Lenin's Mummy: caring for the body. Maintenance of the Lenin Mausoleum

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

Disagreements related to the burial of the leader

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

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

Hurry funeral

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

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

The problem that required immediate solution

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

A very notable initiative was shown in thistime a major party functionary Krasin. It occurred to him to freeze the leader's body like it had happened to the carcasses of mammoths that have survived to the present day. The proposal was accepted, and its implementation was not realized only through the fault of the German firm, which delayed the delivery of the freezing equipment ordered to it.

Creation of the Zbarsky scientific group

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

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

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

The beginning of the process of mummification

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

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

In the new laboratory

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

Scientific Search

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

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

Correction of the appearance of the deceased

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

Shortly before his death, Ilya BorisovichZbarsky recounted that Lenin's dying leanness was concealed with the help of special fillers introduced under the skin, and the "red" filters, installed on the light sources, gave it a "live" color. In addition, in the eye sockets were inserted glass balls, filling their emptiness and giving the mummy an external resemblance to the appearance of the leader. Lips under the mustache were sewn, and in general Lenin in the mausoleum, the photo of which is presented in the article, looked like a sleeping man.

Evacuation to Tyumen

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

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

Questions related to the brain of Lenin

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

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

Was that mythical gyrus?

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

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

Attempts to mummy

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

Immortality according to the price-list

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

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

Turn on the Red Square

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

However, in spite of everything, on the Red Squarelined up queue. The mode of operation of the mausoleum is currently limited, visitors are allowed only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 to 13:00. What will be the fate of the mummy, time will tell.