• Simon Sebag Montefiori: The difference between Stalin and Lenin

If there is no way to bury Lenin, how about selling him? The idea has been put on the table by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the eternal leader of the ultra-nationalist LDPR party, the third largest formation in the Russian parliament . Every year, despite his invective to close the mausoleum, some 450,000 people flock to see the body of the legendary Bolshevik leader, who died in 1924 at his residence in Gorki, outside Moscow.

The idea of ​​making the most famous tenant of the Red Square profitable began to roll when in France the businessman Stéphane Distinguin proposed to sell the famous painting of the Mona Lisa for 50,000 million euros to cover the financial hole that the Covid-19 is causing to the country . "Here we could sell Lenin's mummy. There are buyers: China, Vietnam or some other kind of communist [country] . And Lenin, in good condition, was mummified just 96 years ago," Zhirnovsky, a controversial politician, tweeted. that the same launches a tirade against viagra that calls the "liberal" candidate for the presidential elections "fox". "With the sale of the mummy, the budget can get a lot of money," said the ultra-nationalist leader.

Lenin continues to sell many books , but his lustrous appearance also has a good clientele in some Asian countries. Vietnam contacted specialists who care for Lenin's mummified body last year to help them curb the external deterioration of Ho Chi Minh , their leader embalmed with Soviet aid in 1969. Several countries in the world, including China, Korea of the North and Vietnam, have embalmed their founding leaders thanks to the method of the Lenin Laboratory of the Soviet Union. During these years they have done almost as good a job as Leonardo da Vinci's with the Mona Lisa. But there is currently no news of potential buyers allowing Russian anti-communists to break free of the Bolshevik halo that still presides over Red Square.

Keeping Lenin presentable costs € 173,000 a year, the Russian government revealed in 2016. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the debate about what to do with his body has been reopened several times.

Veteran Russian journalist and member of the Lenin Mausoleum Fund, Yury Izyumov, is not prepared to evict. He believes that Lenin "was a genius who changed the course of world history . " In addition to political demand, there is a point of superstition on the side that is bidding to leave Lenin in his place. Izyumov recalls that World War II began "shortly after our scientists opened the tomb of Tamerlane in 1941," a leading Turkish-Mongol military leader who conquered Central Asia until the early 15th century.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has argued against hiding Lenin, "at least as long as we have among us many people whose experiences are still linked in some way to the achievements of the Soviet period." According to a survey released in 2017 on the occasion of the centenary of the revolution, two-thirds of Russians believe that it is time to bury Lenin's body . But his brain will not rest underground, as it was removed and cut into 300 slices for researchers to determine "the origin of his genius . "

THE 'LENIN RECIPE'

The country is divided. The Communists believe that Lenin remains more current than ever. It is even a recipe against coronavirus. Or at least an inspiration. The country has been in the midst of gas since March, leaving many Russians pending state subsidies and government decisions: first the movement restrictions and now their relief, the creation of new hospitals as a milestone of strength testing and testing of a vaccine as necessary for victory. If Lenin knew how to do anything, it was to mobilize the country. And now the role of the State shines again. As Russian journalist Anna Nemtsova writes, "The term mobilization is a word that all Russians know well after almost a century of Soviet propaganda, an era that glorified the massive response to industrial and security challenges."

Last March, a delegation from the Russian Communist Party decided to violate the rules of confinement that prevailed in Moscow and to go to Lenin's mausoleum on Red Square to commemorate the Bolshevik leader's 150th birthday. "To end the current crisis and defeat the coronavirus, let us learn from Lenin's advice, and all will be well," said Gennady Ziuganov, leader of the hereditary formation of the CPSU.

Lenin's image has long since lost integers as a result of the opening of archives that occurred in the years before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today it is well known that Lenin has hundreds of thousands of people killed, tortured, or exiled. Their backs. But his faithful can argue that he knew how to stand up to the epidemics of cholera and dysentery, which shook the country just as the Bolsheviks came to power. The so-called Spanish flu killed 3% of the population between 1918 and 1919, according to historian Boris Egorov.

Pandemics also hit Lenin's environment. The prominent Bolshevik Inessa Armand was intimate with the revolutionary leader and his wife, although her views on free love clashed with Lenin's puritanism. Armand died of cholera in 1920, in part from following Lenin's instructions and confining himself to a dangerous area. The Bolshevik leader and his partner took care of their daughter, Inna Armand.

Little by little, between purges and expropriations, the first health system in the country was built while the USSR was being shaped. An epidemiological service was created that was deployed wherever outbreaks arose. The tsar had never known to what extent Russian villages were fertile ground for pandemics: an unhealthy world "of icons and cockroaches," said revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Something similar was happening in the city. As Philipp Bloom writes in Years of Vertigo , at the turn of the century workers lived in dormitory neighborhoods in Moscow and St. Petersburg, many in a room without running water or sanitation, and "there were entire neighborhoods completely inundated by a combination of industrial waste and human . " In 1909 a cholera epidemic claimed 30,000 victims in Saint Petersburg.

Lenin believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat. In violence as midwife of the revolutionary transformation. Also in hierarchy, discipline and centralism. His favorite state was the alarm state. Now COVID-19 has left in the air the idea that a more totalitarian approach , or at least a country more closed to the outside, would be more effective in curbing viruses that come from abroad. That is why in April, in the worst of the pandemic, the Communist Party deputies in the Saratov regional parliament hung without permission a banner with the portrait of Lenin that said: "What is life like to you under capitalism?" . Meanwhile, the Russian e-Army, which was the muscle of the Soviet system, is used these days as a test bed for future vaccines.

For many citizens, the open and interconnected world has turned out not to be a panacea for progress. And the idea of ​​control over the citizen - the one who infects and incidentally the one who does not - has a justification again. Everyday life has been disrupted, but in Russia that is a historical constant. A cyclical adversity in the collective . And a fact with personal precedents. Lenin was, after all, one of the first and most famous leaders forced to telework. First, before the revolution, forced by deportations (three years in Siberia) and almost uninterrupted exile for 17 years. And in the last bars of his life, when he retired to his farm to try to regain health between severe headaches and insomnia. Until a stroke knocked him out in March (a month before he died) "he didn't stop reading the Pravda every day and had a hotline installed with the Kremlin," recalls historian Robert Service. His political activity begins and ends compulsively writing letters and avidly reading the news about what is happening out there. Trying to follow a reality with which, after confinement, we all try to reconnect.

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