RUSSIA: Kremlin Waxworks

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Among morticians, the mummification of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin has always been something of a mystery. By the time Soviet Embalmers Zbarsky and Vorobyev got to work, the body of the Russian revolutionary leader (who died in 1924) was already a decaying cadaver with brain missing and arteries cut, the result of an autopsy performed to prove that he had not been poisoned by Stalin. But Zbarsky and Vorobyev, employing secret methods, restored the corpse so that in the next 15 years millions of faithful Communists were able to file reverently past Lenin's body as it lay under a glass tent in a red granite mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square. More detached visitors noted a progressive wasting in the skillful job done by Zbarsky and Vorobyev.

In October 1941, as the Germans besieged Moscow, the mausoleum was closed and Lenin's body moved. On view again at war's end, Lenin appeared to have undergone a change for the better, causing Observer B. Krinitsky to exclaim: "Lenin looks much the same as many of us remember him." The reason for this startling rejuvenation, was suggested last week by Budu Svanidze, 57-year-old nephew of Stalin's first wife Katerina. Svanidze, who recently bolted a Soviet diplomatic job to marry a Hungarian girl, has written a book about life with Stalin, which France's Opera Mundi is serializing.

At a dinner party in the Kremlin's underground shelters early in 1942, says Nephew Svanidze, Stalin was told that Lenin's body, since its removal, was deteriorating rapidly. Stalin expressed fears that if Lenin's body became completely decomposed the Russian people might take it as a bad omen: "If we find it is impossible to preserve the body, we'll have to replace it by an artificial figure. It must be perfectly done." Says Svanidze: "I learned afterward that the body of Lenin had been replaced by a substitute made at Kazan," and the decomposing body secretly cremated. The body that hundreds of the faithful now patiently queue to see, says Author Svanidze, is a fake.