Mummy of Lenin: caring for the body. Serving the Lenin Mausoleum

The mausoleum, erected on the main square of the Russian capital, keeps within its walls a mummy that survived for a long time the regime established by the one whose flesh and blood it once was. Despite active discussions about the need to betray the body of Lenin, since mummification does not correspond to either the current Christian tradition or even the ancient pagan, and it lost its ideological significance, this symbol of political utopia still remains where it was placed in 1924.

Disagreements related to the burial of the leader

The materials published in the years of perestroika allow us to recreate the picture of those days when the country said goodbye to a man who managed to reverse the course of its history. Becomes obvious unreliability of the official version, which claimed that the decision to preserve Lenin's body was made as a result of numerous appeals to the Central Committee of the Party of labor collectives and individual citizens. They simply were not. In addition, against the mummification of the leader were, as individual leaders of the state, headed by Leonid Trotsky, who then held the second most important government post, and the widow of Lenin, NK Krupskaya.

The initiator of honors, more likely to the pharaohs than the statesman of the twentieth century, was JV Stalin, who wanted to make of his former opponent in the inner-party struggle a certain icon of a new religion, and the place of his repose into a kind of communist Mecca. This he managed to fully, and the mausoleum in Moscow for many decades has become a place of pilgrimage for millions of citizens.

Hurry funeral

However, in that winter of 1924, the future "father of the people" had to assure the widow of the deceased leader that he was not talking about the long-term preservation of the remains. According to him, it was necessary only to save Lenin's body from decay for a period necessary for farewell to him of all comers. This could take several months, and for this reason it was necessary to build a temporary wooden crypt.

The funeral, or rather, the laying of the body in a temporary mausoleum, was committed on January 27, and took place with great haste, since it was necessary to finish everything before the return of the main enemy of mummification, Lev Trotsky, from the Caucasus. When he appeared in Moscow, he was confronted with a fait accompli.

The problem that required immediate solution

For the embalming of the body, a group of scientists was involved, using in their work a method developed by Professor Abrikosov. At the initial stage, they injected through the aorta a mixture consisting of six liters of alcohol, glycerol and formaldehyde. This helped for some time to hide the external signs of decomposition. But soon Lenin's body began to become covered with cracks. The relics, which by their status were supposed to be incorrupt, disintegrated in front of everyone. Immediate measures were required.

A very significant initiative was shown at this time by a large party functionary Krasin. It occurred to him to freeze the leader's body like it had been done with carcasses of mammoths that had survived to the present day. The proposal was accepted, and its implementation was not realized only through the fault of the German firm, which delayed the delivery of the freezing equipment ordered to it.

Creation of the Zbarsky scientific group

The solution of the problem was under the personal control of F. E. Dzerzhinsky, on behalf of Stalin, who directed the funeral commission. It was quite obvious that in case of failure, scientists could pay for this with lives. Their situation was further complicated by the fact that the classical embalming technology was not suitable in this case, and none of the known methods were good. I had to rely only on my own creative thought.

Despite all the risks, the team leader Professor Boris Zbarsky assured the government that, thanks to the developments of his friend - the head of the Department of Medicine of the Kharkov Institute Professor Vorobyov, he and his colleagues will be able to stop the process of decay. Since Lenin's body was in critical condition by that time, but there was no choice, Stalin agreed. This responsible, from the ideological point of view, tasked Zbarsky and a group of his staff, which included Kharkov professor Vorobiev.

Later, a young student of the medical institute, the son of Boris Zbarsky, Ilya joined them as an assistant. By the beginning of perestroika, he, an eighty-eight-year-old academician, remained the only living participant in those events, and thanks to him today many details of the process are known, as a result of which the mummy of Lenin has for decades been the object of the worship of millions of people who were drugged by utopian ideas.

The beginning of the process of mummification

Especially for the work was equipped with a basement, located under a temporary mausoleum. Embalming began with the extraction of the lungs, liver and spleen. Then the doctors thoroughly washed the chest of the deceased. The next stage was the application of the cuts throughout the body, necessary for the balsam to penetrate the tissues. It turned out that this operation requires special permission from the Central Committee of the Party.

After receiving it and performing all the necessary procedures, the mummy of Lenin was placed in a special solution consisting of glycerin, water and potassium acetate with the addition of chlorine quinine. His formula, although considered secret at that time, was discovered at the end of the 19th century by the Russian scientist Melnikov-Razvedenkov. This composition was used by him for anatomical preparation.

In the new laboratory

The granite mausoleum in Moscow was erected in 1929. It replaced a former wooden building, built four years earlier. During its construction, the need for a special laboratory facility was also taken into account, in which Boris Zbarsky and his colleagues worked from now on. Since their activities were of a particularly politically important nature, the scientists were given strict control, carried out by specially designated NKVD agents. The mode of operation of the mausoleum was established taking into account all the necessary technological measures. They were then only in the development stage.

Scientific Search

Preservation of Lenin's body required continuous research, since in the scientific practice of those years the technology was not available. In order to establish the reaction of body tissues to those or other solutions, countless experiments were conducted on nameless dead bodies delivered to the laboratory.

As a result, a composition was developed that was covered several times a week by the face and hands of the mummy. But care for Lenin's body did not stop there. Annually it was necessary to close the mausoleum for a month and a half, so that, after immersing the body in a bath, thoroughly impregnate it with a special embalming preparation. Thus, it was possible to maintain the illusion of imperishability of the leader of the world proletariat.

Correction of the appearance of the deceased

In order for the mummy of Lenin in the eyes of visitors to have a presentable appearance, a lot of work was done, the results of which amazed all those who first entered the inner room of the mausoleum and involuntarily compared what they saw with the image of the leader on his last lifetime photographs.

Shortly before his death, Ilya Borisovich Zbarsky said that the death throat of Lenin's face was hidden with the help of special fillers introduced under the skin, and the "live" color was given to her by red filters installed on light sources. In addition, in the eye sockets were inserted glass balls, filling their emptiness and giving the mummy an external resemblance to the appearance of the leader. The lips under the mustache were sewn, and in general Lenin in the mausoleum, the photo of which is presented in the article, looked like a sleeping man.

Evacuation to Tyumen

A special period in the work to preserve the Leninist body was the war years. When the Germans were approaching Moscow, Stalin ordered the evacuation of the remains of the leader to Tyumen. By this time, a small team of scientists involved in the conservation of the mummy suffered an irreparable loss - in 1939, under very mysterious circumstances, Professor Vorobiev died. As a result, Zbarsky, father and son, had to accompany the box to the leader's body to Siberia.

Ilya Borisovich recalled that for all the importance of the mission entrusted to them, the difficulties caused by the war time constantly complicated the work. In Tyumen it was impossible to get not only the necessary reagents, but even for ordinary distilled water it was necessary to send a special airplane to Omsk. Since the fact of the stay of Lenin's body in Siberia was strictly classified, a laboratory for conspiracy was placed in a local school engaged in the preparation of agricultural workers. There the mummy stayed until the end of the war, guarded by a detachment of forty soldiers led by the commandant of the Mausoleum.

Questions related to the brain of Lenin

In a conversation about the leader's mummy, preserved for many decades, a special place is occupied by questions connected with the Leninist brain. People of the older generation, of course, remember the legends that once went about his uniqueness. It should be noted that they have no real reason for themselves. It is known that in 1928 the leader's brain, extracted from the skull, was divided into parts that were stored in the safe of the USSR's brain Institute, previously covered with a layer of paraffin and placed in a solution of alcohol with formaldehyde.

The admission to them was closed, but the government made an exception for the famous German scientist Oskar Focht. His task was to establish those features of the structure of Lenin's brain, which served as a prerequisite for his so prolific thinking. The scientist worked at the Moscow Institute for five years, and during this time conducted extensive research. However, he did not find any structural differences from the brain of ordinary people.

Was that mythical gyrus?

It is believed that the reason for the appearance of subsequent legends was the statement allegedly made by him at one of the conferences that he had discovered one meander exceeding the standard dimensions. However, another German scientist, Professor Jordi Servos-Navarro, head of the Department of Neuropathology at the University of Berlin, was given the opportunity to study the samples of Lenin's brain in 1974, said in an interview that his colleague, if he made his sensational statement, only to please the Bolsheviks, to Which nurtured sympathy.

However, the same scientist dispelled and another common legend that Lenin allegedly suffered from syphilis, which was carefully concealed by the Communists. After the most thorough study, he came to the conclusion that this statement was untenable, noting that on the brain tissues only an insignificant scar, which arose as a result of the wound obtained during the assassination attempt committed on Lenin in 1918 by the Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan, is discernible.

Attempts to mummy

It is interesting to note that the mummy of Lenin in the subsequent period was repeatedly the object of attempts. For example, in 1934 a certain citizen Mitrofan Nikitin, having come to the mausoleum, produced several bullets from the revolver into the leader's body, after which he committed suicide. Several times attempts were also made to break the glass sarcophagus, after which it had to be made of a particularly durable material.

Immortality according to the price-list

With the onset of perestroika, when the aura of holiness was dispelled around a man who had become the evil genius of an entire era, the secrets of the mausoleum associated with embalming technology became the commercial secret of the company Ritual, created by scientists who worked with Lenin's body. This firm was engaged in embalming and restoration of the appearance of the mutilated corpses. The price list was so high (12 thousand euros per week of work), which allowed to use its services mainly to relatives and friends of criminal authorities who died during the bloody showdown.

In 1995, the company's client base was replenished by the North Korean government, paying more than a million euros for embalming the body of their deceased leader Kim Il Sung. They also prepared for eternal worship the body of the head of the Communist Party of Bulgaria Georgy Dimitrov and his ideological colleague Choibalsan, the leader of socialist Mongolia. The body of each of them at home has become the same subject of worship as Lenin in the mausoleum, whose photo serves as a kind of advertisement.

Turn in the Red Square

Today, discussions continue about the burial of this most famous mummy in the world. The annual cost of servicing the Lenin Mausoleum is estimated at millions of dollars and is very burdensome for the budget. The cult of the leader of the proletariat, which once reached colossal scales, is now supported only by small groups of tourists who are nostalgic for the communist past. The secrets of the mausoleum, so zealously kept for almost eight decades, have become available to all those who show interest in this side of our history. History has put everything in its place.

However, in spite of everything, a line is being built on the Red Square. The mode of work of the mausoleum is limited nowadays, visitors are allowed only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 to 13:00. What will be the fate of the mummy, time will tell.