The Scaffolding of Sovereignty by Ben-Dor Benite Zvi;Geroulanos Stefanos;Jerr Nicole;

Author:Ben-Dor Benite, Zvi;Geroulanos, Stefanos;Jerr, Nicole;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

NINE

Re-touching the Sovereign

Biochemistry of Perpetual Leninism

ALEXEI YURCHAK

Original And Fake

What kind of a body is lying in Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow (figure 9.1)? Is it the real body of Lenin, a wax figurine, or an impostor? Rumors about its fake nature have circulated for over ninety years. They started even before Lenin’s death, in the early 1920s, when he fell seriously ill and disappeared from public view. One rumor claimed that Lenin had already died and an imposter played his role.1 In the first days after Lenin’s death in January 1924, his body lay in state in the House of the Unions in Moscow, where enormous crowds gathered to bid farewell to the leader. For some, the experience of an endless line slowly filing past Lenin’s body evoked the crowds that had gathered at the Panopticon Museum in St. Petersburg a few years previously to see a wax effigy of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra in a glass sarcophagus. In a reenactment of Cleopatra’s death, every few minutes a snake slithered out and bit her exposed breast. Poet Alexander Blok wrote about being one of the hankering gawkers who “has come to glimpse the great profile, to see the waxworks advertised.”2 In January 1924, paying respects to Lenin, poet Vera Inber imitated the rhythm and imagery of Blok’s stanza in her poem “Five Nights and Days,” writing that she “has come to glimpse the pale profile, the medal red upon his chest.”3 The dim hall, Lenin’s lit-up corpse, thousands of eyes fixated on his profile—it all reminded her of Cleopatra’s wax model.4

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