If you think that’s bad, I was once shown photographs of the laboratories where the preservation is conducted, and even worse, of the technical staff performing the preservation - I can safely assure members of the forum that I’ve seen much more of Vladimir Lenin than most people would
ever possibly want to.*
Lenin is certainly not incorrupt, nor have his remains been replaced by wax (which probably did happen to some extent in the case of Chairman Mao due to a severe technical error made by the Chinese team, who unlike the team that did Ho Chi Minh, lacked access to decades of Soviet expertise in long term preservation; many people have described the appearance of Mao as “exceeedingly waxy” and regard the speed at which visitors and Communist pilgrims are whisked through the viewing room as suspicious) but rather exists in an advanced state of chemical preservation, but one which it takes a specialized laboratory to maintain.
* This was in the context of a course I took while doing extensive research into the history of the Soviet Union for a book I was working on, before I converted to Orthodoxy but after I had become interested in the possibility, about 17 years ago, approximately; I greatly dislike the Soviet union (although I like the accomplishments of its people in terms of aircraft, spacecraft, railway systems and even the GAZ and ZIL automobiles used by higher ranking partie members and the elite members of the nomenklatura respectively, and I find it ironic that in the Soviet union the class system was so rigid compared to capitalist countries that one’s rank in the Communist Party or lack thereof determined what kind of car, or lack thereof, one would drive). Had the country been free to operate with freedom of religion in the Orthodox Church under a competent government without the evil Marxist-Leninist klepto-oligarchical system parasitically leaching off of it, for example, had the Czar not been deposed and granted a crown of martyrdom for not renouncing Christ (which would later happen under the Soviet-inspired Derg regime in Ethiopia, so that the world has no officially Christian Emperors left in power, only the presumably Shinto-Buddhist Emperor of Japan).
I am planning on writing a book about the Evil Empire, as Ronald Reagan correctly called it, and the good people who suffered therein it, which Ronald Reagan made a point of stressing by sharing jokes smuggled across the Iron Curtain. I had wanted to stress the dichotomy between the pious Orthodox people and other people of the Soviet lands and those of satellite countries of the COMECON and the ridiculous corruption of the ruling class. However I decided instead to make the point in the form of a science fiction novel depicting a future regime inspired by the Soviet Union, since getting the people who matter - the youth - interested in Kremlinology and Soviet history and countering the increasingly strident appeals of those who view the Soviet Union with rose-tinted glasses and think its a system that should be revived, who have gone from a few obscure people, such as a man I encountered in Dresden in 2003 holding a Soviet flag, handing out leaflets and wearing a beret with glasses worthy of a Politburo (I wish I’d had my picture taken with him, since he was a rare example of a true believer who had lived during the period of Communism and wanted it back, which in East Germany due to the way in which reintegration with the West was handled is a sentiment one would encounter, not just in the form of “Ostalgie” but in the form of people who actually thought that life in the DDR was better, because they had lost their job and had difficulties due to the manner in which the reform was conducted; conversely, there are many in Western Germany who are resentful about the amount of money spent on East Germany and regard the “Osties” as ungrateful; for my part I think the DDR should have been allowed to be a separate country in a cultural and customs union with the West, but with a distinct currency, which could have been devalued, as it would have allowed for the kind of economic renaissance that happened to the former Warsaw Pact countries when trade barriers were taken down to happen in the DDR, immediately, in 1990, and then once the countries had equalized, full reunion could have happened. This would have had the added benefit of providing DB and Lufthansa competitors in the form of DR and Interflug, as opposed to what actually happened in terms of dismantling DR and Interflug and in the case of the latter basically laying most people off (since the most important airport in East Germany, Tegel, was in West Berlin, and had a good ground service operation that had belonged to Pan Am, TWA, British Airways and Air France, as Lufthansa was not allowed to fly there until 1989).
en.wikipedia.org
