A people's tragedy

The announcement was made by Kalinin the next day to the delegates of the Eleventh Soviet Congress, which was then in session. There were screams and sobbing noises from the hall. Perhaps because of its unexpectedness, the public showed signs of genuine grief: theatres and shops closed down for a week; portraits of Lenin, draped in red and black ribbons, were displayed in many windows; peasants came to his rest home at Gorki to pay their last respects; thousands of mourners braved the arctic temperatures to line the streets of Moscow from the Paveletsky Station to the Hall of Columns, where Lenin’s body was brought to lie in state. Over the next three days half a million people queued for several hours to file past the bier. Thousands of wreaths and mournful declarations were sent by schools and factories, regiments and naval ships, towns and villages throughout Russia. Later, in the months following the funeral, there was a mad rush to erect monuments and statues of Lenin (one in Volgograd had Lenin standing on top of a giant screw), and to rename streets and institutions after him. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Whole factories pledged to join the party — one agitator said that this ‘would be the best wreath on the coffin of the deceased leader’ — and in the weeks following his death 100,000 proletarians were signed up in this so-called ‘Lenin enrolment’. Many Western journalists saw this ‘national mourning’ as a ‘post-mortem vote of confidence’ in the regime. Others saw it as a cathartic release of collective grief after so many years of human suffering. People sobbed hysterically, hundreds fainted, in a way that defies rational explanation. Perhaps it shows that the cult of Lenin had already cast its spell: that however much they may have hated his regime the people still loved the ‘Good Lenin’, just as in the old days they had despised the boyars but loved the ‘Father Tsar’.

Lenin’s funeral took place on the following Sunday in arctic temperatures of minus 35° centigrade. Stalin led the guards of honour who carried the open coffin from the Hall of Columns to Red Square, where it was placed on a wooden platform. The Bolshoi Theatre orchestra played Chopin’s Funeral March, followed by the old revolutionary hymn, ‘You Fell Victim’, and the Internationale. Then, for six hours, column after column, in all an estimated half a million people, marched past the coffin in gloomy silence, lowering their banners as they passed. At precisely 4 p.m., as the coffin was slowly lowered into the vault, sirens and factory whistles, cannons and guns, were sounded across Russia, as if letting out a huge national wail. On the radio there was a single message: ‘Stand up, comrades, Ilich is being lowered into his grave.’ Then there was silence and everything stopped — trains, ships, factories — until the radio broadcast once again: ‘Lenin has died — but Leninism lives!’

In his will Lenin had expressed the wish to be buried next to his mother’s grave in Petrograd. That was also the wish of his family. But Stalin wanted to embalm the corpse. If he was to keep alive the cult of Lenin, if he was to prove that ‘Leninism lives’, there had to be a body on display, one which, like the relics of the saints, was immune to corruption. He forced his plan through the Politburo against the objections of Trotsky, Bukharin and Kamenev. The idea of the embalmment was partly inspired by the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Lenin’s funeral was compared in Izvestiia to those of ‘the founders of the great states in ancient times’. But it probably owed as much to Stalin’s Byzantine interpretation of the Russian Orthodox rites. Trotsky, who was horrified by Stalin’s plan, compared it to the religious cults of the Middle Ages: ‘Earlier there were the relics of Sergius of Radonezh and Serafim of Sarov; now they want to replace these with the relics of Vladimir Ilich.’ At first they tried to preserve Lenin’s body by refrigeration. But it soon began to decompose. A special team of scientists (known as the Commission for Immortalization) was appointed on 26 February, five weeks after Lenin’s death, with the task of finding an embalming fluid. After working round the clock for several weeks, the scientists finally came up with a formula said to contain glycerine, alcohol and other chemicals (its precise composition is still kept a secret). Lenin’s pickled body was placed in a wooden crypt — later replaced by the granite mausoleum which exists today — by the Kremlin wall on Red Square. It was opened to the public in August 1924.50