founded upon and held together by what was
called the correct line (the foundational truth mentioned earlier). Every
leader in the Leninist system claimed authority on the basis of his or her
knowledge of the correct line, and no leader could question it. After
Lenins death the correct line became articulated as the doctrine of Leninism. Stalins unique power and cult of personality were founded on the
successful and often violent claim that, as the alleged chosen heir, he had
the best command of Leninism.88 Since that doctrine was impersonal (no
one could claim it as their own or question it, but everyone had to refer to
it), however, differing interpretations proliferated.89 This is why the Leninist party always generated many more internal factions than the Nazi
Party.90 And this is also why the Leninist party always had a legitimate potential to criticize any leader, including the general secretary, if a group in the
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party leadership made a successful claim that that leader had violated Leninism. This was what Khrushchev claimed when he attacked Stalins cult of
personality at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.91 And Khrushchev was
accused of the same violation when he was deposed by the politburo in
1964.92
The center of sovereign power in the Leninist polity, then, was located
not in the body of the current party leader, but in the body of the party. But
what kind of a body was it? That body was twinned between mortal and
immortal parts. The first quasi-biological mortal body of the party transcended the individual biology of every party member and leader, becoming
perpetually renewed in every new incarnation of the party throughout
Soviet history. This was the Soviet equivalent of Santners undying people
in a liberal democracy and of the perpetual succession of the mortal bodies
of kings in a monarchy. The second immortal body of the party was the
external foundational truth of Leninism. This was the Soviet equivalent of
Leforts empty place in a liberal democracy and of the kings immortal
body in a monarchy. The material body of Lenin lying in the mausoleum was
one side of this twinned party-sovereignits immortal body.
In liberal democracy the foundational truth is located outside and prior
to the polity (for example, the US Constitution had to be written by the
Founding Fathers before the nation could be constituted). The truth of
Leninism was also external and prior to the Soviet Leninist system. But
in practice, Leninism was not only produced after Lenin himself died (or
when he became incapacitated in the early 1920s) but was even continuously
refashioned and reinterpreted by others throughout subsequent Soviet history, although as a foundational truth it was presented as Lenins own word.
While Leninism occupied the position of the external unquestionable truth,
what that meant in practice changed somewhat from period to period (from
Stalins Short Course, to Khrushchevs anti-Stalinist Thaw, to Brezhnevs conservative turn, to Gorbachevs attempt to return to the unknown Lenin,
and so on).93
To elaborate the function of Lenins body in this model, let us consider
the doubling of Lenin in the canonized and banished versions that produced Leninism. This doubling involved not only constantly manipulating and reinterpreting Lenins texts and the facts of his life but also
constantly resculpting and reconstructing Lenins physical body. That body
was maintained at the level of anatomical form (its shape, weight, color,
mechanical characteristics, moving joints, liquid balances), but changed at
the level of biological matter (with its biological substance continually
substituted). In this process Lenins body was itself doubled into mortal and
immortal bodies. Lenins immortal body was reminiscent of the kings
effigy. This body-effigy of Lenin was visible only to the gaze of the Soviet
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The story of the eyelashes may remind us of the techniques for constructing
kings effigies described earlier. Similar quasi-artistic work has been conducted on the parts of the body that are invisible to the public. For example,
Lenins feet: during the original experiment in spring 1924, Vorobiev and
Zbarsky covered the feet with large amounts of gelatin in an attempt to fix
their shape and position, which had changed after their exposure to the
cold. However, it later turned out, explains Lopukhin, that with time
gelatin changes color, becoming dark. As a result the feet no longer looked
so good. In addition, Zbarsky and Vorobiev covered them with very hot
gelatin, which made things even worse, creating additional deformation.
Later these defects had to be corrected, and the surfaces of the feet had to
be rebuilt.99 This was done with the help of artificial materials that were
applied to the surface or injected under the skin. Suggesting that the feet
no longer looked so good, Lopukhin refers to the gaze of the political
regime (the scientists and party leaders involved in the project) on the
immortal body-effigy that would never be seen by the public.
By the mid-1930s, when it became clear that Lenins body could be
maintained for an indefinite period of time, the medical team around the
project expanded, and in 1939 a special laboratory was created. There was
new funding; new equipment; new, well-educated personnel. The Lab
started working on more nuanced problems, which Lopukhin calls the illnesses of embalming (bolezni balzamirovania), again animating the body,
stressing its emergent nature. These included the changing of pigmentation,
stiffening of joints, decalcification of bones, hydrolysis of fats, fluctuation of
Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty
137
liquid ratios and bodily weight, changing landscape of skin surfaces, and so
on. In the early years, solutions for such problems were developed as each
new problem arose. With the establishment of the Lab, however, it became
possible to develop new methods before they were needed. The work now no
longer focused exclusively on Lenins body but also included basic research
on human postmortem anatomy. By the early 1950s, the Lab was transformed
into a large research institute, which at its peak between the 1960s and 1980s,
employed a couple of hundred scientists, researchers, and technicians who
were organized into several research departments, labs, and teams.100
During the Soviet period party commissions regularly examined Lenins
body and issued detailed reports on its condition.101 As the science developed, the reports show that greater attention was increasingly paid to individual parts of the body. On January 19, 1939, a Commission of the
Peoples Commissariat of Health for the Examination of Lenins Body
reported that persistent problems with Lenins nose (which had lost its
original form in the first month after Lenins death, after exposure to
extreme cold) were finally solved. The nose was completely rebuilt and was
now in a very good condition. The report also stressed that the elasticity
of the eyelids is quite impressive, and the face makes a complete impression of a sleeping person, rather than a corpse.102
But there were also some problems. Alexei Busalov (Director of the
Medical Administration of the Kremlin) remarked: On the soles and toes
there are some signs of mummification. In the pelvic area there are hints of
wrinkling and thinning [of the skin]. They should be photographed and
described.103 Professor of Medicine Nikolai Burdenko pointed to new
spots that had appeared on the outer side of the left forearm and in the
lower part of the body, especially in the pelvic area. He added: I am
particularly interested in the origin of these spots. They are not located in
the places where pressure is applied, which means that they are likely to have
appeared due to [internal] change in the tissues or in the chemical
[embalming] agent, or, perhaps, under the influence of light.104
Lab scientists worked around the clock to address these problems. On
July 19, 1942,105 the body was again inspected by a high-ranking Commission of the Soviet of Peoples Commissars. The commission reported that
most of the problems mentioned earlier had been successfully fixed, the
color of the skin in various parts of the body, compared to 1939, has much
improved. The spots that had earlier appeared on the closed parts of the
body, especially on the back and sides, have been successfully removed.
The elasticity of the tissues and the flexibility of small and large joints, has
improved, and the remarkable flexibility of the shoulder and elbow
joints has been successfully maintained.106 The report also stressed that
the wrinkles that were previously observed on the skin, especially in those
138
Representations
areas where limbs bend and under the armpits . . . have been smoothed
out, and the development of parchment skin (pergamentatsiia) on both
feet had been interrupted.107 The loss of weight, which had been a constant
problem due to the evaporation and outflow of liquids, and which in 1940
amounted to almost two kilos, had been finally stopped by successfully
maintaining the liquid balance in different tissues.108
Another source of constant headache for the scientists was hydrolysis
the process by which solid lipids (fats) in skin and muscle tissues gradually
liquefy and flow out of their areas, causing noticeable changes in the profile
of the skins surface and creating new wrinkles, cavities, and folds. To avoid
hydrolysis the Lab developed special materials to substitute for organic fats.
These have physical characteristics similar to those of fats (they are soft and
malleable and can be sculpted) but are chemically neutral (they do not
undergo hydrolysis). In the early 1940s, Zbarsky explained this work to the
politburo:
After many experiments we developed a mix of paraffin, glycerin, and carotene with
the melting point of 57 degrees Celsius. This mix in liquefied form can be injected
under the skin, where it quickly hardens into a solid mass that can be easily shaped.
After experiments in the lab it became possible to substitute hydrolyzed fats with
this new mass. From the chemical point of view this mass is inert and can be
preserved without change. . . . Two years of experiments in this area produced such
good results that they could be applied to fixing defects in Lenins body.109
139
face] and took a photograph. Changing the outlines and volumes of these patches
we compared the photographs with the pictures of Vladimir Ilyichs face during his
life and on his deathbed. Only after identifying in this way the exact boundaries and
volumes of the necessary injections did we carefully carry them out. As a result of
these injections facial resemblance greatly improved.112
Between 1952 and 1962, under Sergei Mardashev, the second director after
Zbarsky, the Lab grew further. Mardashev introduced new areas of research.
The problem of hydrolysis remained urgent. As years went by, it became
necessary to combat the hydrolysis in deeper tissues that could not be easily
reached using the existing methods. Lopukhin explains: Mardashev, as
a major biochemist[,] understood better than most the magnitude of the
problem caused by the hydrolysis and oxidation of fats that inevitably goes
on in fat cells. He identified that problem as among the most urgent.113
Every deviation of form anywhere in the body had to be addressed,
which often meant developing unique new materials. But in February
1945 a major crisis struck. On March 9, Lavrentii Beria, the dreaded director
of the NKVD (later KGB), who also supervised the Lab, sent an alarmed
letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, the chairman of the Council of Peoples Commissars (fig. 7). Beria reported that on February 15 and 16, Zbarsky and his
assistants Rafail Sinelnikov and Sergei Mardashev conducted
experimental work saturating with gelatin the right foot of V. I. Lenins body for the
purpose of strengthening its epidermis [outer layer of skin]. The foot was placed in
a special rubberized pouch filled with the solution. The work lasted about twenty
hours. In that time the solution was changed twice. After the work was finished at
eight in the morning on February 16 of this year, when the foot was released from
the pouch with the solution, Com. Sinelnikov and Mardashev discovered that
a piece of skin of this shape (in actual size) went missing from the foots back side.
Beria drew the missing piece. No trace of the missing piece of skin has been
found yet, he added. Zbarskys team received a strict order to conduct
a thorough medical investigation to identify the reasons for the disappearance of the aforementioned piece of skin and to report the results of their
investigation.114
The piece of skin was never found. It was probably inadvertently dissolved in the experimental procedure the group had conducted. To replace
the missing piece, the Lab developed special materials with the same flexibility, color, and liquid absorption as the skin on the soles of the feet, and
a patch of that material was applied to the area. Today even a close examination does not easily reveal the substitution. In his letter Beria mentioned
the measures that had been taken to avoid such incidents in the future:
Zbarskys team received strict orders that forbid anyone to conduct any
experimental work on Lenins body in the future without first checking its
methods and means on appropriate objects.115 What Beria called objects,
140
Representations
141
Representations
figure 9. Experimental
objects in the Institute. Photo
from Zbarsky, Ot Rossii do
Rossii.
143
figure 11. During a big procedure a body is submerged in a bath. Photo from
Zbarsky, Ot Rossii do Rossii.
144
Representations
Conclusion:
The Afterlife of an Afterlife
145
Representations
mortal bodies of its every member and leader. Cultivating this body was
parallel to the practices of biopolitics in liberal democracy, where it was
directed at cultivating the perpetually renewed flesh of the population
(the sovereign) that transcends the individual bodies of its constitutive
members.127 It was also parallel to the practice of constructing an effigy of
the kings body (the sovereign) in absolutist monarchy, where it was
designed to maintain the perpetuity of the immortal sovereign form that
transcends the individual mortal bodies of kings.
As in these other cases, the underlying political meaning of the work
directed at Lenins body was to ensure that the party-sovereign remained
perpetually embodied and anchored in foundational truth despite all internal crises of the party organization, purges of its members, denunciation of
its leaders, and turns in its policy. In that process, preservation of the original biological remains of Lenins body (as opposed to the perpetual resculpting of its form) was not only unimportant but also problematic. This
approach to Lenins body meant that it could not be reduced to a mortal
individual biology. Instead, it literally transcended every individual body of
party members, leaders, and even Lenin himself; it was, in fact, the immortal
body of the sovereign.
The party leadership never clearly articulated, either internally or publicly, beyond general statements, why Lenins body was preserved in this
particular way, why so much attention was paid to its invisible parts and its
dynamic form, and why this project was kept in such secrecy. The project
emerged and took shape gradually, as part of a complex political cosmology
that most actors who lived it could not see in full. To some degree this is the
case with all models of sovereign power. Rituals of sovereign perpetuity vary
from regime to regime, and to external observers they may seem irrational
and bizarre. One state is constructing effigies of its kings, another is
cultivating the extrapersonal flesh of its nation, and the third is resculpting the form of Lenins body. More so than in most regimes, however, the
cultivation of the sovereign body in the Leninist polity was performed in
strict secrecy, behind closed doors, visible only to the abstract gaze of the
political regime but never explicitly analyzed by this regime either. The
reason for this secrecy and lack of analysis was the same as the reason party
leaders attempted to make invisible the perpetual manipulation of Lenins
words and thoughts and the facts of his life. This secret approach allowed
the truth of Leninism to appear to be the source rather than the product
of the partys actions and policies. It also made it possible to present every
new version of Leninism as the same, unchanging, consistent teaching of
a genius, and to represent the party, to itself and others, as its unwavering
implementernot its arbitrary creator.
147
With the demise of the party, the Communist project, and the Soviet
polity in 1991, Lenins body was severed from this complex political structure and lost its role as the immortal body of the party-sovereign. The new
state neither closed the mausoleum nor paid much attention to it. In the
1990s, the Lab lost much of its state funding and survived on private donations to the new Mausoleum Fund and by selling its expertise to foreign
clients (for example, for embalming the body of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang
and maintaining the body of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi).128 In the past several
years, state funding has improved but never reached its Soviet level. However, Lenins body remains on display and the Lab continues its work. Much
of this work has been going on by inertiainertia of state institutions,
political ideology, historical imagination, and scientific practice. The Russian state, it seems, cannot decide how to treat Lenins legacy. Leninism was
not just a personal creation of Lenin, and the body in the mausoleum is not
just his personal body. Both are complex productions of many people and
a long history; reducing them to the body and actions of one person, as do
many politicians and journalists today, is historically, politically, and ethically problematic.
Without the Soviet political context, one thing has become clear: for
many scientists of the Mausoleum Lab this project has long constituted, first
and foremost, a unique scientific experiment.129 Some of them say it has led
to a greater understanding of the nature of human tissues, creation of
artificial replacements, and even inventions in other areas of medicine.130
More important, the unprecedented nature of this project means that for
decades scientists have amassed knowledge that is thoroughly unique and
invaluable, even if no alternative application exists for it today. If this project
is never made public but simply vanishes, they argue, this knowledge will be
lost and nothing of the sort will ever be repeated. With these political,
scientific, and historical dilemmas in mind, the decision on the fate of
Lenins body continues to be deferred. Which brings me to my final point.
The dynamic science of reembalming and resculpting this body has
endowed it with a future-oriented, emergent, perpetual momentum. The
collapse of the Soviet project and the end of Communist history has not
automatically resulted in the end of that embodied momentum, has not
destroyed the bodys emergent nature, has not turned it into a corpse.
Notes
1. Vladimir Medinsky, quoted in Vlast 29, July 28, 2008, 782. Unless otherwise
noted, all translations are my own.
148
Representations
2. Administratively, this institute (Center for Scientific Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies) has functioned since the 1990s
under the auspices of VILAR (Russian Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic
Plants).
3. Anya Bernstein, Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism
(Chicago, 2013); Anya Bernstein, The Post-Soviet Treasure Hunt: Time,
Space, and Necropolitics in Siberian Buddhism, Comparative Studies in Society
and History 53, no. 3 (2011): 62353; Justin Buck Quijada, Soviet Science
and Post-Soviet Faith: Etigelovs Imperishable Body, American Ethnologist 39,
no. 1 (2012): 13854; Ichori Hori, Self-Mummified Buddhas in Japan: An
Aspect of the Shugen-Do (Mountain Asceticism) Sect, History of Religions 1,
no. 2 (Winter 1962): 22242. See also a 1997 BBC documentary: Ice Mummies:
The Ice Maiden, part of the Horizon series, season 33, episode 9 (scientists of the
Lenin Lab were involved in the attempts to conserve the body of an ancient
princess found in the permafrost). Uli Linke, Touching the Corpse: The
Unmaking of Memory in the Body Museum, Anthropology Today 21, no. 5
(2005): 1319; Tony Walter, Plastination for Display: A New Way to Dispose
of the Dead, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10, no. 3 (2004):
60327.
4. In this discussion I draw on my own ethnographic research at the institute that
has worked on Lenins body for many decades, interviews with the scientists of
Mausoleum Lab and with other people connected to the mausoleum, and
archival research in four historical archives in Moscow: Russian State Archive
of Social and Political History (RGASPI), State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), and
Central Moscow Archive-Museum of Personal Collections (TsMAMLS).
5. Boris Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni [A history of one illness], Znanie-sila 4
(April 1990).
6. Felix Dzerzhinsky, Peoples Commisar of Internal Affairs and Chairman of the
Main Political Administration (GPU), predecessor of the KGB; Petr Smidovich,
member of the Central Executive Committee of the Bolshevik party. Letter of
the Central Committee (CC) secretary L. P. Serebriakov to Peoples Commissar
on Social Welfare A. N. Vinokurov, July 10, 1922, quoted in Yu. G. Feltishinskii,
Taina smerti Lenina [The enigma of Lenins death], Rossiia i sovremennyi mir 4,
no. 21 (1998). Reprinted in Voprosy Istorii 1 (1999), see http://lib.ru/HISTORY/
FELSHTINSKY/f4.txt.
7. Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni.
8. Ibid.
9. Quoted in ibid., 62.
10. Because of the nature of their work at the estate, these people often found
themselves in the vicinity of Lenin. . . . As soon as they noticed that he was
approaching, they would leave, hide or fall silent; ibid.
11. A. I. Zevelev, Po povodu stati Yu. G. Felshtinskogo Taina smerti Lenina,
[Response concerning Felshtinskys article the enigma of Lenins death],
Voprosy Istorii 8 (1999).
12. V. I. Lenin quoted in V. Lelchuk and V. Startsev, Uroki dvukh publikatsii
[Lessons of two publications], Znanie-sila 11 (November 1990): 5052, 51.
13. Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni, 26.
14. For a description of the Letter to the Congress, see RIA Novosti, Istoriia
raboty Lenina Pismo k sezdu. Spravka, December 16, 2010, http://ria.
ru/history_spravki/20101216/309403217.html.
149
15. L. A. Fotievas role as an informer became known only after the partial opening
of the party archives in the post-Soviet period. See: Zevelev, Po povodu stati
Yu. G. Felshtinskogo Taina smerti Lenina.
16. Trying to protect herself, a few days later Fotieva wrote a note to Lev Kamenev,
explaining that she was not told by Lenins transcriber about his will to keep the
letter sealed. See Izvestiya TsK KPSS 12 (1989): 157.
17. Istoriia raboty Lenina Pismo k sezdu. Spravka.
18. Ibid.
19. In 1990 it appeared in a widely read weekly, Ogonek, whose circulation during
that time reached 3.5 million. See N. K. Gulbinskii, K 120-letiiu so dnia
rozhdeniia Vladimira Ilicha Lenina [To the 120th Anniversary of Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin], Ogonek 17 (1990): 3.
20. Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni, 2122.
21. L. E. Gorelova, Istoricheskoe rassledovanie [Historical investigation], Russkii
meditsinskii zhurnal 13, no. 7 (April 2005), http://www.rmj.ru/articles_3695.
htm.
22. Victor Osipov, quoted in Ravdin, Istoriia odnoi bolezni, 66.
23. Benno Ennker, Formirovanie kulta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze [The Formation of
Lenin Cult in the Soviet Union] (Moscow, 2011), 73.
24. Ibid., 66.
25. According to Tumarkin the term Leninism was first used publicly on January
3, 1923; Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge,
MA, 1997), 120. However, in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the
CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), argued that Leninism was used
even earlierit was coined by the Mensheviks to ridicule Lenins ideas; A Word
About Lenin, by the President of the USSR, the General Secretary of the Central
Committee of the CPSU, M. S. Gorbachev, Pravda, April 21, 1990, 1.
26. Ennker, Formirovanie kulta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze, 75.
27. Later it became known as the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. It was closed
down in 1991, when the Soviet state collapsed.
28. Quoted in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 123.
29. Ibid., 124.
30. Ennker, Formirovanie kulta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze, 84.
31. Quoted in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 132.
32. See Richard Pipes with David Brandenberger, Unknown Lenin: From the Secret
Archive (New Haven, 1996). Alexei Yurchak, Esli by Lenin byl zhiv, on by znal
chto delat: Golaia zhizn vozhdia, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 83 (2007); Alexei
Yurchak, If Lenin Were Alive Today, He Would Know What to Do, in Irina
Prokhorova, ed., 1990: Russians Remember a Turning Point (London, 2013).
33. Marietta Shaginian, Semia Ulianovykh [Ulyanovs Family], part 1 of the trilogy
Bilet po istorii [History Exam]. Part 1 was eventually published in 1938 in a shortened and censored form. Shaginians discussion of Lenins grandparents was
omitted from the publication. (In the omitted parts Shaginian wrote that
Lenins grandmother was Kalmyk and his grandfather was maloros [Ukrainian],
which was a veiled reference to the dangerous fact that Lenins grandfather,
Alexandr Blank, was Jewish, a fact Shaginian could not mention for fear of
being persecuted. This was publicly discussed only in 1991, before the Soviet
Union collapsed). See Yurchak, Esli by Lenin byl zhiv, and Yurchak, If Lenin
Were Alive Today. The CC resolution was adopted on August 5, 1936. See A. N.
Yakovlev, ed., Vlast i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia: dokumenty TsK RKP(b)
VKP(b) VChK/OGPU/NKVD o kulturnoi politike 19171953 [Power and creative
150
Representations
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
151
152
Representations
65. This point was made by Elias Bickermann in his discussion of the imperial
funerals in ancient Rome; Elias Bickermann, Consecratio, in Le culte des souverains dans lempire romain, ed. E.J. Bickerman and W. den Boer, XIX (Geneva,
1972), quoted in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 95, and Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal
Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva, 1960), 151.
66. The face of the effigy for Henry VII (d. 1509) was modeled on his death mask
with such precision that even the slightly drooping left side of the mouth
faithfully reproduce[d] the physical contortions of the kings fatal stroke;
Julian Litten, The Funeral Effigy: Its Function and Purpose, in Anthony
Harvey and Richard Mortimer, eds., The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey
(Woodbridge, 1994), 319: 7. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, the face
of the effigy modeled on her death mask contained meticulously reproduced
wrinkles and other features of ageing; Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of
Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570
1625 (Woodbridge, 1997), 90.
67. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France, 11517; Woodward,
Theatre of Death, 16364; Monica Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation in
Hobbes (Leiden, 2009), 45. When Elizabeth of York died in 1502, her effigy was
made flexible and supple to allow for naturalistic posturing which, with the
life-like head, must have made a deep impression on the crowds who saw it on
its progress through the streets; Litten, The Funeral Effigy, 7.
68. Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, 426; Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in
Renaissance France, 144; Ralph Giesey, Funeral Effigies as Emblems of Sovereignty: Europe, 14th to 18th Centuries, lecture delivered to the Colle`ge de
France, June 10, 1987, 9, 17, www.regiesey.com/Lectures/Funeral_Effigies_as_
Emblems_of_Sovereignty_Lecture_[English]_College_de_France.pdf.
69. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France, 123.
70. Ibid., 11819.
71. Ibid., 40.
72. Richard Mortimer, The History of the Collection, in Harvey and Mortimer,
The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey, 2128.
73. Frazers book still remains influential to a large degree due to important critical
engagements with it over the years, among them those by Wittgenstein and
Evans-Pritchard: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazers Golden Bough (1931;
reprint, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1979); Edward Evans-Pritchard, The Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of Magic, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, King Fuad
1st University 1, pt. 2 (1933): 121.
74. In Frazers account the Shilluks king, known as reth, was believed to embody
a divine beinga god or at least a semi-godin the person of Nyikang, the
legendary founder of the Shilluk nation. Every king was Nyikang. However,
when the king died, Nyikangs spirit left him and entered a wooden effigy.
Once a new reth was elected, the candidate had to raise an army and fight a mock
battle against the effigys army in which he was first defeated and captured,
then, having been possessed by the spirit of Nyikang, which passed from effigy
back into his body, emerged victorious again and became the next king; David
Graeber, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk: On Violence, Utopia, and the
Human Condition, or, Elements for an Archaeology of Sovereignty, HAU:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1, no. 1 (2014): 3.
75. W. Arens, The Demise of Kings and the Meaning of Kingship: Royal Funerary
Ceremony in the Contemporary Southern Sudan and Renaissance France,
Anthropos 79 (1984): 35567; Burkhard Schnepel, Twinned Beings: Kings and
153
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
154
Effigies in Southern Sudan, East India and Renaissance France (Goteborg, 1995);
Graeber, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk. The body of Japans emperor
was viewed as a receptacle (iremono) for the immutable imperial spirit (tennorei) that attached itself to each new emperor and was the source of the
emperors extraordinary authority; Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power
and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley, 1996), 157. The wax effigy used during
the funeral of the Roman Emperor Antonius (2nd century AD) was made in the
emperors likeness, wore his clothes, and lay in his official bed. The emperors
life was transferred to the wax doll by means of . . . magic rites; Bickermann,
Consecratio, quoted in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 95.The principle of papal sovereignty, unlike that of monarchy, is not dynastic, which is why, despite some
structural similarities between them, the theory of a twinned body never developed in this case. This is also why the absent presence of eternal papacy that
survives each pope is invested not in an effigy, but in special objects and rituals
that exist only during the novena (the nine days between the popes). See Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, The Popes Body (Chicago, 1994); Gilbert O. Nations,
Papal Sovereignty: The Government Within Our Government (Cincinnati, 1917).
Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven,
1961).
Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis, 1988). At least one
reason for this was that the Russian monarchy did not experience the same
degree of secularization in the medieval and early modern periods as did those
of Western Europe. Although Lefort does not consider non-European examples, they may shed additional light on the principles of sovereign perpetuity
and their genealogical transformation in modern times.
Every king was temporarily immortal, in Schnepels nice formulation in
Twinned Beings. See also Graeber, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk.
Claude Lefort, The Question of Democracy, in Democracy and Political Theory,
920; Claude Lefort, The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism, in The
Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 292306. See also an excellent discussion in Bernard Flynn,
introduction to The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston,
2005), xiiixxx.
Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The Peoples Two Bodies and the Endgames of
Sovereignty (Chicago, 2011), 3334.
In the United States, for example, that unquestionable foundational truth is
articulated in the voices of the Founding Fathers, who are located in the other
place (which predates the actual polity they founded), and in the words of the
Declaration of Independence, which refers to the foundational truths that,
according to the declaration, we hold . . . to be self-evident (i.e., to be prior to
any proof). To be seen as legitimate, any politician in the United States must
imply that this truth is unquestionably right.
In the Nazi political system there was no external figure of truth that could be
used to delegitimize Hitler in the name of true Nazism. As Christopher
Hitchens wrote, There were no dissidents in the Nazi Party, risking their lives
on the proposition that the Fuhrer has betrayed the true essence of National
Socialism; Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Pub zek, Barbarism with a Human
lic Sphere (London, 2000), 281; see also Slavoj Zi
Face, London Review of Books 36, no. 9 (May 8, 2014): 3637.
See chap. 2 in Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The
Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006).
Representations
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
Yurchak, If Lenin Were Alive, and Yurchak, Esli by Lenin byl zhiv.
Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, 1992), 16.
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 34, 8, 10.
Stalin was considered the Great continuer of Lenins cause rather than the
originator of a different cause. Contrary to Jan Plampers argument, Stalin
depended on Lenin as the source of his own legitimacy and could not supersede Lenin as the locus of truth; see Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the
Alchemy of Power (New Haven, 2012), 85. See discussion in chap. 2, Yurchak,
Everything Was Forever.
89. For a major shift in the interpretation of the doctrine after Stalins death
see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, on the performative shift of ideology
(chap. 2).
90. Joseph Nyomarkey, Factionalism in the National Socialist German Workers
Party, 19251926: The Myth and Reality of the Northern Faction, Political Science
Quarterly 80, no. 1 (March 1965): 45; see also note 82 and Jowitt, New World
zek, The Two Totalitarianisms, London Review of Books
Disorder 78 and Slavoj Zi
27, n. Kern 6 (March 17, 2005).
91. In his Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev
said, We sharply criticize today the cult of the individual which was so widespread during Stalins life and . . . which is so alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism; Nikita S. Khrushchev, The Secret SpeechOn the Cult of Personality,
1956, in Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University, http://www.
fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html, italics added.
92. The short text of the Decision of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the
CPSU of October 14, 1964, laconically subtitled, On Comrade Khrushchev
N. S., stated: As a result of the mistakes and wrong actions of Comrade Khrushchev, which violate the Leninist principle of collective leadership, an utterly
unhealthy situation has developed in the Presidium of the CC; RGANI (Russian
State Archive of Contemporary History), f. 2, op. 1, d. 749, l. 78, italics added. The
statement was as unsubstantiated as it was damningthe Presidium of the CC
had ruled that Khrushchev had violated Leninism. After that, every sentence in
the decision was superfluous.
93. See Yurchak,If Lenin Were Alive, and Yurchack, Esli by Lenin byl zhiv.
94. Not surprisingly, in popular slang Lenins body is called a mummy, which
connotes a stiff, dried-up corpse. But the Lenin Lab scientists frequently point
out that this is a gross misrepresentation.
95. Authors interview with Mikhail Lopukhin, October 22, 2009, Moscow.
96. Authors interview with V. L. Kozeltsev, July 2009, Moscow.
97. The eyelashes were replaced during every major reembalming procedure,
once every year and a half.
98. Authors interview with Lopukhin, October 22, 2009, Moscow.
99. They melted gelatin at a temperature much higher than room temperature in
order to increase the gelatins density after it cooled and hardened.
100. Shtatnoe raspisanie (Personnel chart) of the Research and Scientific Lab
of V.I. Lenins Mausoleum, GARF, f. 8009, op. 51, ed. khr. 873.
101. The commissions included 10 to 20 people, members of the party leadership
and leading medics and biochemists.
102. Comments by Nikolai Burdenko and A. A. Deshin; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2, d. 110.
As this comment suggests, one objective for the maintainance of Lenins body
155
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
122.
123.
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Representations
124. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 179. This argument is also made in a number of other
studies: e.g., G. Graeme, The Soviet Leader Cult: Reflections on the Structure
of Leadership in the Soviet Union, British Journal of Political Science 10 (1980):
16786.
125. See Ennker, Formirovanie kulta Lenina, 371.
126. See also Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 179. See also George M. Young, The Russian
Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford, 2012);
V. A. Kozhevnikov, Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (opyt izlozheniia uchenia) [Nikolai
Fedorovich Fedorov (an attempt to present the teaching)] (Moscow, 1908).
127. As discussed by Santner.
128. Authors interview with historian Aleksei Abramov, director of the Mausoleum
Fund, Moscow, September 9, 2008. Recently it has been reported that in the
1990s the Lenin Lab funded itself by performing temporary embalmings of
members of Russian organized crime slain in criminal wars. These rumors
were probably started after the publication of two books by Ilya Zbarsky (Boris
Zbarskys son and himself a one-time member of the mausoleum group): Ilya
Zbarsky, Obekt N. 1. (Moscow, 2000); Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson,
Lenins Embalmers (London, 1998). However, these reports are inaccurate.
Lenin Lab was never involved in such projects and would not be the right
place for them, since the work it performs is different from the temporary
embalming of bodies that are prepared for burial. Several junior scientists who
worked in the institute where Lenin Lab is located, but who themselves were
not members of the Lab, left the institute in the late 1980s to form two large
private companies in Moscow that offer funerary services. One service is
temporary embalming (which in the 1990s was indeed frequently commissioned by organized crime members). The work of these anatomists is different from the scientists of the Lenin Lab, and the two groups have not been
affiliated; authors interview with Alexandr Tkachenko, currently of the Ritual
Medical-Embalming Service (Moscow) and formerly a Junior Medical Scientist
in the mausoleum. Moscow, August 5, 2009.
129. One also heard open criticism of this project from at least one leading scientist, Ilya Zbarsky; I. B. Zbarsky, Ot Rossii do Rossii [From Russia to Russia], in
Pod kryshei Mavzoleia [Under the roof of the mausoleum], ed. E. E. Zaitseva
(Tver, 1998). Russian word krysha (roof) is used here in two sensesto mean,
first, inside the mausoleum and, second, under the protection of the
mausoleum (the latter referring to protection rackets of the mafia); Zbarsky
and Hutchinson, Lenins Embalmers.
130. For example, the Soviet technique of kidney transplantation (which Lopukhin
developed with scientists of the Institute of Surgery in Moscow in the 1960s)
was influenced by Lopukhins work on Lenins body. This work also led to the
development of a noninvasive three-drop test designed to measure cholesterol levels in the skin of living patients. The test was patented in the United
States in 2002 and its variants are widely used in US medicine; Alexei Yurchak,
unpublished manuscript.
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