Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Nineteen: Moscow skyline in twilight, 1989.
Founding Soviet patriarch Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died in early 1924, and while he apparently wished to be buried over in the family plot, the needs of the living Bolsheviks far outweighed those of the dead.
His successors, shortly to be preoccupied with the reptilian power struggle that ended with Stalin’s fateful emergence, deemed Lenin’s corpse a potentially valuable marketing tool, an icon worthy of preservation by means of a miraculous ad hoc method of hitherto unknown embalming as soon to be put on display in a modernistic mausoleum by the Kremlin wall, facing Red Square.
Generations of Soviet citizens subsequently made a quasi-religious pilgrimage to view Lenin, and since the collapse of the USSR in 1992 this rite of passage has continued to be an option for new-age Russians, if not to its previous level of enforced devotion and decorum.
Visiting westerners irreverently referred to Lenin’s mausoleum as the Red Square Wax Museum, prompting our roving band of “students” to join the lengthy queue one day in July, 1989, enduring the humorless instructions of the mausoleum’s many uniformed handlers (no cameras, no gum, no tank tops or gym shorts, and absolutely no fun) in order to catch the briefest of glimpses at Communism’s official mummy.
Predictably, the comrade appeared waxen.
But near the mausoleum in a garden-like setting with the Kremlin wall again serving as backdrop was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, complete with an eternal flame and the names of Soviet “hero cities,” as dedicated to the millions of citizens, soldiers as well as civilians, who died in World War II.
It was and remains dignified and respectful, a very different and more honest pilgrimage. Irrespective of one’s views about Lenin, Stalin and communism, the USSR absorbed the heaviest share of punishment on the way to whipping the Nazis, making it all the more sad and infuriating to watch today as tsarist wannabe Vladimir Putin brutally inverts this lesson in the Ukraine.
All in all, Moscow in 1989 was an amazing place to visit, especially when residing in a genuine neighborhood as opposed to a sterile hotel. In that year Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet system didn’t yet seem completely improbable, although optimism probably...Read more
