Who was embalmed and why in the 20th century

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Almost exactly 95 years ago, on January 21, 1924, the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense of the same USSR and others, and so on, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, also known by the pseudonym Lenin, died in the Gorki estate after a long illness on 54th year of life.

The very next day, by the decision of Ulyanov's colleagues, his body was embalmed. It lies in a mausoleum specially built for this to this day. However, Lenin is not alone: many similar embalmed bodies can be found all over the world.

In fact, the body of V. Ulyanov was originally planned to be preserved only for a few days: until the funeral, scheduled for January 27. But a few days later, a new decision was made: not to bury the body at all, but to put it in a sarcophagus on Red Square, so that, as the workers of the Putilov plant wrote in the appeal, “Ilyich physically stayed with us and so that the immense masses of working people could see him.” that is, to make it an object of worship for all progressive people, first of the Land of the Soviets, and then of the whole world.

Already on January 27, 1924, the first wooden mausoleum appeared on Red Square - small, cramped and inconspicuous. In the spring of the same year, when Lenin's body went for a new embalming - this time not temporary, but permanent - the first mausoleum was replaced by a second, also wooden, but more impressive. It served as the seat of the leader's body until 1929, when the construction of the current granite mausoleum began. The body "moved" to new premises in the fall of 1930. It has been there (excluding a 4-year business trip-evacuation to Tyumen in 1941-1945) for almost 90 years now.

How did it come to them

In Lenin's mausoleum, two traditions of perpetuating the memory of the deceased, known from ancient times, were combined at once - preserving the body from natural decomposition and placing it in a noticeable structure towering above the ground. Actually, the mausoleum is a structure, a building intended for the burial of the dead not in the ground, but on the surface.

The name of such a building came from the name of the Carian king of the 4th century BC. e. Mausola, to whom his widow, Queen Artemisia, erected a monument in Halicarnassus, which became one of the ancient wonders of the world. Although even before that, various cultures were very successful in the construction of notable monuments, tombs, and the Egyptian pyramids are only one, the most famous example.

It is noteworthy that this tradition is still alive, and the builders of aboveground tombs are guided not only by vanity and the desire to remain in plain sight even after death, but also by purely practical imaginations: mausoleums are used when for some reason it is impossible to bury the dead in the ground. - for example, if the soil is too rocky or muddy, or if it just isn't enough.

It must be said that the idea of flaunting the specially embalmed body of a deceased in 1924, extravagant by today's standards, was not new. The first experiments in the field of deliberate mummification of corpses were carried out by representatives of the Chinchorro culture, which developed on the Pacific coast of South America at least 9000 years ago.

The Egyptians were prominent experts in the field of preserving the bodies of the dead already in the 3rd millennium BC. Independently of them, embalming and mummification techniques also developed in Central and South America, in China and Tibet, in what is now Nigeria. However, as far as is known, the corpses preserved in this way were not exhibited there for decades on public display.

Another thing is when the body was embalmed for a short period so that everyone could say goodbye to the deceased or to take him from the place of death to the place of burial. This is what they do today

The tradition of displaying the embalmed body on public display originated later and not in connection with the spread of Christianity. The relics of the saints here cannot be considered an example, since their bodies in the vast majority of cases are not embalmed, although the popes were thus preserved for a long time, and some of these bodies can still be seen, but more on that later.

It's about embalming for scientific purposes, so that you can study the structure of the human body. People were doing this back in the Middle Ages.

And only in the XVIII-XIX centuries, gazing at the paraded dead became a strange entertainment in our terms. However, if you consider that public executions and "freak circuses" were considered no less entertainment then, this does not seem so surprising.

But the macabre fashion for exposing the bodies of rulers embalmed in mausoleums for many years, undoubtedly, began with V. Ulyanov-Lenin.

Leaders, generalissimos, presidents

Ilyich was followed by the Soviet Bolshevik leader Grigory Kotovsky, who was shot in 1925 and also placed in a mausoleum in Podolsk, Odessa region of Ukraine. And others pulled up there: in 1949, the head of Bulgaria, Georgi Dimitrov, ended up in his own mausoleum, in 1952 - the Mongolian communist dictator Khorlogiin Choibalsan (although he shared the tomb with the founder of the Mongolian republic Sukhe-Bator and their bodies were kept in walled sarcophagi) In 1953, Lenin was pressed into Red Square by Stalin, and in the same year the body of Czechoslovak President Clement Gottwald, who fell ill at Stalin's funeral and died shortly after, was put on public display.

In 1969, the leader of communist Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, died, in 1976 - the chairman of the PRC Mao Zedong, three years later - the first president of independent Angola (the country existed for 27 years in a state of bloody civil war) and the builder of socialism Agostino Neto, in 1985 - m - the head of Guyana, Lyndon Forbes Burnham, who was in power for almost forty years. All of them were embalmed and ended up in the mausoleums. Finally, in 1994, the eternal president of North Korea, Generalissimo Kim Il Sung, joined this "club", and in 2012 his son and also Generalissimo Kim Jong Il reunited with him in the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun.

Few of these rulers rested for a long time in the tombs arranged for them. So, K. Gottwald, as part of the weakening of the communist regime and criticism of the personality cult, was buried in 1962 (and also because his body, being unsuccessfully embalmed, began to deteriorate), a year earlier, I. Stalin was buried at the Kremlin wall, and the bodies of G. Dimitrova and H. Choibalsana, A. Neto and F. Burnham were buried in the 1990s after the fall of communism, while the mausoleums were demolished in most cases. In 2016, the remains of G. Kotovsky were buried - he lost the mausoleum earlier: it was destroyed by the occupying German troops, after which the body fragments were stored in a small crypt.

In their places, in addition to Lenin, today Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and both Kims remain. If you wish and if possible, you can visit the tombs of all four, although you will have to stand in long queues side by side with locals and tourists, go through repeated security checks and hand over photographing equipment.

It is noteworthy that not only the communist fathers of the nation were subjected to the embalming procedure, but also politicians of a different kind with great merits. So, since 1953, the body of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who died in 1938, has been kept in a closed sarcophagus in the Anitkabir mausoleum in Ankara.

With Chiang Kai-shek, President of the Republic of China (Taiwan), the story is more interesting: his embalmed body is in a closed sarcophagus at the yhu residence, which has now become a memorial and, in a sense, a mausoleum, and in the center of the capital of the island of Taipei stands a 70-meter high memorial complex - the National Memorial Chiang Kai-shek Hall. It is curious that the second president of Taiwan, the eldest son of Chiang Kai-shek, Jiang Ching-kuo, is also embalmed and lies in a separate mausoleum a kilometer from his father on the territory of the memorial complex.

The bodies of long-term President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos and the first lady of Argentina Eva Peron were also embalmed, but then buried

Among the mansions in this row are the popes, who were embalmed for centuries for better preservation during lengthy farewell procedures, and then buried on the territory of the Vatican. Not everyone, however, was in for final rest. Thus, Pope John XXIII, who died in 1963, was embalmed in the Vatican tradition, buried and buried, but in 2001 he was again disturbed. The fact is that he was declared a saint, and the body was exhibited in St. Peter's Basilica for worship. The embalming procedure was performed so well that his body now looks as if his dad died not half a century, but a couple of hours ago.

Little girl in questionable company

In the Catacombs of the Capuchins in Palermo, Sicily, there is a small glazed coffin containing the embalmed body of little Rosalia Lombardo, who did not live for several days to be two years old. She died of pneumonia in early December 1920.

The child's father was inconsolable and turned to Alfredo Salafia, a chemist known throughout Italy and abroad, up to the United States, as a successful embalmer. He, using his proprietary methods, preserved Rosalia's body so successfully that it remained for eight decades in the middle of the chapel of St. Rosalia almost unchanged - according to eyewitnesses, the girl looked as if she had just fallen asleep, but was about to open her eyes.

And only at the beginning of this century, the first traces of damage appeared on the body, although it is not buried today, but is located in a capsule filled with nitrogen and in a drier and darker place than before.