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 ...Read more
