Moscow, Part One – Dead Lenin

I have seen Dead Lenin. I was deeply saddened by not being able to take a picture of myself with Dead Lenin. Yes, I know that’s more than a little disrespectful, but . . . I want a picture with Dead Lenin! I mean, right around the corner of Red Square I could buy Lenin T-shirts – come on now!

Incidentally, if you seriously want to pay your respects to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, I do not recommend the Lenin Mausoleum as the place to do so. You walk through, and keep moving. If you don’t keep moving, the young soldier in his incredibly awesome winter uniform will shoo you on with a whistle. No, this did not happen to me, I just watched a lady you was actually there to pay her respects to Lenin – not gawk at a body that’s been on public display for eighty odd years.

I got shooed away by guards at the Lenin Mausoleum much later, after dark, taking silly photos with the girls. I don’t think they appreciate it.

Incidentally. Lenin’s looking distinctively corpish these days, but still good for his age. Although, he needs a bit more than a rose colored light to bring out the color in his cheeks. In all honesty, I’m caught between morbid amusement with the entire Lenin experience, and being quite disturbed by the preserved body.

See, I don’t like the whole decomposing thing. The idea of being decomposed and, say, mixed back in with earth, doesn’t particularly bother me. But the notion of dead bodies slowing rotting into nothing creeps me out. It’s the slowly part. I’m really bothered by embalming, lead lined caskets, steel burial vaults, etc – anything that drags out the process further. In fact, I’m very, very much in favor of cremation – not only for myself, but I would generally prefer it for bodies I was close to when they were people, not that I necessarily get a say in such matters.

I also want to know if all the church bells and liturgies in Red Square (since at least one or two churches have been reopened) hurt Lenin’s waxy ears? Further, how does Lenin feel about hanging out next to the establishment of CAPITALISTIC PRIVILEGE that is the GUM – only the biggest and priciest of the at least four mega-malls of bourgeois privilege surrounding Red Square?

As I said, caught between repulsion and morbid amusement – welcome to my mind.

In further news, when they exhumed Gogol in the 1950s, they found him curled up on his side, not laid out in a neatly Orthodox manner on his back. It is believed that Gogol was buried alive.

Imagine the story he would have written from this.

(This would be a photo of Gogol's new grave, in which he was placed while most certainly dead.)