The once “eternally living” Lenin is still dead. Really?

Monuments to Joseph Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky are constantly increasing in contemporary Russia. However, new monuments to Lenin are no longer being built. From the perspective of today’s powerfulstrongmen, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky represent strength, war victory and domestic “iron order”. Lenin, on the other hand, is seen as a political adventurer and destabilizer. As a man who, according to Vladimir Putin, placed a time bomb under the construction of a the thousand-year-old Russian statehood.

According to the current ruler of the Kremlin, that time bomb was the fact that individual nations were supposed to have – at least on paper – equal rights, including the right to secede from the union, in Lenin’s Soviet Russia and later the Soviet Union. And that is something that even Putin fears in today’s Russia.

Most of all, however, Lenin's legacy is shrouded in silence in today's Russia. Last year's centenary of his death was very cold, and this year's - not round - 108th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is no less cold. The embalmed Lenin still dominates Red Square today. But why is the body of the man who, according to Putin, did so much harm to Russia, still in the mausoleum?

Unbuilt Pantheon

Some of Putin's predecessors, especially those whose political legacy is also a thorn in the side of today's Russian ruler, actually wanted to try to remove Lenin from the centre of Moscow: the so-called "de-Stalinizers", whose leading representatives were Nikita Khrushchev, and Boris Yeltsin.

In the first case, in 1953, it was not about burying Lenin in the ground, but only about moving his posthumous “exhibition hall” outside from the centercentre of Moscow. Two days after the death of Joseph Stalin, on March 7, 1953, the central daily Pravda published a report according to which Lenin’s body was to be transferred from the mausoleum to a new pantheon planned in the Lenin Mountains, where the newly embalmed Stalin was to be laid next to Lenin. The place was to be open to the public, of course, just like the mausoleum on Red Square. The pantheon project also included the relocation there of the remains of “prominent representatives of the Communist Party and the Soviet state,” who had previously been buried in the Kremlin Wall. Red Square was thus to be rid not only of Lenin, but also of its role as the central communist burial ground.

However, the competition for the design of the new pantheon was not announced until a year later. Stalin's body was thus "temporarily" laid to rest next to Lenin in the existing mausoleum, where it remained until 1961. Times had changed a lot in the meantime. The pantheon project fell through. Stalin became a publicly condemned mass murderer, while the "return to Lenin" was declared the only right way to the future. Lenin's successor was secretly buried in the ground, and everything remained the same on Red Square except for Stalin's new grave.

Another hundred years, or even more

In the case of the Yeltsin era, plans to destroy Lenin's mausoleum reached their peak after the power struggles between the Russian president and the Russian parliament in October 1993. The reasons for the plans to definitively bury Lenin's body in the ground were, of course, not biological, but political. When I interviewed the head of the ten-member embalming team, Sergei Debov, at the time, the man who had also embalmed Stalin, stated resolutely that with existing methods, Lenin’s body could easily remain in the mausoleum for “a hundred years or more years.”

But the disputes between supporters and opponents continued, reaching new intensity during clashes between the president and parliament in 1997. And when it became clear that accepting the new reality was much more problematic in Russian society and that burying Lenin could contribute to further radicalization and polarization, the unburied Lenin, turning into more of a tourist attraction, remained in the immediate vicinity of the Kremlin. Neither Yeltsin nor Putin found within themselves the same courage and contemptuous determination with which Khrushchev once pushed through the burial of Stalin's body.

Putin's grandfather and Lenin's cook

Putin's family history is directly connected to Lenin in certain details. In the book First Person. An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait of Russia's President, which was supposed to introduce him as the new president in 2000, Putin stated that his paternal grandfather worked as a cook in Lenin's close circle at the end of Lenin's life. "Apparently, my grandfather cooked very well, because after World War I he was offered a job in The Hills district on the outskirts of Moscow, where Lenin and the whole Ulyanov family lived." Incidentally, the same grandfather was then allegedly transferred to one of Stalin's dachas, where he worked for a long time.

However, Putin's reluctance to finally bury Lenin in the ground is certainly not based only on the fact that his ancestor once cooked for Lenin. No matter how criticized Lenin is, he did something that resonates to some extent in Russian society even today. He created an illusion that this society apparently does not intend to get rid of anytime soon.

In 1917, Lenin's radical ideology, using the argument of the supposedly "scientific" communist theory of Marxism-Leninism, transformed a country that lagged behind many others into the "vanguard of all humanity." No other such state in the world had yet existed, and for Russia the world was thus divided into "us" and everyone else. Even those who had never traveledtravelled from their hometown or village, and those who could not read or write - and such were the majority in revolutionary Russia - were suddenly supposed to think that those who criticized their country were either backward reactionaries or - in today's terminology - simply Russophobes. The point of such propaganda was no longer just to show that the people in Lenin's country were different from everyone else, but that they had become "historically exceptional".

The actual development was of course much more complicated, and today's Russia is not Russia of 1917. However, since then, a whole series of Russian generations, including the youngest ones, have been raised with a negative view of the world around them and a sense of their own historical exceptionality.

Communism, like Lenin, is dead. But Russian national chauvinism has come to an unprecedented life under Putin. Perhaps that is why in today's Russian ideological labyrinth, in which chauvinism is perhaps the only clue, there is still no decisive support for Lenin to be definitively buried.

Because the regime, which already protects its power precisely and only by appealing to chauvinism, perhaps has not yet written the final instructions for the body that has been dead for almost 102 years and still dominates Moscow's Red Square.