Product Description

Between 1924 and the fall of communism in 1991, many millions of visitors paid their respects to the embalmed body of Lenin in Red Square. This is the story of the mausoleum, told by the only survivor of the family that plunged the founder of the Soviet Union into a solution of glycerine and potassium acetate to preserve him forever. Alongside the story of the laboratory and its close ties with Stalin, Ilya Zbarsky also tells his family's story. His father's responsibility for Lenin's mummification brought him scientific repute and political prominence but he lived in fear, initially of the body deteriorating, later of the regime. This eye-witness account throws a mordant and original light on a surreal aspect of the Soviet regime at a moment at which the future of Lenin's corpse is finally a matter of debate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #569754 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-07
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
When Lenin died in January 1924, two races were set in motion. The first, to find a successor, was by far the most straightforward. For the six months prior to his death, Stalin had prevented Lenin from making any public appearances and had ensured that his misgivings about Stalin never became public knowledge. Come the funeral, the right wing of the Party, led by Stalin, was so firmly in the ascendant that Trotsky, the other leading contender for party leadership, took no part in the proceedings whatsoever. The race to preserve Lenin's body was a much closer-run affair. The Politburo had decided that the Soviet Union needed Lenin's body to be permanently on show as a symbolic focal point for the state; the only trouble was that scientists had no idea how to maintain a body for any length of time without it decomposing.

Various teams were delegated to come up with a solution. It was eventually provided by two scientists, Professor Vorobiov and Boris Zbarsky, who were then delegated the task of maintaining the body in the mausoleum inperpetuam. Ilya Zbarsky, Boris's son, was seconded in 1934, and continued to work there until 1952. Lenin's Embalmers provides a fascinating insight into the procedures and technicalities of preservation, but its real merit lies in the unusual glimpse of life among the Soviet elite. The embalmers were considered a national asset and led a privileged, comfortable existence. Zbarsky brilliantly captures this world where nothing could be questioned too deeply, where you took the good things on offer and kept quiet about the blatant injustices for fear of what may happen if you didn't. The only measure of success was survival, and even for the elite it took a curious mixture of hard-nosed political savvy and almost mindless naiveté to avoid the almost constant threat of the firing squad. Zbarsky's pages are littered with those who failed to find the right combination.

The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union makes the book even more poignant. These days the embalmers earn their living from the Mafia, by preserving the steady supply of corpses of gangsters who are gunned down in the battle to control the Russian economy. You may end up concluding that nothing much has changed; in which case you will find Lenin'sEmbalmers a compelling parable for the 20 th. century. --John Crace

Customer Reviews

Rambling, but a weird gem ...
This book is hard to classify - what it reminded me of most is the rambling monologue of an older person captured on tape.

The person in question being Ilya Zbarsky, a Russian scientist who for some time assisted in the "eternisation" of Lenin's body. His story is part autobiography, part biography of his father, part historical treatise, part criticism of Stalin and the Soviet system. And it is rambling, not strictly following chronology and sometimes presenting information that cannot be verified as fact.

What I enjoyed most about the book was the insight into the workings of the Soviet state, the paranoia, the submission of science to politics and the weird, macabre outcome of this. In this respect it is a gem.

In other respects it is too personal to be objective (which may or may not have been the author's intention). Zbarsky's attitudes towards his father (a love-hate relationship, yet he only managed to make a living through his father's position as Lenin's embalmer), his time with the Soviet army in Berlin (... showing him in a positive light, but slagging other Russians off), all are reflecting a personal attitude towards history and facts that should be taken with a pinch of salt. It also nearly always shows him as a critic of the regime, yet he seems to have suffered no special hardships for this (he blames his one major personal downfall on anti-semitism, not on politics).

Interesting, sometimes funny and certainly weird - read it as light entertainment (though some parts are too technical for this) or as a subjective and not totally reliable account of life within the USSR under Stalin. By all means, read it. Enjoy it.

Then why not 5 stars?

Just because some parts are annoying in their "me good, others bad" attitude (Zbarsky's love affair in Berlin for instance) and because sometimes the style gets too "realistic" - meaning that for clarity it should have been edited.