vladimir ilyich ulyanov

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.
--V.I. Lenin

Last Sunday I ran into an old friend of mine who also graduated from the University of Texas but whom I only knew from study abroad in Russia during the summer of 2002. Since I basically flew straight from St. Petersburg to Raleigh, North Carolina, after the program's end in order to begin my new job, I hadn't seen him since then, and it was odd to do so in the United States, let alone in a café in Washington, D.C. I'll call him ts for my own devilish reasons--only the other members of the troika know why--and it turns out my friend ts writes a blog on modern American art for the Smithsonian and is, for those of you who keep track of such things, the only blogger on the federal payroll (Federal Diarist, I'm looking at you). I am amused by his current occupation because while in Russia, ts and I went twenty rounds over the virtue of modern art (I myself subscribing to the camp that form, line, and composition are not just quaint traditions of the unimaginative artistic mind). But now they pay him for his opinions, and I find that I have grown: this summer I finally visited a part of the Met other than the ancient wing (on my previous three visits I haven't made it past the lamassu); I lectured dogooderlawyer on the importance of appreciating Pollock and Rothko; and a trip to the new MOMA only made me stronger.

Most of all, seeing ts has made me reflect on my wonderful time in Moscow, so I thought I would share one of my favorite stories, about my visit to Lenin's mausoleum. (The "mausoleum," by the way, was named for its inventor, the fourth-century-BCE King Maussollos, who constructed the first huge, above-ground tomb for himself in Halicarnassus [modern Bodrum, Turkey], whence, incidentally, four centuries earlier Herodotus wrote his Histories. Whew, sorry. I have to fit in my classical education somewhere.) Lenin died on January 21, 1924, and within a week his body was lying in state in a wooden tomb by the Kremlin in Red Square. In October 1930, the current stone structure was completed, the decision to keep his body permanently on display having been made over his wife's express objections (Trotsky would later quip that "Lenin's body was being used against his spirit"). The man now receives visitors Tuesday through Thursday, from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm, during which time the huge expanse of Red Square is entirely closed off, save an entrance and exit to the tomb, on opposite sides of the plaza. So I dutifully skipped class one morning and joined the queue next to the State Historical Museum. After waiting about 20 minutes, I reached the soldier who was checking bags. He peered into mine and found my camera. "No, I am sorry. You cannot enter the tomb with that." Shocked (my professor, in the first of many mistakes that would later reveal him as a hopelessly inept chaperone, had assured everyone that there were no such carry-along restrictions), I began to argue. After a bit of back and forth, the armed guard motioned for me to follow him around the corner. He put his arm around my shoulder: "Devushka, I will let you in for ten American dollars." "Absolutely not," I replied immediately, and as I shrugged him off and walked away I thought, "It's my right as an honorary Russian to see Lenin for free, and by G-d I will!" (My friend arkady--the Baltimore Sun's bureau chief in Moscow--later disagreed and pointed out that bribing a soldier to get into an historical site would actually have been a quintessential Russian experience. Damn my knee-jerk righteous indignation!)

So I returned another week--this time sans camera--and passed the checkpoint easily. I was the first of what was meant to be just another group of a dozen visitors or so, the maximum allowed in the mausoleum at a time, but something caused a delay with the group behind me (maybe my professor told them, too, that they could bring their cameras). Whatever the reason, I suddenly found myself walking through Red Square all alone. By myself. The silence and space were overwhelming. A few amazed minutes of walking and looking all around me later, I was alone with the man. My eyes adjusted to the darkness. Huh. He was smaller than I had expected, and waxier, too. I moved up the stairs and leaned over slightly to get a closer look. "Devushka! Davai!" I looked up; one of the soldiers in full dress uniform jerked his head toward the exit. Lady! Get a move on! Apparently, the lack of visitors behind me mattered not; maybe he feared that a close inspection might reveal which parts of the Soviet leader are now just wax. So I reluctantly stepped outside the tomb to the space between it and the Kremlin wall, where many other Soviet celebrities are buried. I passed cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, author Maxim Gorky, and American John Reed (whose book Ten Days That Shook the World inspired Warren Beatty's 1981 epic Reds), along with a mass grave of Bolsheviks killed in the 1917 revolution and Premiers Brezhnev and Gorbachev. (Khrushchev is elsewhere, but that story will have to wait for another time!) Finally, there is Stalin's grave, easily identifiable even for those who don't read Cyrillic by the heaps of flowers that crowd the headstone. It is an unfortunate fact of history that "Uncle Joe" is generally remembered with fondness by the people he oppressed.

I highly recommend the short volume Lenin's Embalmers for more information on the industry of keeping the man looking alive.