Embalming Lenin's body to turn it into a symbol of scientific victory over death
The USSR embalmed Lenin in 1924 as a symbol of science's victory over death. McCorristine's essay examines it. Read on to discover the context.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
The Bolsheviks embalmed Lenin's body in 1924 to turn it into a symbol of the scientific and materialist victory over death. The essay *The Immortalization Commission* (2011) examines that decision as part of the attempt to replace traditional religion with a political religion.
**Lenin's** body has been lying in the mausoleum on Red Square for almost a century. He died in January 1924, and the Bolshevik regime decided to preserve him rather than bury him. The decision was not merely a funeral tribute: it was a message. The essay *The Immortalization Commission*, published in **2011**, analyzes how the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and the so-called "God-builders," attempted to replace traditional religion with a political, this-worldly religion. The embalmed body was the visible proof that science could defeat death.
## A body meant to prove that death could be beaten
The reasoning had its own internal logic. If religion promised life after death, scientific materialism promised something better: preserving the body here, in this world. Embalming Lenin turned the mausoleum into a secular altar and chemical technique into a secular miracle. The **2011** essay details that decision and places it within the Bolshevik project of creating a political religion without God.
The paradox escapes no one who looks at the matter calmly. A regime that declared itself materialist ended up mummifying its leader with a ritual reminiscent of the relics of saints. The difference was the wrapping: a lab coat instead of incense.
## The Enlightenment as an argument and terror as a practice
**Steven Pinker** has expressed outrage that Lenin used Enlightenment arguments for his own purposes. The observation has substance. Leninism presented itself as the rational culmination of history, and that Enlightenment alibi coexisted with violence directed against the people themselves.
The Russian Empire lost more people in the First World War than any other country, but even more died under Lenin's rule. His war against the peasants, for example, claimed more lives than the fighting between Reds and Whites. That is the part the mausoleum's symbol does not show.
## Arbitrary arrests: the innovation inaugurated by the Cheka
The numbers do not tell the whole story. Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to antiestéticar being arrested. Lenin pioneered, and Stalin vastly expanded, a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary. That is real terror. The **Cheka**, founded by Lenin almost immediately after the Bolshevik coup, was already practicing that logic.
By the time of the Great Terror of **1936-1938**, millions of entirely innocent people had been arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe. The Party itself was an especially dangerous place, and the **NKVD** constantly arrested its own members. Interrogators who suspected they were about to be arrested often committed suicide, since they had no illusions about what arrest entailed. Being a "member of the family of a traitor to the homeland" was in itself a incivil category, and entire camps were established for the wives of "enemies of the people." Such practices had never before defined a state.
Lenin's body is still there, a reminder that victory over death can also be a way of not letting the dead rest.
**Lenin's** body has been lying in the mausoleum on Red Square for almost a century. He died in January 1924, and the Bolshevik regime decided to preserve him rather than bury him. The decision was not merely a funeral tribute: it was a message. The essay *The Immortalization Commission*, published in **2011**, analyzes how the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and the so-called "God-builders," attempted to replace traditional religion with a political, this-worldly religion. The embalmed body was the visible proof that science could defeat death.
## A body meant to prove that death could be beaten
The reasoning had its own internal logic. If religion promised life after death, scientific materialism promised something better: preserving the body here, in this world. Embalming Lenin turned the mausoleum into a secular altar and chemical technique into a secular miracle. The **2011** essay details that decision and places it within the Bolshevik project of creating a political religion without God.
The paradox escapes no one who looks at the matter calmly. A regime that declared itself materialist ended up mummifying its leader with a ritual reminiscent of the relics of saints. The difference was the wrapping: a lab coat instead of incense.
## The Enlightenment as an argument and terror as a practice
**Steven Pinker** has expressed outrage that Lenin used Enlightenment arguments for his own purposes. The observation has substance. Leninism presented itself as the rational culmination of history, and that Enlightenment alibi coexisted with violence directed against the people themselves.
The Russian Empire lost more people in the First World War than any other country, but even more died under Lenin's rule. His war against the peasants, for example, claimed more lives than the fighting between Reds and Whites. That is the part the mausoleum's symbol does not show.
## Arbitrary arrests: the innovation inaugurated by the Cheka
The numbers do not tell the whole story. Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to antiestéticar being arrested. Lenin pioneered, and Stalin vastly expanded, a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary. That is real terror. The **Cheka**, founded by Lenin almost immediately after the Bolshevik coup, was already practicing that logic.
By the time of the Great Terror of **1936-1938**, millions of entirely innocent people had been arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe. The Party itself was an especially dangerous place, and the **NKVD** constantly arrested its own members. Interrogators who suspected they were about to be arrested often committed suicide, since they had no illusions about what arrest entailed. Being a "member of the family of a traitor to the homeland" was in itself a incivil category, and entire camps were established for the wives of "enemies of the people." Such practices had never before defined a state.
Lenin's body is still there, a reminder that victory over death can also be a way of not letting the dead rest.
Also available in: Deutsch
Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (3 replies).
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