Lenin embalmed: the body as a symbol of victory over death

Lenin's body as a symbol of victory over death

In May 1923, the last photograph of Lenin alive was taken. According to the essay The Immortalization Commission (2011), the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and the so-called "God-builders," tried to replace traditional religion with a secular political religion, and the decision to embalm the leader served that design: to turn him into a symbol of the scientific and materialist victory over death.

The paradox that unsettles Stephen Pinker

The psychologist is outraged that Lenin used Enlightenment arguments for his own purposes. The unease has grounds: some argue that the Enlightenment and Leninism share a common root, while others deny it vehemently. The detail of the embalming, some analyses point out, reveals that "scientific socialism" operated with the logic of a religious sect: the incorrupt body of the leader as a relic, faith in science as a substitute for dogma.

More lethal against their own than against the enemy

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 claimed more lives than the fighting between Reds and Whites. Under the Third Reich, a loyal ethnic German had no reason to antiestéticar arrest; Lenin pioneered a policy of arbitrary arrests and Stalin expanded it. By the Great Terror of 1936-1938, millions of entirely innocent people had been detained, often by quota. No one was safe.

The NKVD and the incivil category of being a relative

Interrogators who suspected they were about to be arrested often committed suicide. Being a "family member of a traitor to the homeland" was in itself a incivil category, and entire camps were set up for the wives of "enemies of the people." Such practices had never before defined a state.

The cult of the image as proof of the contradiction

The exacerbated cult of the leader's image, so typical of "scientific socialism," is hardly scientific. In details like this, it is shown again and again that communism is not a political ideology, nor an economic theory, nor a social philosophy, but a religious sect of the worst kind. Russia, China, Korea, Albania: four communist regimes that took the cult of personality to the extreme, and only one is Slavic. It was not a national trait: it was the method.

The objection that does not hold up

Some argue that the USSR was an attempt to lift the Russian people up rather than to create socialism. Marx himself specified that the socialist revolution would take place in industrialized countries and would be carried out by the proletariat; Russia was barely industrialized. The USSR sought to abolish the Old Regime and prevent Russia's disappearance at the hands of other powers. Lenin's body, embalmed to conquer death, is still there: the material proof that the project was something else.