Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty

ALEXEI YURCHAK Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty The Form D U R I N G D I S C U S S I O N S A F E W Y E A R S ago in the Duma about the fate of Lenin’s body, which is displayed in the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square, Vladimir Medinsky, then a Duma deputy (and now Russia’s minister of culture), suggested that it was time to take this body out of the mausoleum and bury it in the ground. ‘‘Do not fool yourselves,’’ he explained, ‘‘with the illusion that what is lying in the mausoleum is Lenin. What’s left there is only 10 percent of his body.’’ The respected political weekly Vlast’ decided to check this figure. During the autopsy in January 1924, wrote the weekly, Lenin’s brain and organs had been removed. When Lenin was embalmed, his internal liquids were replaced with embalming fluids. Since organs constitute about 17 percent of human body mass, and liquids about 60 percent, Lenin’s body had lost 77 percent of its original matter. Therefore, concluded the weekly, the Duma deputy had gotten it wrong: what is lying in the mausoleum is 23 percent of Lenin’s body, not 10 percent as Medinsky had suggested.1 Such half-ironic calculations point to a widespread misconception about the nature of the body lying in the mausoleum. It is assumed that the authenticity of this body can be measured in terms of the percentage of its original biological flesh. The generations of scientists who have worked on preserving Lenin’s body for the past ninety years, however, have measured its authenticity differently. They have been concerned with maintaining not the body’s biological flesh, but its physical form. This form includes the body’s look, shape, weight, and color, as well as its dynamic characteristics— its overall suppleness, elasticity of skin, flexibility of joints, internal pressure in muscle tissues, and so on. For decades, scientists have worked on maintaining this dynamic form intact, while letting the original biological matter a b s t r a c t This essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Lenin 116 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 116–57. 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 figure 1. ‘‘Center for Scientific Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies,’’ Krasin Street, Moscow (part of VILAR Institute). Author’s photo. The Lab has worked to preserve the dynamic form of every part of Lenin’s body, including parts that have never been visible to the public or intended for display. Scientists have maintained not only the features of Lenin’s 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, Lenin’s 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 117 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 body’s 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. figure 2. Sarcophagus in the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square, Moscow. Photo: http://www.comtourist. com/history/leninmausoleum/photos-leninmausoleum/page/2/. figure 3. Lenin lying in the sarcophagus. Photo: http:// www.n-tv.de/panorama/ Lenin-soll-unter-die-Erdearticle2419961.html. Why has Lenin’s 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 118 Representations complex political role that Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 body’s dynamic parameters and invisible parts. In fact, the political role of Lenin’s preserved body goes far beyond that of propaganda. To understand this extended role we must first travel to the past—to the last years before Lenin’s death, when the divergence between Lenin and his cult began. Leninism In spring 1922, feeling quite ill and exhausted, Lenin relocated to the Gorki estate outside Moscow to improve his health. He continued to be active in the party leadership, wrote a few theoretical articles, and participated in occasional political decisions. But his medical condition was worsening, and in May 1922 he had a stroke, which resulted in the temporary loss of his ability to speak, read, and write.5 The politburo of the party reacted by introducing strict rules designed to isolate Lenin from political life. This decision was partially dictated by the real concern for Lenin’s health. The strictness with which it was imposed, however, made some witnesses suspect that the party leadership was also trying to eliminate a powerful political rival. For example, a secretary of the party’s Central Committee (CC) wrote in a personal letter on June 10, 1922: ‘‘Things with [Vladimir] Ilyich [Lenin] are so bad that even we can’t get any access to him. Dzerzhinsky and Smidovich guard him like two bulldogs and don’t let anyone come close to him or even into the building where he is staying.’’6 In late summer 1922, Lenin’s condition somewhat improved and his speech gradually returned.7 In the fall, he felt so much better that he returned to Moscow to engage in political work and gave several speeches at the meetings of the CC. However, in December 1922 his condition again sharply deteriorated, and the party leadership insisted that he move back to Gorki. From that moment Lenin’s complete isolation from political life began.8 On December 24, the leading group in the politburo instructed the medical doctors who looked after Lenin: ‘‘All meetings are forbidden. . . . Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 119 Neither friends nor family members should communicate to Vladimir Ilyich anything about political life to avoid provoking any thought or anxiety.’’9 The order ‘‘was extended to the staff at the Gorki estate—the cook, servants, gardeners, technical workers and guards.’’10 Lenin was allowed ‘‘to dictate from 5 to 10 minutes a day,’’ but only on the condition that ‘‘these texts should not be treated as correspondence and Vladimir Ilyich should not expect any response to them.’’11 Lenin experienced his isolation as ‘‘imprisonment,’’ complaining to his closest friends and relatives: ‘‘I haven’t died yet, but under Stalin’s supervision they are already trying to bury me.’’12 Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and a few members of the staff who remained faithful to him continued passing occasional notes and texts of Lenin’s to trusted people outside the Gorki estate. In late December 1922 and early January 1923, sensing that the end was near, Lenin dictated several substantial texts and letters that later became collectively known as ‘‘Lenin’s political testament.’’13 Among them was Lenin’s now-famous ‘‘Letter to the Congress’’ addressed to the delegates of the Thirteenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, which was scheduled to meet in late spring 1924. These were highly sensitive documents in which Lenin critically assessed the political views and moral traits of several leading figures in the party: Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, and Georgy Piatakov. He reserved his strongest critique for Joseph Stalin, the current first secretary of the party. Stalin had a dangerous tendency to be authoritarian, intolerant of the opinions of others, and rude in private interactions, all of which made him inappropriate for the position of the party leader, wrote Lenin.14 Lenin gave strict instructions about these documents to his secretary, L. A. Fotieva, and to his wife. They were to be hidden for the time being and only made available to the party congress if Lenin died. Lenin did not realize that Fotieva was serving as an informer for ‘‘the troika’’ (the party’s top three leaders, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin, who opposed the other leader, Trotsky).15 She promptly communicated to them the contents of Lenin’s ‘‘Letter to the Congress.’’16 In May 1924, four months after Lenin’s death, his ‘‘Letter’’ was indeed read to the delegates of the Thirteenth Party Congress. However, it was soon after suppressed by Stalin and omitted from the final published transcript of the congress that appeared a few months later.17 Starting from the early 1930s, when Stalin emerged as the party’s single leader, the letter was officially described as a forgery produced by the enemies of the party to undermine its unity. Possessing a copy was now treated as evidence of one’s participation in antiparty activities, which at the height of the Stalinist purges could mean a death sentence.18 The ‘‘Letter to the Congress’’ was temporarily rehabilitated in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, when it was read in closed sessions to the 120 Representations delegates of the Twentieth Party Congress. However, this document remained unknown to the wider Soviet public, and under Leonid Brezhnev it was again suppressed. The letter was finally published in widely circulating Soviet papers only at the end of Perestroika.19 As the fate of this letter and other important documents that Lenin dictated at the end of his life demonstrates, starting in fall 1922 and until the end of Soviet history, Lenin’s voice was effectively censored by the party leadership. In spring 1923, Lenin’s condition turned for the worse. A third stroke, in March, caused almost complete loss of speech, reading, writing, and basic motor functions.20 Lenin’s progressing disabilities led to the intensification of the political rivalry among party leaders.21 Lenin was now completely isolated from the world, and, in the words of Professor Viktor Osipov, a doctor on Lenin’s medical team, ‘‘During that final period of his illness, from spring 1923, [Lenin] saw himself as a person who had been deleted from the list of active political figures of the USSR.’’22 The Soviet public read about Lenin’s health problems regularly in Soviet newspapers, but these reports were selective and tightly controlled by the politburo, and in the final months they disappeared altogether. To the public it seemed that Lenin remained politically active and in close communication with party leadership. His name was frequently invoked, but not in relation to his actual condition.23 While the politburo was isolating the living Lenin from the political world, it was simultaneously engaged in canonizing Lenin’s public image. ‘‘It was at that time, [from 1922 and] until Lenin’s death in January 1924, that most mythological images and institutions that were formed around Lenin’s cult were created. A precondition for this was the loss by Lenin at that time of his unmatched personal aura.’’24 More than a year prior to Lenin’s death, and in spite of his active protestations, the party leadership introduced the term ‘‘Leninism’’ into public circulation.25 ‘‘From early 1923, the leading party propagandists started insisting on the necessity to pledge party allegiance to ‘Leninism.’’’26 On March 31, 1923, nine months prior to Lenin’s death, the party established the ‘‘Lenin Institute’’ in Moscow.27 In the summer of 1923, Pravda appealed to its readers: ‘‘‘Every scrap of paper’ bearing an inscription or mark made by Lenin could provide an important contribution to an understanding of the great man.’’28 Later the newspaper added: ‘‘‘Any bit of paper typed on a typewriter,’ if it carried the signature of V. I. Lenin, should be sent in to the Institute.’’29 The party leadership was now actively constructing ‘‘Lenin’’ as ‘‘a particular object of political iconography that was not connected in any way with the real living Lenin.’’30 While ‘‘Lenin’s every word’’ from the past was publicly collected, much of what Lenin was in fact saying and writing after the fall of 1922 was pointedly erased from that image. Now Lenin was not Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 121 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’’ saying—not Lenin himself. Lenin the political figure was now doubled—into 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 bigger—‘‘a program,’’ ‘‘a tactic,’’ ‘‘a philosophical world view’’—in 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 Lenin’s family, which she learned from Lenin’s 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 interpreted—something 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 Lenin’s 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 ‘‘Lenin’s immortality’’—his cult status—that 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 122 Representations 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 Lenin’s 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 country’s definitive authority on Lenin’s work, ‘‘for seventy years since its founding has been fulfilling an absurd function . . . legitimizing for publication those [Lenin’s] texts that matched the canon [of the day], however different from the real Lenin’s words they were, and altering or modifying those [Lenin’s] texts that did not fit that canon.’’38 Gorbachev began his April 1990 speech at the celebrations for the one-hundred-twentieth anniversary of Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 123 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, that’s 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 These admissions by party ideologues, advisors, and historians at the end of Soviet history exposed something that had been the case from the early 1920s: that the doctrine of ‘‘Leninism’’ had been produced continuously, as much by drawing on Lenin’s thought as by distorting it. In 1924, the dual process by which Lenin was transformed into Leninism became crucial to the final decision to preserve the man’s body for posterity. To understand how this happened, let me return to the time of Lenin’s death. Preservation Lenin died on January 21, 1924. There was no longer a need to banish the real Lenin from the political world to prevent him from interfering with his canonized image. The banished Lenin and the canonized Lenin were now reunited in one dead body. It is clear from discussions between the party leaders and medical doctors in the weeks following Lenin’s death that the decision to preserve his body forever was not planned beforehand but emerged gradually and somewhat unexpectedly. Immediately after Lenin’s death, Professor Alexei Abrikosov conducted an autopsy and performed the usual short-term embalming procedure to preserve the body temporarily, allowing it to be publicly displayed for a few days before the funeral. Because no plan to preserve Lenin’s body for posterity existed, Abrikosov cut major arteries and blood vessels in Lenin’s body during the autopsy. Later Abrikosov explained that had the plans for long-term preservation existed at the time, he would not have cut the arteries, because they are crucial for delivering embalming liquids to all corners of the body during long-term preservation.41 For the first six days after Lenin’s death his body lay in state in the House of Trade Unions in Moscow; huge crowds of people from all over the country waited for hours in extra-cold temperatures to bid farewell to the leader.42 124 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 signs—the ‘‘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 Lenin’s body was comparable to treating it as a religious relic—unthinkable for communists.46 Kliment Voroshilov similarly claimed that if Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s Funeral on March 5, 1924. At the meeting, Leonid Krasin, a Central Committee member with an engineering degree, suggested placing the coffin containing Lenin’s 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 too—it would preserve not only the body but also its current defects, while liquid Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 125 embalming might allow one to fix the latter. Moreover, added Grigory Belen’ky, 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 down—say, the freezer is not working for half an hour—it 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 Savel’ev proposed putting the body in a transparent capsule filled with pure nitrogen—neutral 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 it’s 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s Funeral,’’ the other,—‘‘Commission for the Preservation of Lenin’s Body.’’53 Many party leaders took part in the work of both commissions. This duality reflected the two different views of Lenin’s body between which the leadership was oscillating—from 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 126 Representations 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 Vorobiev’s report, Nikolai Semashko asked him, ‘‘How long can we expect Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s Memory,’’ issued a public statement, explaining in retrospect why it had been decided to preserve Lenin’s body. The statement was read by Enukidze—the 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s body, whether or not the authentic biological trace is preserved is not pivotal. As Enukidze put it, Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 127 ‘‘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 person—in 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 Lenin’s ‘‘anatomical image’’ (anatomicheski obraz).58 ‘‘Anatomical image,’’ like ‘‘physical appearance,’’ implies a specific focus on the body—one in which the body’s 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 skul’ptura), 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s body is different—its 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 The political reasons for this peculiar kind of preservation can be illuminated by comparing the treatment of Lenin’s body with those of rulers in other cultural and historical contexts. An obvious place to start is with the bodies of Western European kings famously analyzed by Ernst Kantorowicz, whose work focused on the late medieval and early modern legal theories 128 Representations linking monarchic sovereignty and the king’s body.61 Sovereign power is absolute, not only spatially, within sovereign borders, but also temporally.62 By perpetually reproducing itself, it survives the demise of any concrete agent of sovereignty. But what is the mechanism of this reproduction, and what form does the temporal dimension take in practice? With the shift toward an increasingly secularized institution of monarchy, writes Kantorowicz, the legitimation of the king was no longer dependent on the ‘‘approval or consecration on the part of the Church,’’ but was purely ‘‘dynastic.’’63 The king’s legitimacy was now grounded not in grace but in nature (kinship, familial biology). While the ritual of royal succession still referred to the Holy Spirit as the source of legitimation, in practice that spirit had become naturalized, ‘‘seated in the royal blood itself,’’ making royals biologically different from others—a ‘‘royal species of man.’’ 64 According to this doctrine, the physical body of the king, unlike that of other mortals, was doubled, consisting of a mortal body (body of nature) and immortal body (body of grace). The king’s death was the demise of the mortal body; but the immortal body survived and, after the interregnum, reinhabited the flesh of the next king. In European monarchies this corporeal doubling was understood in explicitly material terms, which came to be reflected, for example, in the construction of an effigy of the king upon his death. The effigy was a full-size model that looked uncannily similar to the dead king. While sculptures and images of the dead are common in many funeral ceremonies around the world, they usually function as external representations of the dead—that is, as substitutes for the corpse. But the effigy functioned differently from these other sculptures and images—instead of substituting for the corpse of the king, the effigy appeared alongside it, coexisting with the corpse in time and space.65 The corpse and the effigy together functioned as the twinned materiality of the king’s body. Great artistic efforts were summoned for the production of effigies. They were made with extreme realism, using wax, leather, and wood; their faces were modeled on the death mask of the monarch, carefully chiseled and painted to look as lifelike as possible (figs. 4, 5, 6).66 Often real hair and eyelashes were used to add a natural look; the fingers and limbs had moving joints, and the torso was supple, allowing it to acquire different positions (sitting, lying, holding a scepter) in different contexts.67 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France and England, during preparations for the king’s funeral the effigy was dressed in the king’s clothes and seated on the throne in the Hall of Honor. Medics pretended to take its pulse and listen to its breath; food and wine were placed in front of it; and after meals stewards washed its hands and wiped its mouth.68 During royal funeral processions, members of the French Parliament walked close to the effigy, and courtiers Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 129 jostled with each other for the position nearest to it, practically ignoring the corpse of the king’s 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 king’s 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 figure 4. Effigy of Charles II (d. 1685), wax and wood. Westminster Abbey Museum. figure 5. Effigy of Frances, Duchess of Richmond (d. 1702), wax and wood. Westminster Abbey Museum. 130 Representations figure 6. Effigy of William III of Orange (d. 1702), wax and wood. Westminster Abbey Museum. But is the theory of the king’s 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 king’s two bodies was specific to late medieval–early 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 Frazer’s 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 periods—from 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 sovereign’s 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 Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 131 sovereign perpetuity had also emerged. Importantly, this political cosmology not only influenced the decision to preserve Lenin’s body for posterity but also shaped the peculiar scientific practice according to which this body has been treated ever since. The Leninist model of sovereign perpetuity did not develop as a direct genealogical transformation from the previous Russian monarchy. In fact, according to Michael Cherniavsky, a student of Kantorowicz, a doctrine comparable to that of the king’s two bodies in France and England never existed in the Russian tsarist state.76 This fact, however, did not prevent the emergence of a comparable model of sovereign perpetuity in the Bolshevik Communist state after Lenin’s death. The development of this model was encouraged not by the previous institutional structures of the Russian monarchy or religious rituals of the Russian orthodoxy, but by the general revolutionary ethos of modern European states that focused on the sovereign body as the central site of their democratic transformation. The Bolsheviks imagined themselves heirs to the French Revolution who had created the ultimate modern state, severing all links to Russia’s traditional past and opening itself completely to the future. Liberal democratic revolutions in Europe and North America influenced the political imagination of the Bolshevik state far more than did those of the Russian monarchy and orthodoxy. 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 sovereign’s legitimacy was guaranteed by his or her link to ‘‘another place’’—a 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 located—but 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 132 Representations functions of sovereignty,’’ the locus of sovereignty in liberal democracy ‘‘‘migrate[d]’ into a new location.’’80 However, unlike Lefort, who defines that location as an ‘‘empty place,’’ Santner defines it as a particular kind of ‘‘flesh’’ of the people or nation, which remains after the monarchy is gone. This flesh inhabits the body of every member of ‘‘the people,’’ existing as a sublime, immortal, extrapersonal surplus to his or her mortal biology. This leads, Santner argues, to the state’s obsessive management of that flesh of the population through techniques of biopolitics. Despite the seeming difference in Lefort’s and Santner’s arguments, they should be united into one model as its two different parts: the locus of sovereignty is not in one or the other of these locations, but in their twinned coexistence. Santner’s ‘‘flesh’’ of the people and Lefort’s ‘‘empty place’’ together constitute the very duality of perpetual sovereign power in liberal democracy that was once manifested in the king’s twinned body. Santner’s extrapersonal flesh is the modern equivalent of the uninterrupted succession of kings’ mortal bodies that in the monarchy constituted the perpetual ‘‘dynasty’’ and in modern liberal democracy constitutes the undying ‘‘nation,’’ the perpetual ‘‘we, the people.’’ And Lefort’s empty place is the modern equivalent of the immortal body of the king—the political system’s foundational truth, which is located outside of and prior to the system, legitimizing it from that external place. In different modern systems, the foundational truth varies—for example: the truth of the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the doctrine of Communism, and so on.81 Let us now return to the Leninist polity, where the structural organization of sovereignty differed from both absolutist monarchy and liberal democracy. Comparing the Soviet case with both systems will be helpful. Lefort even offers such a comparison, arguing that if the leader in a liberal democracy reoccupied the ‘‘empty place’’ of sovereign power, democracy would slide into ‘‘totalitarianism,’’ which is what happened, according to him, in Germany after 1934 and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, while Lefort is right about the Nazi German state, where the Führer’s body indeed coincided with the center of sovereign power, his assessment of the leader’s position in the Soviet Union is inaccurate. No Soviet leader could occupy the locus of sovereign power, because the relation of every leader to that power was mediated by the figure of ‘‘Leninism.’’ Every Soviet leader—including Stalin at the height of his powers—had to refer to Leninism for legitimacy. Any political idea or individual in Soviet history could be granted legitimacy if their loyalty to Leninism could be demonstrated; and any idea or individual could be delegitimized in an instant if they were shown to violate Leninism.82 Two striking phenomena of Soviet history—first, the emergence of Stalin’s unique power and personality cult Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 133 and, second, the complete collapse of Stalin’s cult after his death, which did not lead to the collapse of the party—demonstrate 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 opposite—of 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 institution—the so-called party of the new type—Jowitt 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 leader—the Führer. Nazism was based on the Führerprinzip—that 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 Lenin’s death the correct line became articulated as the doctrine of ‘‘Leninism.’’ Stalin’s 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 134 Representations party leadership made a successful claim that that leader had violated Leninism. This was what Khrushchev claimed when he attacked Stalin’s 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 Santner’s 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 Lefort’s ‘‘empty place’’ in a liberal democracy and of the king’s immortal body in a monarchy. The material body of Lenin lying in the mausoleum was one side of this twinned party-sovereign—its 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 Lenin’s own word. While Leninism occupied the position of the external unquestionable truth, what that meant in practice changed somewhat from period to period (from Stalin’s Short Course, to Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist Thaw, to Brezhnev’s conservative turn, to Gorbachev’s attempt to return to the ‘‘unknown Lenin,’’ and so on).93 To elaborate the function of Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s texts and the facts of his life but also constantly resculpting and reconstructing Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s body was itself doubled into mortal and immortal bodies. Lenin’s ‘‘immortal’’ body was reminiscent of the king’s effigy. This body-effigy of Lenin was visible only to the gaze of the Soviet Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 135 political regime that ‘‘looked’’ at it from the external point of sovereign perpetuity. It was this gaze of the polity that the scientific and party commissions performed over the years when they examined the body and described its condition in secret reports. It was in relation to this gaze that the body’s examinations were conducted, defects were corrected, and scientific procedures were invented. But to the common public this body-effigy was invisible—any information about it or the procedures to which it was subjected was always ‘‘top secret.’’ What members of the Soviet public saw when they visited the mausoleum was Lenin’s other, banished, ‘‘mortal’’ body, which is akin to the king’s corpse. The body-corpse they saw appeared fixed, immobile, unchanged, as if it had been embalmed at the moment of death and remained intact ever since.94 Lenin’s physical body was literally doubled—into a dynamic body-effigy visible only to the gaze of the political regime and a static body-corpse looked at by millions of visitors to the mausoleum. But there is an important difference between Lenin’s body and the doubled bodies of medieval kings. The physical doubling of the king into two separate bodies—the corpse and the effigy—occurred only during the short period of the interregnum. Conversely, a comparable doubling of Lenin’s body was produced inside that body itself and as a perpetually renewed condition. As in the case of the canonization and banishment of Lenin’s written works, the material doubling of his body was produced through regular procedures of reembalming and reconstruction. These procedures can be compared with the regular alternation of kings on the throne—both function as mechanisms of sovereign perpetuity. The precise regularity, complexity, and secrecy of the procedures performed upon Lenin’s body are striking. Some procedures are repeated daily, some weekly, and the most complex and lengthy (taking about two months) are repeated every one and a half years. They are part of an elaborate science of the body that is located between art and biology. It is to this peculiar science that I now turn. Between Art and Biology Recollect the way in which Lopukhin’s description of Lenin’s body as a ‘‘living sculpture’’ invokes its numerous ambiguities. One such ambiguity—that Lenin’s body both is and is not a sculpture—suggests that it is suspended between the two modes of art and biology. To continuously resculpt its form and dynamic properties, explains Lopukhin, ‘‘one must not only know the basics of anatomy, physical chemistry, and how to maintain the water balance. . . . One must also possess an artistic sense. This is very 136 Representations important. This is why not everyone is capable of doing this work.’’95 Another veteran scientist of the Lab, Professor V. L. Kozel’tsev, elaborates: ‘‘Every new wrinkle, cavity or protrusion must be fixed. We are talking about tiny dimensions. Some amount of artificial substitutes has to be introduced [in these places], which is quite difficult. One needs experience and artistic sense to perform this work.’’96 What this ‘‘artistic sense’’ might entail is illustrated by several problems posed by Lenin’s body in different periods. During the initial embalming conducted by Vorobiev and Zbarsky, Lenin’s eyelashes were inadvertently destroyed. For the few first years the body had no eyelashes. To regular visitors, who can never come too close to the body, this fact was not obvious; however, it was ‘‘still a clear aberration,’’ says Lopukhin, and needed to be addressed: We had a very good histologist. He was buying artificial eyelashes, which were sold in regular [cosmetic] shops. And he managed to slide them under [the eyelids], so that there were at least some kind of eyelashes.97 Without eyelashes it did not look good.98 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, Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 bal’zamirovania), 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 People’s Commissariat of Health for the Examination of Lenin’s Body’’ reported that persistent problems with Lenin’s nose (which had lost its original form in the first month after Lenin’s 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 People’s 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 skin’s 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 Lenin’s body.109 The material is applied by microinjections to different parts of the body to reconstruct the landscape of its surfaces. ‘‘The places of depression or change of volume in the hands and other parts of the body,’’ continued Zbarsky, ‘‘were injected with the mixture that we developed as a substitution for the fatty materials that underwent hydrolysis.’’110 The process was ongoing; original fat cells were continually replaced with artificial ones all over the body, and the surfaces were manually reconstructed. When the body was examined in November 1943, Georgii Miterev (people’s commissar of health) turned to Zbarsky for clarification: ‘‘So, you insert artificial mass instead of them [natural fats]. Does this mean that after a period of time all fats [in the body] will be replaced with this new artificial mass?’’111 ‘‘Yes,’’ nodded Zbarsky. Miterev was satisfied and the commission continued its inspection. The total substitution of the original biological cells with artificial ones did not bother the commission. It was concerned more with maintaining the nuanced form of the body, including a detailed profile of its skin surfaces in visible and invisible places. In the case of Lenin’s face, this work proceeded on a microscopic scale. Zbarsky explained: At first, to identify the exact area and volume of the necessary injection we applied our mass, a colored mix of wax and paraffin, to a given place [on the surface of the Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 139 face] and took a photograph. Changing the outlines and volumes of these patches we compared the photographs with the pictures of Vladimir Ilyich’s 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 People’s Commissars (fig. 7). Beria reported that on February 15 and 16, Zbarsky and his assistants Rafail Sinel’nikov and Sergei Mardashev conducted experimental work saturating with gelatin the right foot of V. I. Lenin’s 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. Sinel’nikov and Mardashev discovered that a piece of skin of this shape (in actual size) went missing from the foot’s back side. Beria drew the missing piece. ‘‘No trace of the missing piece of skin has been found yet,’’ he added. Zbarsky’s 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: Zbarsky’s team received strict orders that ‘‘forbid anyone to conduct any experimental work on Lenin’s body in the future without first checking its methods and means on appropriate objects.’’115 What Beria called ‘‘objects,’’ 140 Representations figure 7. Letter from L. P. Beria to V. M. Molotov describing the disappearance of a piece of skin from the back side of Lenin’s right foot, with a one-to-one scale drawing of the missing piece. March 9, 1945. RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2s, ed. khr. 56, str. 120–21. and what scientists today call ‘‘experimental objects’’ (eksperimental’nye ob’’ekty), comprise a bank of about two dozen anonymous bodies of different sizes, shapes, and ages that were embalmed according to the same method as Lenin’s (figs. 8, 9). Once every eighteen months Lenin’s body is subjected to ‘‘big procedures’’ lasting two months, when it is thoroughly examined, tested, and then completely reembalmed. All embalming liquids are drained from the body, which is then submerged in a bath with a new embalming solution, where it spends a couple of weeks. Then the body is examined and submerged in a new bath of a different solution. And so on. Various solutions are designed to affect different body parts—the skin, bones (which require calcium), muscle tissue, and so on. All liquids that are drained from the body undergo a variety of biochemical, anatomical, and physical tests to identify any microchanges in their composition (the presence of mildew and other microorganisms, biological and chemical processes).116 Similar procedures are Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 141 figure 8. A bank of ‘‘experimental objects’’ in the institute on Krasin Street. Photo from I. B. Zbarsky, ‘‘Ot Rossii do Rossii,’’ in Pod ‘‘kryshei’’ Mavzoleia, ed. E. E. Zaitseva. performed on anonymous ‘‘experimental’’ bodies (figs. 10–12). ‘‘We take samples [from the internal tissues] . . . and study their microstructure,’’ explains another scientist. ‘‘Our research shows multiple changes that take place all the time, especially in those tissues that were kept under bad conditions in the past’’ (that is, in the early years of the project, when not all procedures had been fully developed).117 Hundreds of microphotographs of the body’s surfaces are taken with precision cameras. Specially designed equipment compares these with the pictures taken during the previous session, and any changes in the form are corrected.118 Speaking with the scientists and reading reports of the examination commissions one is struck with the level of attention paid to the invisible parts of the body. In July 1942, a party commission pointed out the ‘‘remarkable mobility in the shoulder and elbow joints’’ as well as in the ‘‘neck and wrist’’ joints, which led to the conclusion that ‘‘the head, neck, elbows, forearms, and wrists remain mobile.’’119 In 1943, the report of another commission emphasized that the flexibility of ‘‘the system of joints and tendons of the spine area’’ in fact improved due to new treatments.120 If preserving the skeletal bone structure is crucial for the preservation of the body as a whole, then maintaining functional joints has an additional importance. They allow the body to remain flexible and supple, to change poses. Such a body can be examined from a variety of angles, bent to undergo complex procedures, painstakingly resculpted and reshaped in specific areas without the risk of damage to the whole. Perhaps more important, on the 142 Representations figure 9. ‘‘Experimental objects’’ in the Institute. Photo from Zbarsky, ‘‘Ot Rossii do Rossii.’’ level of form the body appears during examinations as authentic and unchanged, a perpetually regenerating body, not a stiff corpse. (Recollect the kings’ effigies with their flexible torsos, moving limbs, and bending joints.) In these examinations, reports, and procedures, the gaze of the political regime sees a body that transcends the public space of ideology and the role of a popular propaganda symbol. This is the immortal body of Lenin— the body-effigy that is constantly emerging, inhabiting a perpetual sovereign unfolding. Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 143 figure 10. During a ‘‘big procedure’’ on an ‘‘experimental object’’ (not Lenin’s body), V. L. Kozel’tsev is leaning over the bath. Photo from the private archive of Professor Kozel’tsev. figure 11. During a ‘‘big procedure’’ a body is submerged in a bath. Photo from Zbarsky, ‘‘Ot Rossii do Rossii.’’ figure 12. An ‘‘experimental object’’ taken out of a bath during a ‘‘big procedure.’’ Photo from Zbarsky, ‘‘Ot Rossii do Rossii.’’ 144 Representations Conclusion: The Afterlife of an Afterlife Lenin’s body has been displayed in the mausoleum for ninety years. Of them, the last twenty-five have been marked by a heated public debate about that body’s future. Attitudes are split between those who consider it a sacred symbol of the heroic revolutionary past, an evil emblem of a criminal regime, or a neutral monument of national history. Some argue that the body should remain in the mausoleum on Red Square, some that it should be buried elsewhere with state honors, and some that it should be publicly disgraced.121 Most government officials, however, have avoided making categorical statements about its fate. Instead they try to make the body appear ‘‘normal.’’ One way of doing this is to compare it with the bodies of religious saints common to both the Christian and non-Christian worlds, and which tend to have a positive connotation. In December 2012, President Putin was asked what sounded like a rehearsed question: does he agree that having an unburied corpse in the center of the country violates Russian religious traditions? His response sounded equally rehearsed: Lenin’s body does not violate any traditions because the dead bodies of saints have been publicly displayed in Orthodox monasteries for centuries—from Kiev-Pechora Monastery in the Ukraine, to Pskov-Pechora Monastery in Russia, to Mount Athos in Greece. The preservation of Lenin’s body in fact continues this practice, ‘‘although the Soviet Communist regime undeniably used this tradition in its own interests,’’ added Putin with a smile.122 The main point of this commentary was to suggest that Soviet history should be seen as part of normal human history, and that critiquing it from the position of a different epoch or a different nation is inappropriate. This is why, the president suggested, there is only one unbiased approach to the question—to leave Lenin’s body as is. When asked whether the government plans to bury Lenin’s body, Putin’s press secretary responded: ‘‘At the present moment this question is not on the agenda. It is irrelevant.’’123 Of course, there is nothing new about linking Lenin’s body with religious relics. In her study of the Lenin cult, Nina Tumarkin suggested that the Bolshevik leadership could have preserved Lenin’s body as a ‘‘sacred relic’’ that would ‘‘continue to legitimate Soviet power and mobilize the population,’’ which was deeply Orthodox, largely illiterate, and familiar with saints.124 However, the problem with this suggestion is that the party leaders, during their discussions of Lenin’s body, never linked its preservation to the relic tradition and in fact explicitly tried to distance it from religious connotations.125 Others have also suggested that the decision to preserve Lenin could have been influenced by Nikolai Fedorov’s philosophy of ‘‘common Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 145 cause,’’ in the early years popular among some Bolshevik intellectuals, which ‘‘sought human salvation in the physical resurrection of the flesh.’’126 This argument, however, is also problematic. As I have argued, the method of preserving Lenin’s body has included constant substitution of Lenin’s flesh with new inorganic substances. The result of such manipulations is a kind of matter that is profoundly altered and would be quite incompatible with the ‘‘flesh’’ that Fedorov sought to resurrect. To understand the political meaning of Lenin’s body in the Soviet past and the role it plays today, analysis of its symbolic representation is insufficient. Its materiality—its tissues, cells, and joints; its visible and invisible parts; the scientific procedures to which they have been subjected; and the examinations that have focused on them over the years—is equally important. By way of summing up, I will make the link between the symbolic and the material explicit. The uniqueness of the Leninist polity lay in the novel way in which the sovereignty of that regime was organized. Sovereignty here was vested neither in the figure of the ruler (as in the premodern absolutist monarchy or Nazi state) nor in the abstract populace (as in the modern liberal democracy), but in the party. This model was not simply different from the other two but also functioned as their peculiar combination. The party was a collective agent that was neotraditional (in Jowitt’s terms)—it was institutionally organized according to the principle of ‘‘charismatic impersonalism.’’ This agent transcended every one of its members, including its current leader—each member could turn out to be wrong and illegitimate, but the party was always already legitimate and right. The correctness and legitimacy of this agent was guaranteed by the foundational truth of Leninism—a truth that was external and prior to the party and to which the party had unique access. But the party was not only a collective, charismatic, impersonal agent—it was also the sovereign of the Soviet system. Every utterance or opinion expressed by the party not only transcended any utterance or opinion of individual party members, including the party leader, but was also equivalent to the expression of the eternal, foundational truth. The immortal body of this party-sovereign also transcended the individual bodies of every party member, including the body of the leader. The material form of this immortal body was the perpetually reconstructed body of Lenin lying in the mausoleum. From this perspective, the ongoing practice of constructing, reconstructing, and cultivating Lenin’s body—as a combination of body-effigy (visible only to the political regime) and body-corpse (displayed to the population)—acquires a new significance. This practice was nothing other than the material cultivation of the immortal, infallible, perpetually renewed body of the sovereign-party—the body that transcended individual 146 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 king’s 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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s body (as opposed to the perpetual resculpting of its form) was not only unimportant but also problematic. This approach to Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 ‘‘Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 party’s 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 implementer—not its arbitrary creator. Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 147 With the demise of the party, the Communist project, and the Soviet polity in 1991, Lenin’s 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, Lenin’s body remains on display and the Lab continues its work. Much of this work has been going on by inertia—inertia of state institutions, political ideology, historical imagination, and scientific practice. The Russian state, it seems, cannot decide how to treat Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s 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 body’s 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): 623–53; Justin Buck Quijada, ‘‘Soviet Science and Post-Soviet Faith: Etigelov’s Imperishable Body,’’ American Ethnologist 39, no. 1 (2012): 138–54; Ichori Hori, ‘‘Self-Mummified Buddhas in Japan: An Aspect of the Shugen-Do (‘Mountain Asceticism’) Sect,’’ History of Religions 1, no. 2 (Winter 1962): 222–42. 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): 13–19; Tony Walter, ‘‘Plastination for Display: A New Way to Dispose of the Dead,’’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10, no. 3 (2004): 603–27. 4. In this discussion I draw on my own ethnographic research at the institute that has worked on Lenin’s 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, People’s 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 People’s Commissar on Social Welfare A. N. Vinokurov, July 10, 1922, quoted in Yu. G. Fel’tishinskii, ‘‘Taina smerti Lenina’’ [The enigma of Lenin’s 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 stat’i Yu. G. Fel’shtinskogo ‘Taina smerti Lenina,’’’ [Response concerning Fel’shtinsky’s article ‘‘the enigma of Lenin’s death’’], Voprosy Istorii 8 (1999). 12. V. I. Lenin quoted in V. Lel’chuk and V. Startsev, ‘‘Uroki dvukh publikatsii’’ [Lessons of two publications], Znanie-sila 11 (November 1990): 50–52, 51. 13. Ravdin, ‘‘Istoriia odnoi bolezni,’’ 26. 14. For a description of the ‘‘Letter to the Congress,’’ see RIA Novosti, ‘‘Istoriia raboty Lenina ‘Pis’mo k s’’ezdu’. Spravka,’’ December 16, 2010, http://ria. ru/history_spravki/20101216/309403217.html. Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 149 15. L. A. Fotieva’s role as an informer became known only after the partial opening of the party archives in the post-Soviet period. See: Zevelev, ‘‘Po povodu stat’i Yu. G. Fel’shtinskogo ‘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 Lenin’s transcriber about his will to keep the letter sealed. See Izvestiya TsK KPSS 12 (1989): 157. 17. ‘‘Istoriia raboty Lenina ‘Pis’mo k s’’ezdu’. 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. Gul’binskii, ‘‘K 120-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Vladimira Il’icha Lenina’’ [To the 120th Anniversary of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin], Ogonek 17 (1990): 3. 20. Ravdin, ‘‘Istoriia odnoi bolezni,’’ 21–22. 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 kul’ta 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 earlier—it was coined by the Mensheviks to ridicule Lenin’s 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 kul’ta 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 kul’ta 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, Sem’ia Ul’ianovykh [Ulyanov’s Family], part 1 of the trilogy Bilet po istorii [History Exam]. Part 1 was eventually published in 1938 in a shortened and censored form. Shaginian’s discussion of Lenin’s grandparents was omitted from the publication. (In the omitted parts Shaginian wrote that Lenin’s grandmother was Kalmyk and his grandfather was maloros [Ukrainian], which was a veiled reference to the ‘‘dangerous’’ fact that Lenin’s 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 kul’turnoi politike 1917–1953 [Power and creative 150 Representations 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. intelligentsia: documents of the CC RKP(b) – VKP(b) – VChK/OGPU/NKVD on cultural policy from 1917 to 1953] (Moscow, 1999). Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 130. This polity was a departure from Lenin-style party leadership; eventually it evolved into high Stalinism. V. Melnichenko, ‘‘Vera, nadezhda, Lenin’’ [Belief, hope, Lenin], Rabochaia tribuna, December 4, 1990. R. Kosolapov, ‘‘Ostorozhno martyshizm’’ [Beware of monkey business], Leningradskaia Pravda, December 22, 1990. Ravdin, ‘‘Istoriia odnoi bolezni,’’ 20. ‘‘A Word About Lenin,’’ 1. F. Burlatski, Vozhdi i sovetniki [Leaders and advisors] (Moscow, 1990). Comment by Vladimir Vorobiev: ‘‘Protokol zasedaniia Meditsinskoi Komissii po sokhraneniiu tela V. I. Lenina ot 12 marta 1924 g’’ [Protocol of the meeting of the medical commission for the preservation of V. I. Lenin’s body of March 12, 1924]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52, papka 1, ‘‘Dokumenty k voprosu o bal’zamirovanii tela V. I. Lenina,’’ str. 134. The absence of undamaged arteries and major blood vessels in Lenin’s body constituted a substantial problem for the Mausoleum Lab in the following years, forcing the scientists to develop alternative methods of delivering embalming liquids to remote parts of the body. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 140. E.g., ‘‘Akt N. 7 vneshnego osmotra tela V. I. Lenina/Ul’ianova/, 21-e fevralia 1924 g’’ [Act n. 7 of the external examination of the body of V. I. Lenin/ Ul’ianov/February 21, 1924]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52, str. 23. ‘‘Protokol osmotra tela V. I. Lenina ot 26 marta 1924 g’’ [‘‘Protocol of the examination of Lenin’s body, March 26, 1924’’]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52. This was how the leadership treated numerous proposals to preserve Lenin’s body that laypeople sent to the Central Committee. In a letter dated January 22, 1924 two rank-and-file party members proposed freezing Lenin’s body ‘‘inside a transparent block of ice,’’ putting it in a state ‘‘analogous to anabiosis that would prevent it from decomposing for an indefinitely long period’’; ‘‘Perepiska po voprosu sokhraneniia tela V. I. Lenina’’ [Correspondence on the question of preserving V. I. Lenin’s body], RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 54, papka 5 and 6. In a letter dated February 19, an amateur chemist from Simbirsk proposed covering Lenin’s body with ‘‘transparent stone’’; ‘‘Zasedanie Tsentral’noi Komissii Prezidiuma TsIK SSSR po organizatsii pokhoron V. I. Lenina’’ [Meeting of the Central Commission of the Presidium of TsIK of the USSR for the organization of V. I. Lenin’s funeral], March 5, 2014]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52. These proposals were never seriously considered, but they demonstrate that the idea of preserving Lenin’s body for posterity had been circulating in the public discourse. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 174. Ennker, Formirovanie kul’ta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze, 191. Ibid. Ibid., 200. ‘‘Zasedanie tsentral’noi Komissii Prezidiuma Tsentral’nogo Ispolnitel’nogo’’ [Meeting of the Central Commission of the Presidium of CEC (Central Exectutive Committee) of the USSR for the organization of Lenin’s funeral]. March 5, 2014; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52. OGPU: United State Political Administration (prototype of NKVD and later KGB). Ibid. Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 151 53. Ibid. E.g., ‘‘Protokol zasedaniia Meditsinskoi Komissii po sokhraneniiu tela V. I. Lenina ot 12-go marta 1924 g.’’ [Protocol of the meeting of the medical commission for the Preservation of V. I. Lenin’s Body. March 12, 1924]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52 str. 123; italics added. 54. Statement of the ‘‘Commission for the Organization of Lenin’s Funeral,’’ March 25, 1924 (quoted in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 185). 55. ‘‘Stenograficheskii otchet zasedaniia Komissii TsIK Soiuza SSR po uvekovecheniiu pamiati V.I. Ul’ianova/Lenina. 26-go iiulia 1924 g. (prilozhenie k protokolu N. 18) [Stenographic report of the meeting of the commission of the CEC of the USSR for the Immortalization of V. I. Ul’ianov/Lenin’s memory July 26, 1924 (appendix to protocol n. 18) RGASPI, f. 16, op 2c, ed. khr. 48, papka 3, str. 73. 56. ‘‘Istoriia bal’zamirovaniia tela V. I. Lenina’’ [History of the embalming of the body of V. I. Lenin], July 24, 1924; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 1, plenka 522. 57. See Alexei Yurchak, ‘‘Netlennost’ formy: Leninism i material’nost’ mavzoleinogo tela’’ [Incorruptibility of form: Leninism and the materiality of the mausoleum body], Neprikosnovennyi zapas 89, no. 3 (2013). The Catholic church, according to Caroline Bynum, has usually insisted that dead bodies should not be disturbed (changed, dismembered, fitted with new materials), since it is the original biological matter of the body that would rise to heaven; Caroline Bynum, ‘‘Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,’’ Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 23. The same was the case in the Russian Orthodox church: even though dismemberment of sacred relics was tolerated, the original biological substance of the body was not supposed to be disturbed; S. A. Ivanov, ‘‘Blagochestivoe raschlenenie: paradoks pochitaniia moshchei v vizantiiskoi agiografii’’ [Graceful dismemberment: a paradox of relic veneration in Byzantine hagiography], in Vostochnoevropeiskie relikvii [Eastern European relics], ed. A. M. Lidov (Moscow, 2003), 123. 58. ‘‘Mavzolei Lenina snova otkroetsia dlia poseshcheniia 9 ianvaria 2007 goda’’ [Lenin’s Mausoleum will open again to the visiting public on January 9, 2007], Newsru.com, December 25, 2006, www.newsru.com/russia/25dec2006/ lenin.html. 59. Author’s interview with Mikhail Lopukhin, August 2009, Moscow. Lopukhin worked in the Lab from the late 1940s to the late 1980s and today, despite old age, remains one of the Lab’s regular consultants. For twenty years he also occupied the posts of rector of the Second Medical Institute in Moscow and director of the Research Institute of Physical and Chemical Biology. 60. This is why occasional speculations in the media of the supposed fantastic plans of the Soviet leadership to ‘‘revive’’ Lenin one day in the future produce nothing but laughter among the scientists of the Lab. This body is missing many vital organs, including the brain, and most of its tissues are partially artificial. ‘‘What is there to revive?’’ they ask; ibid. 61. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (1957; reprint, Princeton, 1996). 62. Sovereignty is something about which we have heard much in recent years, e.g., Carl Schmitt, ‘‘Definition of Sovereignty,’’ in Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922; reprint, Chicago, 2004), chap. 1.; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1998). 63. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 330. 64. Ibid., 331. 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 l’empire 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 king’s 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), 3–19: 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, 115–17; Woodward, Theatre of Death, 163–64; Mónica 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 King’s 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 Collège 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., 118–19. 71. Ibid., 40. 72. Richard Mortimer, ‘‘The History of the Collection,’’ in Harvey and Mortimer, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey, 21–28. 73. Frazer’s 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 Frazer’s 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): 1–21. 74. In Frazer’s account the Shilluk’s king, known as reth, was believed ‘‘to embody a divine being—a god or at least a semi-god—in the person of Nyikang, the legendary founder of the Shilluk nation. Every king was Nyikang.’’ However, when the king died, ‘‘Nyikang’s 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 effigy’s 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): 355–67; Burkhard Schnepel, Twinned Beings: Kings and Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 153 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 154 Effigies in Southern Sudan, East India and Renaissance France (Göteborg, 1995); Graeber, ‘‘The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk.’’ The body of Japan’s 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 emperor’s 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 emperor’s likeness, wore his clothes, and lay in his official bed. The emperor’s 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 Pope’s 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 Schnepel’s 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, 9–20; Claude Lefort, ‘‘The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,’’ in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 292–306. See also an excellent discussion in Bernard Flynn, introduction to The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, 2005), xiii–xxx. Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago, 2011), 33–34. 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 Führer has betrayed the true essence of National Socialism’’; Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (London, 2000), 281; see also Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘Barbarism with a Human Face,’’ London Review of Books 36, no. 9 (May 8, 2014): 36–37. 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), 1–6. Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., 3–4, 8, 10. Stalin was considered ‘‘the Great continuer of Lenin’s cause’’ rather than the originator of a different cause. Contrary to Jan Plamper’s 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 Stalin’s 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, 1925–1926: 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 Disorder 7–8 and Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘The Two Totalitarianisms,’’ London Review of Books 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 Stalin’s life and . . . which is so alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism’’; Nikita S. Khrushchev, ‘‘The Secret Speech—On 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 damning—the 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 Lenin’s 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. Author’s interview with Mikhail Lopukhin, October 22, 2009, Moscow. 96. Author’s interview with V. L. Kozel’tsev, July 2009, Moscow. 97. The eyelashes were replaced during every major reembalming procedure, once every year and a half. 98. Author’s interview with Lopukhin, October 22, 2009, Moscow. 99. They melted gelatin at a temperature much higher than room temperature in order to increase the gelatin’s density after it cooled and hardened. 100. ‘‘Shtatnoe raspisanie’’ (Personnel chart) of the ‘‘Research and Scientific Lab of V.I. Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s body Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 155 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 156 is to avoid an appearance of a corpse. This reminds us of the emergent quality of this body and of Lopukhin’s phrase ‘‘living sculpture.’’ ‘‘Protokol zasedaniia komissii Narkomzdrava Soiuza SSR po osmotru tela V. I. Lenina, sostoiavshegosia 19-go ianvaria 1939 goda v Mavzolee’’ [Protocol of the Meeting of the Commission of the People’s Commisariat of Health Care of the USSR on the examination of V. I. Lenin’s Body that took place on August 19, 1939 in the mausoleum]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2, d. 110. Ibid. By that time, during WWII, Lenin’s body had been evacuated from Moscow to the town of Tyumen in the Urals. Comment by Burdenko, ‘‘Protokol zasedaniia Komissii, obrazovannoi soglasno rasporiazheniiu SNK SSSR, N 12115/s, 29.06.42, po osmotru tela V. I. Lenina, sostoiavshemusia 13 i 14 iiulia 1942 g. v gorode Tiumeni’’ [Protocol of the meeting of the commission formed in accordance with the directive of Soviet of People’s Commisars of the USSR, N 12115/s, of June 29, 1942, on the examination of V. I. Lenin’s body that took place on July 13 and 14, 1942 in the town of Tiumen]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, papka 5, ed. khr. 54. The loss of underlying connective and elastic tissues or rapid loss of water from the skin’s horny layer gave it a glossy appearance. Comment by Burdenko, ‘‘Protokol zasedaniia Komissii.’’ ‘‘Doklad zasluzhennogo deiatelia nauki professora B. I. Zbarskogo 29 noiabria 1943 goda’’ [Report of the honored scientist Professor B. I. Zbarsky on November 29, 1943]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2s, papka 5, ed. khr. 54. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Yu. M. Lopukhin, Bolezn’, smert’ i bal’zamirovanie V. I. Lenina. Pravda i mify [Illness, Death and Embalming of V. I. Lenin] (Moscow, 1997), 126. ‘‘Sovershenno sekretno. Tovarishchu Molotovu I. M.’’ [Top secret. To Comrade Molotov I. M.]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2s, ed. khr. 56, str. 120–21. Ibid. Some tests occur in the ‘‘Center for Scientific Research’’ on Krasin Street, others are conducted in medical institutes around Moscow. A whole network of research institutes is regularly involved in this ongoing work. Author’s interview with Lopukhin, October 22, 2009. Ibid. Ibid. See also interview with a photo technician in Pavel Lobkov’s film Mavzolei, shown on NTV television, Moscow, 1999. Comments by Burdenko (who in late 1939 was promoted to the rank of Academician, partly in recognition of his work in the Mausoleum), ‘‘Protokol zasedaniia komissii.’’ Comment by Nikolai Burdenko, ‘‘Acts and Conclusions of the Government Commission for the Examination of Lenin’s Body in the Town of Tyumen, November 29–December 3, 1943’’; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 56, str. 7. For a number of opinions see, e.g., ‘‘Medinskii predlagaet pokhoronit’ Lenina’’ [Medinskii proposes to bury Lenin], Interfax, June 9, 2012; http:// www.interfax.ru/russia/249940. S. Bychkov, ‘‘Putin i ‘moshchi’ Lenina’’ [Putin and Lenin’s relics], Moskovskii komsomolets, December 11, 2012, http://www.mk.ru/politics/article/2012/ 12/11/785670-putin-i-moschi-lenina.html. Ibid. 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): 167–86. 125. See Ennker, Formirovanie kul’ta 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. Author’s 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 Zbarsky’s son and himself a one-time member of the mausoleum group): Ilya Zbarsky, Ob’’ekt N. 1. (Moscow, 2000); Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, Lenin’s 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; author’s 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 senses—to 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, Lenin’s 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 Lopukhin’s work on Lenin’s 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. Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty 157