Fungus in Red Square

Member this whole story?

About Lenin sprouting fungus in the middle of Red Square? The whole embalmed leader thing has always fascinated me on a very abstract level. It’s so creepy, and – so labor-intensive – like – people’s entire JOBS had to do with keeping that body from decaying – I am creeped out by it, and yet I kind of can’t look away. It somehow dovetails with my whole cult-fascination thing. The turning of a man into a god. But not really a god. It’s more of an empty SYMBOL. A symbol that got emptier and emptier with every passing year. And yet still – the charade was kept up. Embalming him like that did not turn him into a god – it turned him into an OBJECT. There’s something very openly cynical about the whole thing – or so it has always seemed to me.

In this book I’m reading now – Stalin – the entire event of Lenin’s death – and the power struggle that went on then – and Lenin’s dying gasps of breath – and his warnings about Stalin’s “rudeness” – and all of that – is painted in GRAPHIC detail. It’s terrifying. Lenin had helped to consolidate Stalin’s power. Or … “Koba”, as he was known then. And Lenin realized (too late) that it was not good for one man to have so much control. Lenin’s deathbed realization came too late.

The whole back and forth between the dying Lenin and the strategizing Stalin is absolutely gripping – It’s been told a gazillion times before, and nobody told it better than Robert Conquest – but still: different writers bring different talents to oft-told stories, and Radzinsky is a wonderful writer. He, like Conquest, tries to go into the mystery of it – the mystery of Stalin.

Both come to the same conclusion – but I’ll use an excerpt from Radzinsky’s book which I have right here. This is a quote from one of Radzinsky’s anonymous informants – which kind of just sums it all up:

“Bolshevik documents are peculiar in that wherever they say ‘peaceful demonstration’ they most probably mean ‘armed uprising.’ The general rule is that ‘yes’ almost invariably means ‘no’. Somebody has called this an ‘in-depth’ language – a false-bottomed language, in which words have two or three meanings. Add to this that Stalin was a grand master. To understand the reasons for his moves you must look at the result. Only then will certain things become clear.”

Think about that: To understand the reasons for his moves you must look at the result.

Conquest had been saying that for years. And scoffed at, scorned, ridiculed – we all know of his vindication now.

But think about that. To understand the reasons for his moves you must look at the result.

It is only in the RESULTS that we can even begin to “grok” Stalin. There aren’t too many people (especially leaders) you can say that about. Most people have more egotistical or narcissistic personalities – and so therefore must leave behind evidence of what they see as their genius. They write letters, they leave behind journals, they jabber to their friends, they make big speeches, they make huge glaring errors, they flail about publicly – we can think of many leaders who behave this way. Their egos are over-involved, they are openly power-hungry, and they have a need (which often leads to their downfall) to have any “result” be attributed to them. They want people to be able to point to a result and say: “THAT. THAT happened because of HIM.” You get that? It has to do with wanting glory. Whether we agree with the morality of the result or not is irrelevant. We’re talking here about a personality type. Stalin had the opposite thing going on. He never wanted people to be able to point to anything and say, “THAT. THAT happened because of HIM.” Never. He wanted to be invisible, ubiquitous, everywhere, omnipresent, and yet in a position where he could deny everything. In his early days in the Party, people who met him never could really get a line on him – he seemed to make the OPPOSITE of an impression. People would say he seemed like a “blob”, or like a “lump” … He inverted. He became anti-matter. He was NOT THERE. But behind the scenes? Look out. You could not see his fingerprints on anything. You just need to look at the results.

Now this, to me, is one of those unending mysteries – and which is why I have 10 books about Stalin on my shelf, and why I will continue to buy up books about this time period.

Because of the eternal fascination of this sentence: To understand the reasons for his moves you must look at the result.

Radzinsky and Conquest use some of the same overriding language – Conquest, in his masterpiece The Great Terror – says over and over again, about Trotsky, or Zinoviev, or even Lenin: “He did not understand Stalin yet.” It is as though these “colleagues” of Stalin had all the signs – but they misinterpreted them. Or … such cold calculatedness is actually very difficult for normal people to grasp. You think: There HAS to be something else going on here! Or … it was put off as just Stalin being “rude”. If he just had better manners, maybe he would be a more effective leader. I mean, honestly – this is the looking glass world of nutso-land that these people were living in. Stalin was rude??? Uhm. Yeah. I’ll say. But again: it took most people a while to “understand” Stalin. In the begining, the Bolsheviks valued others for their cruelty and their ability to focus ruthlessly on one goal. They were revolutionaries. They thought Robespierre was to be emulated. They knew blood would be shed. They felt that blood HAD to be shed. Stalin was valued for his cruelty … and his “dedication” – but again, like the excerpt above from the informant … all of these words kind of lose their meaning when you talk about Stalin in any serious way. It’s quite incredible. You start to get close to the guy – and everything begins to invert. George Orwell knew what the hell he was talking about. Lunacy.

And yet – NOT. Lunatics eventually lose control. They eventually show their hand. Why? Because they yearn for glory! Or booty! Or riches! Or whatever. They are fallible, they are susceptible to temptation. Not so Stalin.

What frightens me most about him is how much SENSE it all makes – if you look at it through his eyes. Lots of insane things make a lot of sense. It’s just that very very few of us have the willpower to go about and make everybody else do what we want them to do. Most of us have a little thing called COMPASSION, most of us have a little thing called a CONSCIENCE … which stops us from imposing our will on everyone around us. We actually have something called BRAKES. Most people do. Most people say, “Uhm … no. Not gonna go there … even though I want to so much!!” Stalin did not have those brakes. And when I say his mindset makes “sense” – I am not endorsing it, so don’t say I did. I am saying that from his perspective, his behavior was literally the only way to go – and – if you look at the results – you can see that he was 100% correct. He got what he wanted. A totally paralyzed and atomized society where he was the only person who really mattered.

THAT is the fascination, for me. It’s terrifying. I suppose you could say what really interests me then is the psychology. The psychology of Stalin. I know that I “do not understand Stalin yet”, and perhaps I never will … but the questions will continue to pester at me.

How to “grok” Stalin. Hmmmmm.

So back to Lenin’s death – and the eventual result of the dude sprouting fungus in public 80 years later.

Here is Radzinsky writing on Stalin’s creation of the Lenin Personality Cult (which is amazing – because by the end of his life, Lenin had turned on Stalin – or at least had serious second thoughts about him) … but Stalin knew he had to turn the “Party” into a religion. And every religion needs a God. His cynicism about religion in general – his revelation during his seminary years that “there is no God” – did not mean that he discounted the need for religion. On the contrary. He understood that need intuitively – and he set about creating a religion – in a land that was supposed to be now full of atheists.

Did Stalin set about, cynically and calculatedly, to create this cult of Lenin so that he would be in the shadows? That any ultimate blame for this experiment failing would never rest solely on his shoulders?

See, that’s the thing: He didn’t set about creating a cult for HIMSELF. That happened over time, yes – but Lenin was ALWAYS present. Leningrade, Lenin Squares, yadda yadda – all decreed by Stalin. A narcissistic egotist would insist on all the glory.

Nope. Stalin was smarter than that. Greater glory means greater blame when things go wrong. I can only guess but it seems that his entire life’s goal was to stay in power. And staying in power was IT for him. No glory? Fine. As long as he was still in power.

I’m trying to look to the results, I really am.

Anyway: Here’s the excerpt from the book about Lenin’s death, and Stalin’s creation of the personality cult, and embalming the dude and putting him on display.

FROM “Stalin” by Edvard Radzinsky

By October the previous year Lenin had given up the struggle and was rapidly sinking. The Leader who had once been such a brilliant seminarist devised an unprecedented propaganda campaign which might have been called “Departure of the Messiah”. Stalin had taken the measure of his country long ago. Under the Romanovs, during the Revolution, in the past and in the future, it was forever looking for a god and tsar. (We shall hear his own formulation of this idea later.) He decided to present it with a new god, in place of the one overthrown by the Bolsheviks. An atheist Messiah, the God Lenin.

In the autumn months he was already planning the “Ascension”. He sent delegations to Nizhny Novgorod. Ritual farewells to the Messiah were instituted: representatives of the toiling masses vowed to the departing God that they would continue his immortal work. Representatives of the heroic Red army made their farewells. Lenin was enrolled for all eternity as an honorary Red army man, and presented with a bundle containing his uniform. In November the half-dead Lenin had to receive the proletariat as represented by a delegation from the Glukhov factory. An old workman delivered greetings which were also an epitaph: “I am a blacksmith … We shall forge all that you have designed.”

Lenin still had several months to live when the Gensek first spoke about his funeral in the Politbuor. “I learn that this question is also a matter of great concern to some of our provincial comrades.” He went on to report a surprising request made by those comrades. “Do not bury Vladimir Ilyich. It is essential that Ilyich remains physically with us.” Trotsky, who was present, realized that Stalin intended to transform the atheist Ulyanov into a sacred relic to be worshiped by the faithful. Molotov recalls that “Krupskaya was against it, but we did it by decision of the Central Committee. Stalin insisted.” He had his way and produced an imperishable Marxist god.

He had thought of everything. When the death of the God was imminent, doctors advised the ailing Trotsky to take a cure at Sukhumi. After Lev’s departure Stalin saw to it that none of the remaining leaders visited Lenin, in case one of them turned up at the Messiah’s bedside at the very moment when he began withdrawing into eternity, and turned the dying man’s mumblings into “last words” to suit himself.

But it happened just as he feared. Bukharin, who was receiving medical treatment right there in Nizhny Novgorod, appeared at Lenin’s bedside. He described that “when I rushed into Ilyich’s room … he heaved one last sigh. His head fell backward, his face was terribly pale, I could hear a hoarse gurgle, his arms went slack.”

Stalin corrected Bukharin’s mistake, simply wiped him out of the deathbed scene, transferred him from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow. As a result, Zinoviev was shortly writing in an article that “Ilyich had died … An hour later we were on our way to Nizhny Novgorod where Ilyich was already lying dead — Bukharin, Tomsky, Kalinin, Stalin, Kamenev, and I.”

Trotsky would later speak of “Stalin’s poison”. But this is irrelevant. Professor V. Shklovsky, son of the eminent physician M. Shklovsky, found in his father’s records the testimony (originally meant to be destroyed) of V. Osipov, one of the senior doctors attending Lenin, and the speech therapist S. Dobrogayev. We read in particular that “the final diagnosis dismisses the stories of the syphilitic character of Lenin’s disease, or of arsenic poisoning. It was atherosclerosis, mainly affecting the cerebral blood vessels. The calcium deposit was so thick that during dissection the tweezers made a noise as if they were rapping on stone. Lenin’s parents also died of the disease.” But the story that Lenin had been poisoned would never die. Stalin killed too many others for anyone to believe that he had not also sent his most dangerous enemy to the grave.

While preparations were being made for Lenin’s funeral, a telegram was sent to Trotsky: “Funeral takes place on Saturday, you cannot get here in time. The Politburo thinks that the state of your health makes it essential for you to go to Sukhumi. Stalin.”

In fact the funeral had been postponed until Sunday. But Stalin was not simply lying. Where there is a god there are loyal and disloyal disciples. The disloyal, who have insulted the Messiah in his lifetime, must not be present at his obsequies.

Stalin devised a grandiose plan for the God’s funeral. The arrival of the Body by train was a solemn ceremony in itself (the compartment which held the sacred remains and the locomotive which pulled it would be stationed forever in a building clad in granite and marble). The loyal disciples devotedly bore the precious Body from the station across Moscow to the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. Few of those helping to carry the Lord’s coffin would survive.

At 7:00 pm the public were admitted to the Hall of Columns. The God Lenin lay there in his khaki tunic. And Stalin, also wearing a tunic, kept vigil over him. People filed past all night long. The frost was incredible, and bonfires were lit. There was a frozen mist; people were wreathed in the steam of their own breath.

The Body had been embalmed on the morning of January 22. It was a temporary job, done so that the Messiah could lie in state in the Hall of Columns for several days. But Stalin had thought up a fantastic scheme: he would show that the Bolsheviks could conquer even deateh. The God would be imperishable. Thousands of telegrams from workers called for postponement of the funeral. In response to the wishes of them and millions of others, the Kremlin announced: “It has been decided to preserve the coffin with Lenin’s body in a special Mausoleum on Red Square near the Kremlin wall.” Simultaneously, “at the request of the workers of Petrograd” the capital of the Romanov empire was renamed Leningrad.

By the end of January a wooden mausoleum designed by A. Shchusev had been erected over the coffin. Stalin meanwhile was working out the details of the new cult. “Red corners” in honor of Lenin would be set up all over the country. At one time the “red corner” was where the icons were hung in a peasant hut. Now portraits of the God Lenin would hang there.

Behind the closed doors of the Mausoleum Stalin’s unprecedented idea was already being realized. When experts declared that contemporary science lacked the means of preserving a body for any considerable length of time, other experts were found. The anatomist Vladimir Vorobyov and the young biochemist Boris Zbarsky undertook to embalm the body as required.

The scientists worked day and night, and Stalin himself went down into the Mausoleum several times. He obtained a result in time for the Thirteenth Congress in May. Kamenev, presiding, announced on the second day that after the morning session delegates would be able to see Lenin in his new immortal guise. They were stunned. Asked by Zbarsky whether “the likeness has been preserved,” Lenin’s brother said, “I can’t say anything, I’m overcome. He’s lying there looking just as he did when I saw him after he died.” Thus, Stalin’s present to the first Congress held without Lenin was — Lenin.

When he had created an empire, he would rebuild the wretched little wooden Mausoleum in marble, porphyry, and labradorite, with columns of different kinds of granite. Such would be made the dwelling place of the imperishable God, his holiest shrine in the atheist empire. Krupskaya, when she lived in the Kremlin complex, often went down into the Mausoleum. Zbarsky tells us that “six months or so before she died she visited the Mausoleum. She stared for a long time, and then said ‘he’s just the same, and I’m getting so old.'”

In the West, not everybody believed in the “ever-living” Lenin. They alleged that the figure lying in the Mausoleum was a wax doll. So Stalin arranged in the thirties for a group of Western journalists to be shown the relics worshipped by the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s biographer, Louis Fischer, was one of their number. He has described how “Zbarsky opened the glass case containing the remains, and pinched Lenin’s nose. Then he turned his head to right and left. That was no wax doll. It was Lenin. The iconoclast had become a relic.”

Stalin had given them their imperishable God. Next he must give them a tsar.