ON January 25 1924, Lenin died. A writer recalled that day, nothing: 'At 4:00 exactly, all radio, all telegraph lines, transmitted one message: "Stand up, comrades, Illich is being lowered into his grave!" Everything stopped everywhere in Russia for five minutes. Trains stopped, ships stopped.'
But not hope. In 1924 the poet Mayakovsky wrote the lines of poetry:
'Lenin' and 'Death'
These words are enemies
'Lenin' and 'Life'
Are comrades
To Mayakovsky, Lenin lived in the past,present and future. A metaphor--but people at that time believed in the literal possibility of eternal life in the world. Leonid Krasin, a Soviet minister, was convinced that there world be a time when science would be so astounding that it could bring great figures of history back to life. In March 1924, he began the project of preserving Lenin's body. The Burial Committee was renamed the Perpetuation Committee. The leader's body was embalmed like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. There seemed to be the hope that later on,once science reached its peak, the the mummy would rise again--and the words in Mayakovsky's poem would be proven true.
Not long after, the embalmed body was placed in a pyramid shaped sarcophagus plated with glass. That transparent pyramid was placed in a room beneath a red marble platform. On that platform the leaders of the Communist Party stood as they watched the parades in the Red Square, outside the Kremlin. Beneath them, in nthe dark, Lenin lay illuminated.
I once saw that body, and was disappointed the mummy was just like a wax statue at Madame Tussaud's. Although Lenin's mausoleum was simpler, less ornamented, than the great temple for Ho Chi Minh at Hanoi, the effort to preserve the Bolshevik leader was merely and would unimpressive illusion. Mayakovsky (who later committed suicide) would definitely have been disappointed.
The year, 1991:the Soviet Union comes to an end. The Marxist-Leninist project is declared a failure. Capitalism comes. A McDonald's restaurant opens in Moscow, and booms. On the first few days, the queues to enter this American food hall are longer than the lines of pilgrims at the Red Square. A news item:the state budget for the Lenin Mausoleum laboratory is cut from 100% to 20%. In 1997, President Yeltsin recommended a referendum to decide whether it wouldn't be better to close the mausoleum and for Lenin's body to be buried beside his mother. Parliament rejected the recommendation, but a grandchild of the ex Communist leader had in idea: take Lenin's body around the world as an exhibition--it would bring in money....
If Nadezhda Krupskaia were still alive, she would be struck to the core to see what happened to her husband's body. Five days after Lenin died, Krupskaia appealed, through the Pravda newspaper, to the workers and farmers, for the grief at Illich's death to be expressed in another way. 'Don't make a monument to him', she pleaded. 'If you wish to honour the name of Vladimir Illich--build baby-centres, kindergartens, homes, schools'. But in those days of mourning almost no one heard her plea.
And a revolution that aims to change the world with scientific fervour--a modern revolution--apparently cannot keep itself going, precisely because of an illusion brought by modernity itself. Vladislav Todorov, a Bulgarian intellectual from the Institute for Arts Research at Sofia, wrote Red Square, Black Square:Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (published in 1995) and we find there a reflection on that monument which should not have been built: The mummy of Lenin is the point at which modernisation is terminated and the omnipresence of the Party is imposed.
People say that modernity is disenchantment, people's loss of the magical in the world, but in the Red Square something magical was inadvertently reborn. They guaranteed the science could liberate mankind from supersition and all kinds of ideologies, for science could direct the world. But what happened was not liberation, but rather control, which arose as paradigm. The revolution became repression, the awareness of class became ideology, and new idols arose.When Marx wrote of man going astray in 'reification' (or Verdinglichung), he was actually like a prophet of old calling attention to the disaster of idolatry. But revolution ofteh eats its own words.
In a corner of a Seattle, in the state of Washington, America, there is and idol of Lenin beside a busy street. An American tourist bought the statue and carried it from a town in the former Soviet Union, when the people there decided to dismantle the two-metre high statue. In Seattle,the thing was offered for sale. Until last year, there were no takers. Even idols,like anything turned into material objects, can quickly transform into commodities, to be traded on the market.
That is what has happened in the world since Lenin was preserved in a pyramid of glass. But in Indonesia, in 2001, like some miracle this mummy has been brought back to life. Not in homage, bu tin terror--and people are burning 'communist' books, yelling 'beware the danger of communism,' and have entered once more into a time of ignorance, with a supersition, one thousand stories of ghosts from the now petrified forest, the jungle that no longer has a name.
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