BACK IN VANCOUVER, I THOUGHT about the stories that Fulcheri told of his experiences as a mummifier and examiner of the holy dead. I understood his fascination, and in part I shared it, but I couldn’t help but notice the eerie disconnect between the humble faith of the devout and the chill logic of the Vatican, which had not hesitated to call in the whole bristling arsenal of science to preserve a dissident Ukrainian cardinal. I wondered—although I felt rather guilty for harboring such thoughts—whether the Vatican intended on disclosing to the people of Lviv what it had done to Cardinal Slipyj, explaining how it had surgically altered and chemically enhanced his body for eternity. Or would Rome choose another course of action? Would it remain silent, allowing Ukrainians to draw their own conclusions about the cardinal’s preservation at some distant time in the future?
What struck me most in Italy, however, was just how deep the reverence for preserved bodies runs in the Catholic world, and how easily those in positions of power can turn this to their advantage. The prelates of Rome had capitalized upon this ancient veneration to inspire the faithful and to advance the Church’s own political agenda, but they were not the only ones to profit from it. Others in Europe, far more ruthless, had also sought to exploit it, and they had done so on occasion with particularly disastrous consequences. Indeed, during the 1980s, radical nationalists in Serbia had used veneration for the ancient preserved dead to prepare the way for ethnic cleansing.
The Serbs are a people with very long memories. As Orthodox Catholics, they live along the edges of the ancient cultural faultline that divided Christian Europe from Moslem Asia. Conquered by the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century, they fomented rebellion after rebellion for nearly five hundred years, until at last they won their freedom in the nineteenth century and later united with other Slavs to found Yugoslavia. It was a fragile union. Serb nationalists hated sharing the reins of power, particularly with Yugoslavia’s sizable Moslem population. By the late 1980s they had begun scheming to seize control of the entire country. As an intregal part of their plan, they promoted a dramatic public tour of a fourteenth-century Serb prince, Lazar.
It was Lazar, a popular local hero, who had led the ill-fated defense of Serbia from the Turkish invaders. Enjoining his fellow Serbs to leave work on their farms to follow him in June of 1389, the prince and his forces met the invaders on Kosovo Polji, “the field of blackbirds.” In the heat of the clash, Serb knights managed to slay the Turkish leader, Sultan Murad I. But the death of the sultan did little to curb the ferocity of his forces. The Turkish army slaughtered the Serb knights in their heavy chain-mail armor, leaving the battlefield littered with glinting corpses. They also captured the kingpin of the Serb defense—Lazar himself, who was beheaded a month later.
The Orthodox Church canonized Lazar as a martyr. His followers carried his body to a monastary at Ravanica, where he was revered for centuries as an Incorruptible. Few things, reasoned extreme Serb nationalists in the late 1980s, were likely to inflame Serbs as much as a glimpse of the murdered prince, whose mummified remains had by then become little more than bones. That he had so deteriorated did not matter to Serbs: the devout offered their prayers as a procession carried Lazar from Bosnia and Croatia to Kosovo. Two years later, the new Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, spoke to more than one million people on the ancient Kosovo battlefield, stirring nationalism to fever pitch. Portraying himself as the reincarnated Lazar, Milosevic rode to power, unleashing war and the atrocities of ethnic cleansing and forcing tens of thousands of Moslems to leave their homes in Kosovo.
Milosevic understood exactly what he was doing, but he was not the first politician to see the glimmer of gain in the relics of the ancient dead. From the Russian Revolution to the darkest days of the Cold War, Eastern European Communists had capitalized on ancient Christian beliefs surrounding the preserved dead. While suppressing the Catholic Church in Eastern Europe, dispatching priests to the firing squads and archbishops to the frozen camps of the Gulag, they had cynically borrowed pages from Rome, creating their own brand of Incorruptibles.
NUMBER 2 KRASIN Street looks much like any other modernist Soviet-era office building in Moscow. Situated just a brisk ten-minute walk from the walls of the Kremlin, it blends into its drab surroundings with a kind of artless camouflage. On a recent March morning, the bland gray facade was the same color as the muddy slush in the street. The blackened skeletal trees out front looked exhausted and defeated, as trees do throughout Moscow at that time of year. The sign over its doorway drew scarcely a blink from a passerby. It read, in Russian, THE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGICAL CENTER OF BIOMEDICAL TECHNOLOGIES. As with so many other things in the former Soviet Union, however, the placard out front did little to convey the eerie reality within. At 2 Krasin, some of Russia’s finest medical minds toiled, as they had for decades, on a bizarre quest: to transform dead dictators into the most perfect mummies the world has ever seen.
In this, the staff at 2 Krasin had been singularly successful. Thanks to its ministrations, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, lies seemingly untouched by time in his austere Red Square mausoleum. Dead for nearly three-quarters of a century, Lenin remains a major public figure in Russia, as much a part of popular culture and political discourse in Moscow as many living politicians. And Lenin is just one of the triumphs of the Mausoleumists, as the secretive aging morticians at 2 Krasin Street are privately known. Their client list reads like a Who’s Who of the Cold War—Joseph Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and Kim Il Sung.
I had arrived in Moscow by appointment to meet and talk with the Mausoleumists, but I had unwittingly picked a bad time. The United States, Canada, and other NATO members had just begun bombing Belgrade after Slobodan Milosevic’s assault on Kosovo. Young Russians were up in arms about the devastation being wreaked on their old Serb allies, demonstrating angrily in front of the American embassy. To prevent things from getting out of hand, the Kremlin had sent out the army to guard the embassy from the sea of sullen faces on the street. My interpreter, Natalia, an English-language professor from St. Petersburg, was worried sick. Her students were desperate to run off to Yugoslavia to volunteer for the army. But I found it hard to gauge the depth of Russian rage. A click of the remote in my hotel room produced a popular Moscow television program: the American cartoon Beavis and Butthead, dubbed into Russian.
Nonetheless I felt very nervous heading off to my first meeting at 2 Krasin Street, and my sense of anxiety was not exactly allayed inside the door. Against the far wall, a receptionist sat behind a lone desk, looking very small in a very large and empty-looking foyer. She stared at Natalia and me, took our names and made a discreet call on a rotary phone, whispering something into the receiver. I glanced around the foyer, searching for some other sign of life. There wasn’t any, only a door standing ajar in an empty corner room. At one time, 2 Krasin Street had boasted its own KGB monitoring, but circumstances were clearly not what they had been. To help pay the bills, the Mausoleumists and their associates had been reduced to leasing out space to two businesses virtually unheard of in the old Soviet era: a travel agency and a bank.
A secretary finally appeared and led the way up the stairs past a dusty-looking bust of Lenin the revolutionary and into a small elevator. A formaldehyde odor wafted in the air as staff in white lab jackets squeezed in beside us. On the third floor, the door parted on a large carved wooden panel showing Lenin beaming down benevolently. The secretary led the way down a narrow corridor and ushered us into an immense echoing office stripped bare of any personal photos or effects. At the far end behind a desk sat a dapper-looking man in his early sixties. It was Juri Denisov-Nikolsky, the senior Russian researcher responsible for Lenin’s body. Short and rotund, with graying hair swept back neatly from his face, he spoke an eloquent, old-fashioned kind of Russian and wore a look of frank curiosity on his face. As we talked, I began to see that he had been looking forward to this meeting. He loves to spar.
Denisov-Nikolsky wasn’t at all what I had expected. I had imagined someone dry, humorless, difficult, and rather self-important, which was how he had come across on the phone to Natalia. He isn’t. He is a stickler for detail, yes, but he is fond of a laugh, particularly when it can be had at others’ expense. His thick unruly black eyebrows hop and dance frenetically above his eyes when he is amused, which seemed to be much of the time in my presence. First of all, however, he had to take Natalia and me up to the office of the director of the institute for an official grilling that would decide whether he could talk to me at all. This, it soon became obvious, was going to be an ordeal. But after Natalia and I had somehow scraped through, we all headed back downstairs to schedule a meeting. Denisov-Nikolsky loosened his necktie like a man about to have a good time.
The next morning when we arrived, he was in a jovial mood. He greeted us amiably and made fun of me when I alluded to what I had read about the secrecy of the Mausoleumists’ methods. “So I guess I just made a great mistake in coming into contact with a person like you,” he said, with a broad conspiratorial grin. “I should live isolated and away from the outside world.” Seeing him so relaxed and amused, I began to feel ridiculous. It occurred to me that perhaps I had read too many John Le Carré novels. So I began to ask him detailed questions about the methods that he and his colleagues used to preserve Lenin. He declined to answer. I asked how many people the Mausoleumists had embalmed. He refused to give out the information. I requested permission to see the Mausoleumists’ labs. I had heard, although I didn’t mention this, that they featured large liquid tanks containing human cadavers that dated back to 1949. I wanted to see them. Denisov-Nikolsky changed the subject.
He was, however, slightly more willing to talk about other things—including his own background. Like his fellow Mausoleumists, he is a member of Russia’s old medical elite. He was born in Azerbaijan, the son of an engineer, and he graduated from one of the best medical schools in the then Soviet Union, St. Petersburg’s Military Medical Academy. He has a Ph.D. in anatomy, with a speciality in the morphology or structure of human bone. Among other things, he is an expert on osteoporosis, the abnormal loss of bone tissue that plagues many postmenstrual women, and he has lectured widely on the subject in Russia. He lives comfortably in Moscow, though not as comfortably as he did before the drastic devaluation of the ruble in the late 1990s, and has traveled broadly. He is married to a fellow doctor and medical researcher. His daughter is a doctor and his grandson is about to enter medical school. He is a member of the prestigious Academy of Medical Sciences.
Much of his spectacular climb up the ladder in the Russian medical establishment was due to his labors as a Mausoleumist. In 1970, Denisov-Nikolsky had just finished a stint as a young medical expert for the Russian army and as a researcher for a Moscow medical institute and was at loose ends when he received an important referral to Sergei Debov. Debov was the biochemist who headed the laboratory belonging to Lenin’s Mausoleum, as the research facility was then known. A pioneer of Russian work on DNA and a vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Debov was an erudite and charming man who was on the lookout for a first-rate medical researcher. He and his fellow Mausoleumists had a good thing going. In return for their silence and their research on new and better ways to preserve the dead, they each were given their own laboratories. These were relatively well stocked and equipped with up-to-date scientific gear—a novelty in much of Soviet science. Debov and his colleagues also had the freedom to pursue their own research interests. This, too, was a novelty. A post at 2 Krasin Street ensured a spacious, comfortable apartment in Moscow, a good deal of foreign travel, the best schools for one’s children, and all the medals and honors that a grateful government could bestow. Denisov-Nikolsky signed on.
After nearly thirty years of such work, he became the guardian of the lab’s secret formulas for Lenin’s care. Some Russian reporters, impressed by the body’s lifelike color and look, had accused him of secretly substituting a wax model. When I asked him if it were true, Denisov-Nikolsky laughed. Twice a week, one or another of the Mausoleumists inspected the body for signs of deterioration. Every eighteen months or so, Denisov-Nikolsky arranges for Lenin to be lowered by elevator into a subterranean laboratory beneath the Mausoleum. This lab is kept at a constant temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit—a beautiful spring day in the parlance of the Mausoleumists. There it is stripped of its clothes, checked for signs of decay, and immersed in a vat of chemicals. Then it is raised again several weeks later into the world of the living.
BY SUCH ELABORATE means, Lenin, the driving force behind the Russian Revolution, the founder of Europe’s earliest concentration camps, and the architect of Soviet-style terror, has eerily outlasted all his comrades and contemporaries. The last time Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, saw him in 1938, she is said to have shaken her head sadly. While she had aged, she muttered to a guard, her husband looked exactly the same as he did the day he died. It was a fate that neither she nor Lenin had ever wished for. Lenin himself was frankly contemptuous of those who made dead revolutionaries their idols. His wife shared these views. Shortly after her husband died from a stroke in January 1924, she wrote a letter to the Soviet newspaper Pravda. She demanded that her husband be given a plain burial in a simple grave. “Do not let your sorrow for Ilyich find expression in outward veneration of his person,” she warned. “Do not build memorials to his name.”
Lenin’s would-be successors ignored her. Even before Lenin was dead, Joseph Stalin had proposed embalming the revolutionary so that Russians could get used to his death gradually. At the time, neither Stalin nor his ideas were taken particularly seriously. When Lenin died, observed Denisov-Nikolsky, “plans were made to bury Lenin and the grave was even dug and the day of the funeral was named.” Delegations from across Russia struggled to make the funeral on time, but in the dead of winter, many were held up on the roads. The Kremlin ordered that Lenin be temporarily embalmed according to funeral practices popular in the West. This would allow delayed delegations to pay their respects to Lenin. But five weeks later, the crowds of mourners had not thinned and brown patches had appeared on the skin on Lenin’s head. These were worrying signs of decay.
Stalin, who was beginning to gather up the reins of power, insisted that Lenin be permanently installed in Red Square. The bodies of Russian Orthodox saints were preserved under glass in cathedrals across the country. Why not inter Lenin in a shrine where pilgrims from the grieving nation could pay homage? It was an incredibly cynical idea. Lenin, after all, had launched a vicious campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church. Indeed, he took such a personal interest in the Church’s destruction that he had asked to see daily lists of the priests to be put to death. But Stalin astutely observed that Lenin’s campaign had left a huge void in Russian society. Stalin had been raised in a deeply religious household and had even attended a theological seminary. He knew that a successful Communist government would have to supply something to replace the Orthodox saints. Stalin offered up Lenin.
No one had ever tried to preserve a human body exactly as it had been at the height of life, not even the ancient Egyptians. “People in Egypt mummified their great leaders so the souls could live together with the bodies,” noted Denisov-Nikolsky. “They didn’t aim to keep the exact appearance of the mummies and that’s why we’ll never know what Ramses V looked like.” But Stalin envisioned perfection. He wanted a body that the Russian public could immediately identify and worship, a body that was even more lifelike—and hence more holy—than those of the saints. A Committee for the Immortalization of Lenin’s Memory was hastily convened. One of its members, Leonid Krasin, a close working associate of Lenin, advocated freezing his old friend like a side of beef. But after conducting a few experiments with other corpses, Krasin gave up. He realized it would be extremely difficult to maintain the body at the exact temperature required. Moreover, moisture was bound to collect on the inner surface of the sarcophagus, accelerating putrefaction.
With no one else to turn to, the committee reluctantly handed Lenin’s body over to a pair of untried morticians, biochemist Boris Zbarsky and anatomist Vladimir Vorobiov. Vorobiov had a local reputation in the city of Kharkov as a preparer of anatomical specimens for medical classes. He flayed, incised, and chemically treated human corpses to reveal the minutiae of their anatomy. His cadavers were instructive for medical students, but never very pretty. Zbarsky, on the other hand, was a cocky young Jewish biochemist eager to make his way in the new Soviet system. He had never worked with the dead before, but he had persuaded himself that with his knowledge of chemistry and Vorobiov’s grasp of anatomy, they could preserve Lenin for decades just as the Kremlin wanted. Zbarsky was willing to risk everything on this belief. He knew that failure would lead directly to the firing squad.
In March of 1924, he and Vorobiov moved into a cellar below Lenin’s temporary wooden crypt in Red Square. Initially, the young biochemist refused to touch the famous cadaver: he couldn’t bear to handle a dead man. He expected Vorobiov to carry out all the procedures, but the astonished anatomist refused. According to one story, Vorobiov threw a medical gown over to his young associate one day, suggesting that henceforth they do everything together. Zbarsky reluctantly agreed and they got down to work. They ordered vats of chemicals—formalin, glycerin, alcohol, ethanol, potassium acetate, quinine chloride, gutta-percha, and honey. They also contacted Alexander Pasternak, the brother of the famous Russian writer Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago. Vorobiov wanted Pasternak, an accomplished artist, to do a detailed watercolor of Lenin’s body. This could then serve as a permanent record of Lenin’s skin color, his liver spots, and warts. This rendering, which sprawled over nine sheets of paper, would become the standard against which their work could later be judged. There was no time to spare. The water in Lenin’s eyes was evaporating: his closed eyelids were shrinking ghoulishly into their sockets. Also, the muscles of his lower lip were retracting, creating the beginnings of a grimace. Worse still, Lenin smelled.
Zbarsky and Vorobiov worked around the clock with their assistants. They ate and slept in the crypt. They never publicly divulged exactly what they did to Lenin. But according to Zbarsky’s son Ilya, who followed in his father’s footsteps as a Mausoleumist and later wrote a fascinating book about his experiences, the team first eviscerated Lenin, then flushed out his body cavity with distilled water and acetic acid. They injected him with formalin and lowered him gently into a formalin bath. He looked like an exotic fish in an aquarium. Eventually the two morticians hauled him out and dried him off. Then they dunked him repeatedly in a bath filled with glycerine, potassium acetate, water, and quinine chloride—the same solution, claimed Ilya Zbarsky, that was used for maintenance treatments on Lenin.
Four months after they began, the work was done. The Kremlin invited Lenin’s family to come take a look. Dimitri Ulyanov, Lenin’s brother, was stunned. He said Lenin looked even better than he did when the family last viewed him a few hours after death. Relieved to hear this, the Kremlin installed the body in an elegant, pyramid-shaped mausoleum in Red Square. For his efforts, Zbarsky received a huge sum of money for the time, twenty-five thousand rubles, which he spent on clothes and lavish dinner parties for his friends and party contacts over the next three years. The nervous strain of the previous months had imprinted itself painfully on his imagination, however. He had a recurring nightmare: in his dreams, he told one reporter, he saw a fly buzzing inside Lenin’s sarcophagus.
Zbarsky and Vorobiov continued to minister to Lenin, visiting the Mausoleum twice a week. But despite their great triumph, they never managed to ingratiate themselves with Russia’s new master, Stalin. Vorobiov disliked the small Georgian intensely and, on occasions when he had drunk too much, didn’t mind saying so in the company of others. This was very unwise: Vorobiov died under mysterious circumstances in 1937. Zbarsky hung on longer at the Mausoleum, but in 1952 he was purged and imprisoned in one of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns. He died soon after. One of his students, Sergei Debov, began tending to Lenin’s needs, and before long Debov and the Cold War carried the Soviet brand of immortality to new heights.
IN AN ELEGANT sunlit apartment on Begovaya Street, Lyudmilla Debova dabbed a tear from her eye as she watched her husband, Sergei Debov, on videotape. Debov, who took part in the mummification of Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and many others, had died of skin cancer in 1995. But Debova kept his study just as it was when he was alive, a shrine to her husband’s memory. After spending an afternoon with her and her vivacious sister, Valentina Victorovna, I felt as if I knew him, too. Debov’s well-thumbed books—the collected plays of Shakespeare, coffee-table books on Monet and Degas, field guides to shells and fossils, biographies of Martin Luther King Jr., and other twentieth-century luminaries—still lined the shelves of his study. The tangerine plant Debov had carried back from Hanoi still flowered in a corner window. The dried crocodile he had collected in Angola still sat on a ledge. And the little lacquered liquor cabinet he had been given in North Korea, that was there, too. Debov, it transpired, had always brought back mementos when he traveled abroad. “The whole world is represented here,” said Victorovna proudly.
The videotape showed a tall, distinguished-looking man in his early seventies with thick black-framed glasses. He looked relaxed and slightly bemused as he answered questions from a Russian television journalist. The sudden death of Stalin in March of 1953, he explained, took the Mausoleumists by surprise. For nearly a quarter of a century, Stalin had ruled the Soviet Union with a terrible cunning, eliminating all opponents and spreading terror from the frozen reaches of Siberia to the prosperous countryside dachas outside Moscow. Stalin had seemed both immortal and invincible. Signing daily death-sentence lists of five thousand people at the height of the great purges of the late 1930s, he spent his evenings sipping Georgian wine and reveling in American westerns and comedies screened in his private theater.
Stalin’s would-be successors immediately bestowed their country’s greatest honor upon him. They ordered the Mausoleumists to prepare their chemicals. For Debov and his colleagues, this was a frightening prospect, for Stalin had died under suspicious circumstances. In the Kremlin, rumors of poison were flying, for it was said that Stalin’s face had turned black just before his death and that he had hurled curses at all those who huddled around him. Debov and his colleagues feared that if they turned up evidence of poison, there would be a bloodbath in the Kremlin, where Stalin’s successors eyed each other hungrily like circling hammerhead sharks. If there was any hint that the Mausoleumists had concealed such evidence, it would be the Gulag or worse for them all. On the videotape, a Russian television reporter asked him if he was afraid. Debov smiled a little, hesitating. “Nobody wished to do the postmortem examination,” he conceded finally, “so a college student was found to do it.”
Fortunately, the student discerned no hint of foul play. Stalin had died of a stroke. But the team did not have an easy time preserving his body. Stalin’s face was pocked and pitted, something tactfully omitted from official portraits of the Soviet leader. This meant that the Mausoleumists had to find a way to make the scars disappear. Eventually they called in lighting specialists who devised a system of twinkling lights that softened Stalin’s pockmarks and hid his wrinkles, making him look years younger and far more pleasant than he ever had in life. When the body was at last ready for viewing, Debov called the Kremlin and asked for a set of clothing to dress him in. “An aide brought a shabby worn-out uniform and an old pair of boots,” recalled Debova. “Sergei was very surprised, but it turned out that’s all that Stalin had. He just slept on an army bed and led a spartan life.”
When the Mauoleumists were done, Stalin’s body was exhibited in a glass-topped sarcophagus next to Lenin in Red Square. For a while, lines of the curious extended far down the pavement, but they quickly tapered off. Later, a young woman stood up at a Communist Party congress to describe a dream she had. In it, Lenin had spoken to her, saying, “It is unpleasant for me to be beside Stalin who brought such misfortune to the Party.” After that, a group of men from the Kremlin appeared late one night in 1961 at the Mausoleum. They brought papers and an ordinary wooden coffin. Debov and his colleagues helped them lift Stalin from his glass sarcophagus and lay him in the coffin. Then they watched as soldiers nailed the lid shut and carried it out to a freshly dug grave behind the mausoleum. Debov never saw Stalin’s body again.
BUT THE MAUSOLEUMISTS were not terribly concerned by Stalin’s sudden fall from grace: by that time, they had their hands full of work. Other Communist states were lining up to have their own version of Lenin, so whenever somebody prominent died—from Mongolian strongman Horloogiyn Choybalsan to Angolan revolutionary Agostinho Neto, and from Bulgarian party boss Georgi Dimitrov to Czech Communist leader Klement Gottwald—the Mausoleumists got a call from the Kremlin. The instructions varied shrewdly from case to case. The rulers and despots of minor client states, such as Mongolia, received the cheapest, most ephemeral form of Soviet mummification, while those who presided over nations critical to Russian foreign policy benefited from the most lavish attentions that Debov and his team could manage.
Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader who had delivered such a stunning blow to the confidence of the American military, warranted red-carpet service. He died of a heart attack in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War. With instructions from the Kremlin, Debov and his colleagues packed a plane full of chemicals and equipment and flew to Hanoi. The North Vietnamese seemed very anxious about the embalming. The American army had begun searching for Ho Chi Minh’s body, after hearing rumors that the North Vietnamese would trade all their prisoners of war to get it back. So Hanoi had been forced to go to elaborate lengths to protect the corpse, moving it from cave to cave. One morning, Debov and his colleagues woke up to see an American tank churn past their camouflaged shelter. “The team was guarded,” said Debova, “but still they saw the cannon of the tank pointed at them.”
Further adding to the tension were technical problems. It was the first time the Mausoleumists had worked with a body whose skin was not pink-white. They weren’t exactly sure how to preserve the correct pigmentation. They tested various solutions on human cadavers of similar color in Hanoi until at last they found something that worked. They were immensely proud of the finished product. Debov later told his wife that Ho Chi Minh was better preserved than Lenin himself. The North Vietnamese leadership were very grateful. They awarded Debov their highest medal, the Hero of Labor, and presented the departing scientist with a precious keepsake: a pair of vases made from an American warplane they had shot down.
Indeed, wherever Debov traveled as a Mausoleumist, his hosts showered him with honors and gifts. They threw elaborate banquets and pandered to the team members’ private hobbies. “Debov loved to fish,” says Debova, “so wherever he went, they organized fishing trips for him.” When North Korean president Kim Il Sung died in 1994, Debov and his team flew to the capital Pyongyang, where they were put up in the dead leader’s palace. In a country of famines, “they were treated like czars,” said Victorovna. Kim Il Sung’s reclusive successor and son, Kim Jong-il, happily posed for photos with them, and when Debov returned to Moscow, his suitcases bulged with presents, including a bottle of gold-flecked liquor. Debova still had it. She brought it out and kindly offered me a drink. When I declined, a look of relief crossed her face. “It’s Korean,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “so it’s not very good.”
The reputation of the Mausoleumists seemed unassailable, but even so, a few famous names from the Cold War slipped through their hands. The phones at 2 Krasin Street were maddeningly silent in the late summer of 1976, for example, when Mao Tse-tung died in China. Sino-Soviet relations were horribly strained at the time. The Chinese didn’t dare ask for help. Instead they sent a small delegation to Hanoi, hoping to weasel the Russians’ secrets out of those who tended to Ho Chi Minh. The Vietnamese refused to divulge a thing. In Beijing, the new leadership realized it would have to go its own way in preserving the Great Helmsman. The Chinese, however, were greenhorns at this work. In their nervous attempt at perfection, the appointed embalmers injected Mao with liters more formaldehyde than standard medical texts prescribed. “The results were shocking,” observed Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui, in his published memoirs. Mao’s face became as swollen and distended as a soccer ball. Formaldehyde seeped from his sodden skin. His bloated ears stood out like inflated flippers along the sides of his head. Only hours of frantic salvage work by Li and his associates returned Mao to some semblance of himself.
THE MAUSOLEUMISTS TOOK a secret glee in these stories. They weren’t at all sorry to hear of their Chinese comrades’ troubles. But by then, unknown to Debov and his colleagues, the glory days of 2 Krasin Street were almost over. The old Soviet Union had begun staggering like a drunk under the weight of economic stagnation, and Eastern Europe couldn’t wait to dispose of its puppet governments. In 1989, Berliners finally tore down the concrete slabs of the hated Berlin Wall and then reunited, while Romanians arrested Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, videotaping their executions for public television. A year later, Bulgarians deposed their own Communist leaders, then angrily desecrated the Stalinist mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, who had been mummified by the Mausoleumists. Dimitrov’s family hastened to fetch the corpse, which they quickly cremated in order to avoid further indignity.
In Moscow, people seemed equally keen to rid themselves of the past. At the instigation of Boris Yeltsin, a fierce critic of the old Soviet regime, the Russian republic declared its sovereignty, effectively dismantling the Soviet Union. The old Soviet flag with its hammer and sickle disappeared from the Kremlin walls, and statues of Lenin came clattering down onto the cobblestones. Russians talked longingly of burying Lenin’s body, claiming that peace would never come to the land until the architect of the Russian Revolution had been evicted from his grand tomb in Red Square and buried in the cold ground where he belonged. But the Kremlin hesitated: if Lenin were buried, who could guarantee he would rest in peace? Dead as he was, Lenin had many, many enemies. Kremlin officials cast about for a tidy solution. One rumor had it that they considered auctioning off the body to a foreign buyer, thereby removing the troublesome corpse from harm’s way while earning a tidy sum for the government.
The auction, of course, never took place. Yeltsin failed miserably in his attempt to jump-start the Russian economy, the old Communist guard flexed its muscles once again, and the optimism that had swept through the streets of Moscow vanished. Lenin’s body still remained safely ensconced in Red Square. But at 2 Krasin Street, his minders were bitter men. In his echoing office, Denisov-Nikolsky rapped the table hard in frustration. Since 1991, he explained, the Russian government had virtually ignored him and his colleagues, embarrassed, it seemed, by their mere existence. Indeed, the government had paid not one ruble toward the upkeep of Lenin. “Nothing!” said Denisov-Nikolsky, almost roaring, his face a livid red.
The financial starvation had led to desperate measures. To pay their bills, the guardians of Lenin had entered into a business relationship with a Russian funeral company, Ritual Services. The firm catered to Moscow’s nouveaux riches, which in practice often meant catering to the Russian mafia. Initially, the Mausoleumists served as consultants, helping to pretty up and preserve cadavers for families who could afford such luxuries, but relations with the company had quickly soured. Denisov-Nikolsky and his colleagues had severed all connections. The anatomist refused to discuss the details, but it was clear that the falling out hadn’t been on ideological grounds. Indeed, the Mausoleumists welcomed any wealthy customers, even Americans. “If a rich Texan wished to preserve himself, his wife, or his mistress, then why not?” observed Denisov-Nikolsky. “If someone suddenly gets the wish to be embalmed, we’re open. We’re willing to do it.”
Clients weren’t exactly pounding down the doors, however. To help stay afloat, the Mausoleumists were reduced to accepting handouts from a public trust fund established by a prominent Russian journalist. It was a humiliating state of affairs for a group of scientists who once stood at the pinnacle of official Soviet science. It was also a very worrying one. Lacking financial support, the Mausoleumists had no incentives to attract a new generation of medical researchers to their ranks. Young Russians wanted to go where the money was, explained Denisov-Nikolsky, derisively rubbing his thumb and forefinger. Moreover, Russia’s finest medical talent wanted to do something more satisfying than work on dead bodies, especially when there were few perks to compensate for this sacrifice. Without new blood, the aging Mausoleumists were in danger of becoming extinct. And signs of the end were everywhere. The Mausoleumists had nearly exhausted the supplies of embalming chemicals they had stockpiled in better times, said Denisov-Nikolsky. They were unable to afford to buy new stores. Outside, as if to underline these contentions, a secretary clattered away on a manual typewriter.
Like most of his colleagues, Denisov-Nikolsky hated the thought that Lenin’s body might one day end up as worm food. He had sunk the best and most productive years of his medical career into the work at the Mausoleum and he was not about to see his pet project fall to wrack and ruin. He was proud of what he and his colleagues had achieved. Over the past thirty years, he said, he had detected no trace of decomposition or putrefaction in the cadaver. Lenin, the revolutionary, seemed to be in a perfect state of limbo—a feat never before accomplished by human morticians—and he desperately wanted to see how long it would stay that way. “This has been a very great achievement by Soviet science,” he insisted. “It doesn’t have any analog anywhere in the world. So to stop, to cease this work would greatly affect the achievements and developments of Russian science.”
For more than half a century, the Soviet government had gone to immense lengths to keep its revolutionary saint whole and intact. It had siphoned off the best minds of its medical schools, students whose brilliance could have been put to work healing the living, and sent them instead to toil upon the bodies of dead men. It had paid lavishly for the preservation of Lenin in his granite tomb, while millions of Russian peasants had perished from starvation during the great famines of the thirties. It had elevated the craft of the mortician into a science and lavished every honor conceivable on a group of men whose main contribution to society was to tend cadavers. All this it had done to preserve the dead.
Denisov-Nikolsky knew all this, but the scientist in him regretted nothing. Lenin, he maintained, was now a great scientific experiment and, as ironic as it sounded, he was loath to let something as ephemeral as politics get in the way.