Lucky Stiff - Preservation of Vladimir I. Lenin's Embalmed Corpse

Lucky stiff - preservation of Vladimir I. Lenin's embalmed corpse

National Review, Nov 7, 1994by Adam Tanner

MOSCOW

HIS empire has collapsed, and few in Russia still honor his ideology. Yet the father of Soviet Communism is still waited on hand and foot by a team of embalmers who keep Lenin looking just as he did when he died 70 years ago.

Twice weekly, a group of elderly scientists visits Lenin's tomb off Moscow's Red Square to inspect his body. His glass coffin is opened, and his custodians dab embalming fluid onto his face and hands, the only visible parts of his body (the rest is covered by a suit, with a blanket over the legs).

Once every 18 months, the now 124-year-old Lenin spends about 60 days immersed in a glass tub of chemicals inside his red marble mausoleum residence. With watchful soldiers never far off, the scientists oversee the bath, in which the clear chemical solution penetrates the skin, assuring that, as in a living person, Lenin's body remains about 70 per cent liquid. Lenin's minders then hoist the body out of the tub onto a hospital stretcher and lay it out to rest for a few hours while the excess liquids drip off. When the body is dry, the scientists bind Lenin with rubber bandages to prevent leakage and put his clothes back on.

Just a few years ago, this procedure and the chemical solutions used in it--a mixture consisting mostly of glycerol and potassium acetate--were considered a top secret of the Kremlin. The 120 million visitors who had entered the mausoleum since 1924 could only guess whether the body was real or a wax doll, and if it was real, how it was maintained.

Ilya Zbarsky knows, and after decades of secrecy he has broken the embalmer's code of silence with the most extensive description of the procedure ever made public. Zbarsky's father helped perfect the Lenin embalming technique in 1924, and he inherited the task as Lenin's keeper from 1934 to 1952. Now 80, Zbarsky speaks openly and with humor about the Lenin secrets.

"There have been a lot of articles in the press saying that a hand was cut off or that just the head and the hands remain," says Zbarsky, who shared his unpublished memoirs for the preparation of this article. "They absolutely do not correspond to the truth; the body is whole and is preserved to this day." Lenin's current minders, many of whom are Zbarsky's contemporaries, corroborate his description of the embalming procedure.

Zbarsky vividly recalls his embalming days and acknowledges that such work was "an unpleasantness." "We did our work and we quickly got used to it," he says. "For anyone who just arrived, of course, it would appear rather strange."

Not only strange, but dangerous. During the Stalinist days when Zbarsky did the embalming, even the smallest flaw on Lenin's body could earn one a trip to Siberia or worse. Every blemish and bacteria growth that might appear brought terror to the hearts of the embalmers, who would frantically scrub the imperfection off of Communism's central deity. "We were greatly afraid that something would happen to the body," Zbarsky says. "If you made a mistake, you could have been shot during Stalin's time."

Perhaps Zbarsky's most dangerous mission came during World War II, when he led the evacuation of the body to the Ural Mountains, lest the advancing German troops capture the sacred idol. He set up a new laboratory and kept the body looking fresh through the duration of the war.

Despite his loyal service to the state, Zbarsky eventually did end up suffering under Stalin, losing his job when his father was arrested in 1952. After that, he worked in a different biological lab on new research. Yet he kept his secret.

ACCORDING to Zbarsky, his father and the other early embalmers developed the two-month bath immersion technique because Lenin's veins were cut in an autopsy immediately after his death in 1924. That meant that a standard embalming by injecting formaldehyde into his body through the veins could last for only a few weeks at best, not until the end of the Soviet state.

"At first they performed regular embalming on the body, but changes started to occur within a month or month and a half," Zbarsky says. "Then the Politburo made the decision to preserve the body for a long time, and several months of scientific work were done." When Russians continued to line up in sub-zero weather for days to see Lenin after his death in January 1924, the Kremlin decided to preserve the body for good, and thus was born the tub immersion technique, a process generally used today only for infants without a developed vein system.

In recent years, the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin has twice decided to bury Lenin once and for all and end what many consider a grotesque experiment. The first near-burial came after the 1991 August coup, the second after the October 1993 destruction of the Soviet-era parliament. Yet each time Yeltsin hesitated, and his opportunity faded.

Since the December 1993 elections, which brought a sizable pro-Communist and hard-line nationalist opposition to parliament, Yeltsin has been unwilling to spend the political capital it would take to bury Lenin in his likely final resting spot, next to his mother's grave in St. Petersburg. And in recent months, few have clamored for the burial. When one political activist picketed near Red Square last spring calling for the sale of Lenin's body abroad, she was quickly detained by police.

Even though it continues to oversee Lenin's body, the Institute of Biological Sciences in Moscow has become an empty shell of its former glory. It was once a heavily guarded institute monitored by the KGB, but today a journalist can easily slip by the door, only to find most of the laboratories closed or in disrepair.

Boris Khomatov, the scientist who oversees Lenin's embalming today, says one of his colleagues recently traveled to North Korea to discuss the embalming of Kim Il Sung. Reports on whether the North Koreans are undertaking the task have been contradictory. But nowadays the secrets of Lenin's body are not limited to Communist icons. Officials at the Institute of Biological Sciences say they are hoping to market their technique to rich Americans and other foreigners who want to embalm their relatives.

Zbarsky, for his part, feels that the era of embalming should come to an end; he says Lenin no longer deserves a place in the mausoleum on Red Square. "I put a lot of energy and time into this in my life," he says, "but as a citizen, I say it's time to bury him."