Long since turned to dust in a London cemetery, Karl Marx lives on in the turgid periods of Das Kapital and in the reverent thoughts of all right-minded Communists. That other god of the Soviet Olympus, Nikolai Lenin, remains visible in Moscow where science has kept the Russian Dictator's corpse intact for eleven years. Last week the Lenin tomb was closed to the public while Soviet workers busily installed air-conditioning equipment with a view to preserving the sacred remains for at least a century more.
When frail, tired "N. Lenin" (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) died in 1924, the Bolshevist high command decided upon a strictly non-Christian apotheosis. A conference of scientists was called to find means of preserving the body. Biochemist Boris Ilyich Zbarsky and Anatomist Vladimir Petrovich Vorobev offered to try, worked four months on the cadaver, which subsequently appeared under glass in a temporary tomb in the Red Square. When plans for the permanent tomb had finally been agreed on, the corpse vanished for 18 months into the recesses of the Kremlin. At last in 1930 the new mausoleum was completed. It was a terraced pyramid of sleek red & black granite. From a single 50-ton block over the bronze doors flared in red porphyry the word LENIN.
Thereafter, day after day for months and years, long queues of worshipful believers in Communism and curious infidels moved slowly through the doorway, flanked by two immobile guards, down a narrow passage to an underground room, through heavy air that muffled footfalls, discouraged talk. In that uneasy silence the body, clad in the uniform of a Red Commander with a shroud over the legs, lay on a block of black granite, beneath a tent-shaped enclosure of glass. The bald, Slavic head with scrubby, rufous beard and mustache rested on a silk pillow. From the ridge of the glass enclosure shielded lights glowed on the waxy features of the man who proclaimed the World Revolution of the World Proletariat. Other light there was none. Through that gloom, by last week, more than 8,000,000 persons had passed. Last year Scientists Zbarsky & Vorobev, permanent caretakers of the corpse, were awarded the Order of Lenin, highest Soviet honor.
Meanwhile ugly rumors were sprouting. Was Lenin's body shrinking? Was it decaying? Had the face caved in, been repaired? Was the image the actual corpse of Lenin? Last week Comrade Zbarsky indignantly answered such calumnies: "All the legends circulated abroad concerning a decaying condition of the body are false. On the contrary, we are now more than ever certain of the infallibility of our method." Thereupon it was announced that by October the Lenin tomb would be air-conditioned. Zbarsky had been fearful lest on warm days currents of air set in motion by throngs of pilgrims prove "injurious" to the body. After the conditioning equipment is installed it was thought that Lenin could safely be viewed all day and all night in any weather.