Lenin's Body Improves with Age | Hacker News Reader

Lenin's Body Improves with Age

scientificamerican.com

74 pointslermontov71 comments

I'm still amazed that this incredibly ghoulish display survived the fall of Communism all the way to this day.

Lenin was genuine. He did things out of perceived neccesity that many are critical of in hindsight, but few historians would argue Lenin wasn't actively trying to improve the lives of men. Many around the world have much respect for the man. This is a way that people honor him. The only reason to seriously object would be if it somehow went against his wishes.

It's hard to imagine, given your characterization of him, that Lenin would support this at all.

I think people who wish to honor the dead will do so regardless of whether there is a mummy or memory to honor. I think the preservation and display of Lenin, at the time, was a political stunt for political goals. I think they continue to do it today because for everyone involved, it's just something they've always done. There's no real purpose for it at this point.

I'd imagine it helps with tourism, money is a good motivator

It is kept around because of older folks who pine for the good old days of which it is a symbol. It'll take another 20-30 years until those folks are no more and the body will probably be buried.

Lenin specifically requested no memorials to him. However the needs of the state superseded the wants of the individual, in the end (with a dose of broad over simplification), its what sunk soviet style communism in eastern europe.

In 1921, Lenin had his soldiers steal nearly all the grain produced on peasant farms, then distributed it amongst his soldiers and cronies while five million people died of starvation: https://www.google.com/search?q=soviet+famine+of+1921&source...

When America donated enough grain to relieve the famine, Lenin deliberately prevented it from reaching the starving rural peasants.

Lenin, by the way, purchased no fewer than nine Rolls-Royce cars during his brief reign.

I'll give you that he was genuine. So was Hitler.

all wealth including land, industry and business was confiscated

Right. No one rich, well off, or even well fed except him. Sounds genuinely like all absolute dictators ever. Leaders around the world respect a glorified, scrubbed version of an idealistic man, not the real Lenin.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin

Downvoted. Gonna take that as a compliment.

So was Sir Winston Churchill, by whose policy 10 mln Bengali people died from starvation. I see no difference between one greedy self-important politician and another. Its a pity we are defenseless in front of them.

There is good information that the true scope of the famine didn't really reach London until after the 1943 harvest came in, and by then the famine was easing.

There is a difference when one is intentional and the other is due to unreliable information. Yes, the results are the same (starvation), but it matters how it happened.

It's also interesting that in soviet Russia it was the urban disaffected population who supported the revolution, while the farmers and peasants did not. Lenin at first tried to get them to cooperate (volunteer) in the collectivization programme, but farmers wanted none of that, they preferred selling their grain and produce on the market to urbanites.

Finally, desperate, Lenin gave orders, contradicting his advisors who told him it would result in poor production and starvation, went ahead and forced collectivization. This resulted in famine, as farmers forced to hand over their production, didn't have an incentive to produce.

It seems as though this was a murky situation that administrators/provincial governments did not understand was happening at the time (much less a central government back in London!)

Which would make it very different from the other famines being mentioned here.

(Also, according to Wikipedia the figures you cite seem to be a multiple of current estimates).

It's not like the British Empire didn't have any experience of dealing with famine in the colonies, though. In the previous century a quarter of the Irish population died in a famine and another quarter or so fled to the US.

It's not that I have anything against Churchill, but it's easy to come up with excuses for politicians or historical figures one would like to support while assuming both omniscience and ill-will of the others.

And 25m Indians in the late 19th C. The British had turned most Indian arable land over to cotton. The British food producing arable land had been turned over to wool. The market for Indian cotton collapsed when the superior American production recovered from the Civil War. The El Nino drought wiped out the remaining food production and what grain was produced was being exported back to the UK. They guarded from starving Indians with soldiers.

The same weather system flooded China, flood defenses had been neglected while the Chinese were fighting off European colonists. Another 25m starved.

"Churchill's only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about people perishing in the famine was to ask why Gandhi hadn't died yet. "

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992...

Oh yeah, and killing every second male in Ireland by Lord-Protector Cromwell is also grossly exaggerated.

You imply that Lenin caused the famine, that's a stretch, a fatal one. I'll accept fully that war communism made an existing food situation worse, but no man controls the weather.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921

I think they are referring to the famine the soviets caused in Ukraine[1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Except Lenin was long dead by then.

"no man controls the weather"

Men in power control the resource allocation and the extent at which actions in their political program would consume the known resources. Famine was not only the result of the weather alone.

> I'll give you that he was genuine. So was Hitler.

I would say Lenin was more comparable to Robespierre than Hitler. There is no doubt they were all ruthless mass murderers, but for different reasons.

I think they confirmed Lenin bought one Rolls-Royce? There was an embargo in effect, and no Industrialized nation would sell to the Communist. Britian caved, and let Rolls-Royce sell Lenin air plane engines. They Sweetened the deal by selling him a Rolls at a 15% discount. Maybe he had more? It was a horrid time. I have found conflicting information on Lenin. I don't think there were too many historians(especially American) who weren't writting a narrative condemning anything remotely related to communism?

I know communism has not worked, but sometime's I wonder, "Do I need three automobiles, or more water/food than my family needs?"

Do I have a right to more inorganic and organometallic compounds, or carbon atoms just because our current system says I can--if I obtained them legally? I just don't know. Would I be a willing participant in order to find out--no. What I'm trying to say is I just don't feel the ideas of communism are evil. I still can't even talk about it because of the McCarthy era.(No, I'm not that old. The fear of anything different than Capitalism was just drilled into me as a kid.)

Autoevolution has some info and pictures on the Rolls, including one he had converted into a sort of snowmobile:

http://www.autoevolution.com/news/dictators-favorite-rides-1...

Indeed, Lenin however was an absolutist, and absolutists rarely come to a long term solution.

> He did things out of perceived neccesity that many are critical of in hindsight, but few historians would argue Lenin wasn't actively trying to improve the lives of men.

I bet most (all?) tyrants genuinely believe they are doing the right thing. Murderers in prison mostly believe their crimes were justified.

I know this buzzfeed generation prefers 'top fives' and '20 mosts', but if you look at the history of Russia from ~1224 to now, it is hard to not think that Stalin has the top score solely because of technology, not brutality. if killing loads of people for vague reasons were in the olympics, russia would always win.

I read somewhere Mao screwed his nation pretty badly, topping some chart way above hitler and stalin (something around 60 million?)

Maybe a better way of looking at it would be in terms of percentage of potential victims (in this case, Genghis Khan should be pretty high).

I was talking about the intra-national/regional competition.

The only reason to seriously object would be if it somehow went against his wishes.

It did go against his wishes.

"but few historians would argue Lenin wasn't actively trying to improve the lives of men."

So was Hitler. He wanted to improve the lives of Aryan Germans (at the expense of everyone that was not, like Polish, or Jews).

Lenin remains the biggest killer of nuns and religious people of the wold ever. He had a real problem with people deciding on their own not to follow him, so he killed a big part or Russian society.

While he did not dirty his hands directly, he gave the dirty orders that other people would follow. The dirty jobs pal of Lenin was called Stalin. Lenin wanted money, let's make Stalin rob a bank, Lenin wanted to remove someone, let's call Stalin again.

Of course, If you lie down with dogs, you'll wake up with fleas. Lenin was probably poisoned by Stalin, and the rest is History.

This sums my own thoughts in the matter:

"If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/23/message...

Lenin, Stalin are huge figures in Russia history. Many men worships them. They are generally not considered like evil in Russia. Lenin made communism under which USSR became the most powerful empire in the world and Stalin won second world war.

PS I'm not exactly agree to above statements. History is complex thing. But many men I know think the way I described.

What do they think about the men they killed? Especially Stalin.

History is always written by the victors. What does the western world think of colonisation, wars etc?

But Stalin lost (historically speaking). His successors spent a lot of time erasing his legacy.

And at least in Europe, our colonial past is usually not seen as something to be proud of, apart from the nationalist groups (which is par for the course, it's difficult to be a nationalist without a strong ability for cherry-picking historical facts).

Even in Western Europe, while Stalin is overall portrayed in a negative light, he's still given quite a lot of positive portrayal in the context of World War II. It's not surprising that there are still people that see him in a more positive light in a country where several generations grew up in the shadow of a massive propaganda operation setting him up as a hero.

As for the European colonial past, I think that depends on where you are. In Britain at least it's not that unusual to notice signs of people that miss at least the idea of the British Empire. A lot of British culture is tied indirectly to it through an admiration for the stereotype of the British military forces that held the empire together, and a fascination with the ex-colonies. As well as the Commonwealth, of course, which is basically a re-packaged, politically correct way of holding on to some of the last vestiges of the empire.

Interesting. I would not have thought there would be so many nostalgics of the UK's colonial empire. In France, the "nostalgic" faction are the royalists, and they are an extremely small minority that nobody takes seriously.

I don't think many people wants it back. But many people do appear to look at the empire as a proud part of British history.

With respect to the comparison with France, consider that France has been a republic far longer than Britain has been without at least the trappings of an empire, and the empire had a sort of "soft landing" with a gradual loss of territories, and with most of the colonies retaining special relationships with Britain in the form of the Commonwealth, and with many of them retaining the Queen as their head of state.

It wasn't until 1981 that Britain lost its last colony (a few remaining overseas holdings remained as British Dependent Territories, now British Overseas Territories), and as recently as 1982, Britain defended one of its last vestiges of the Empire militarily (the Falklands War).

But at the same time, Britain had for decades by then pursued a policy of voluntary decolonisation on relatively friendly terms (with a few notable exceptions, like Kenya and Zimbabwe) - explicitly with the aim of trying to avoid situations like what France ran into with e.g. Algeria (or anything like Britains own drawn out conflict in India).

So really, a large proportion of the British adult population still at least has some vague memory of Britain still having an empire in their childhood or youth - albeit for most people their memory will be of one that had been in serious decline for a long time. Furthermore, most of them if they are aware of the decolonisation will have memories of a Britain that had abandoned any idea of holding on to its colonies with force and where decolonisation was largely orderly and reasonably "friendly" and where Britain in most cases where it did not happen peacefully could be reasonably construed as having acted properly (e.g. in Zimbabwe, it was the white minority local population, not Britain, that started the long running conflict)

If most adults in France could personally remember the last monarch, I suspect they royalists would still have more support there too. Similarly I expect the British Empire will fade rapidly as fewer people personally remembers it.

>Even in Western Europe, while Stalin is overall portrayed in a negative light, he's still given quite a lot of positive portrayal in the context of World War II.

Yeah, by uneducated people who don't know, the WW II was started by 3rd Reich, CCCP and Slovakia.

And yet at the same time even many of us without nationalist inclinations in the UK are extremely proud of outspoken arch-colonialist Churchill for his role in defeating Hitler, to the point where his less fashionable opinions and military blunders are largely glossed over. Stalin fandom[1] centres on his role in Soviet military successes in the same war, and rebuilding a destroyed nation afterwards. The regime that exposed his excesses and carried out a program of "de-Stalinisation" is long gone and perhaps not entirely trusted because of its own flaws, his victims are long dead, and the last thing the Putin administration want to discourage is nostalgic admiration for leaders' strength in standing up to Europe.

[1]at least Russian Soviet fandom. I'm a bit more perplexed when I see his face alongside Marx and Lenin on some of the more hard-left trade unionists' May Day placards over here...

> And yet at the same time even many of us without nationalist inclinations in the UK are extremely proud of outspoken arch-colonialist Churchill for his role in defeating Hitler, to the point where his less fashionable opinions and military blunders are largely glossed over.

That's a bit different, isn't it? I don't know how it is in the UK, but outside of it, it's not his pro-colonial views which are admired, but his charisma and obstination. The regime that exposed his excesses and carried out a program of "de-Stalinisation" is long gone and perhaps not entirely trusted because of its own flaws, his victims are long dead, and the last thing the Putin administration want to discourage is nostalgic admiration for leaders' strength in standing up to Europe.

That's a fair point. I would be curious to read the parts of the current Russian curriculum dealing with him.

> I'm a bit more perplexed when I see his face alongside Marx and Lenin on some of the more hard-left trade unionists' May Day placards over here...

Yeah, it's not like the USSR was exactly a big promoter of trade unions on its own soil...

> That's a bit different, isn't it? I don't know how it is in the UK, but outside of it, it's not his pro-colonial views which are admired, but his charisma and obstination.

Isn't that fundamentally similar to admiring Stalin for being strong enough to defeat Hitler rather than his penchant for purges, gulags and strategically-useful famines? Or indeed crediting JFK as the media-friendly darling of the civil rights movement rather than one of the key antagonists in the escalation of a war which may have cost 10% of Vietnam's population.

I'm not suggesting that Churchill or even JFK were remotely close to being a bad a human being as Stalin, but the tendency for history's lens to be very selective about what it focuses on isn't exactly something unique to Russia.

They are not proud of it, but they generally emphasize on his achievments.

He is in good company. There is not much communism left in China, but Mao is still embalmed in his mausoleum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Mao_Zedong

Not much communism? Seems to me that the media plus almost every bank plus every square inch of land being entirely state-owned is quite a lot.

Just because the state owns lots of stuff does not mean the state is being communist. State capitalism is also a thing.

As far as enterprise goes, after finding out that keeping everything in house was not working, nearly all state enterprises were incorporated and the government mostly got out of the running of the businesses, while still holding onto a majority of shares.

There are also privately owned enterprises, which first equaled the number of people in employment in the public sector in 2001, and has been growing fast since, with China today having about the same balance of private sector to public sector jobs as Alaska.

Also, the state does not own all the land, for the past ten years private land ownership and property rights have been established in law, hence the nail houses - http://www.danwei.org/bbs/property_rights_the_coolest_na.php

Communism is about public ownership of the means of production. Given that the Chinese state is pretty much an extension of the party elite, state ownership in China does not have much, if anything, to do with public ownership.

Is the working class controlling these things? No. Has class struggle been eradicated? No. So it's not communism.

(Arguably at least in a marxist sense the very existence of a state wielding political power is incompatible with communism, but fundamentally the one key definition is that communism is a society without class differences - one would be hard pressed to argue that is the case in China)

There'd be a better basis for arguing it's socialism of some form, but state ownership does not automatically mean socialism either, nor does socialism require state ownership (but it also does not preclude it).

Similarly Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam) is in a mausoleum, modelled after Lenin's infact. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh#Death

Look at it from another perspective: it is a tourist attraction, that may bring some money to Moscow, just like mummies in the British museum.

Legacy of communism can and must be commercialized in all possible ways: Soviet Union produced amazing quantity of artifacts, cultural objects and scientific data that is possibly yet to be rediscovered and re-thought, just like the ideas used by PreVu mentioned in the article.

In case you were as curious as I was to see a picture of Lenin's body: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01809/Vlad_18094...

I've seen it in person. Rather than being ghoulish, it's thought-provoking - it's odd to see an actual historical figure in the flesh, if not the spirit.

It seems like a bit of a Ship of Theseus. Even at this point I wonder how much of what you see of his face can be said to be 'original'. But still people visit, as if Lenin is still there.

I wouldn't be surprised if nothing you can see on the exhibit is "original". First, they clearly admit in the article that they focus "on preserving the body's physical form—its look, shape, weight, color, limb flexibility and suppleness—but not necessarily its original biological matter. After 145 years, it's quite possible that everything was substituted. Second, Russia has a long tradition of creating a PR-pumped image of healthy, almost immortal leaders. That could be a natural part of such cult practices.

Lenin died 1924, he was born 145 years ago.

>Second, Russia has a long tradition of creating a PR-pumped image of healthy, almost immortal leaders.

Well, North Korea probably yes. But I haven't noticed such tradition in Russia.

Perhaps the immortality part was an exaggeration, but I was thinking about the way the Kremlin avoids admitting any health problems of the leaders. That happened in case of Yeltsin and allegedly in case of Putin's absence in March this year. Recently there was an interesting article about this "health PR" dating the tradition back to the USSR era, but I can't find it right now.

This is hardly unique to Russia - after all, FDR avoided being photographed from the waist down and wore special braces when standing and Kennedy had many secret health problems. I think this is more a fact of projecting an image of power in any society.

People still go there to visit because it still is as much Lenin you can get!

If they could get him just fit enough to ride a horse shirtless, he could run against Putin ;)

He reportedly wanted a private funeral and to be buried next to his mother.

I do wonder how they keep him from spinning.

Wow theres a german article on a swiss site called "20 minutes" that is a complete rip of this article, it came out yesterday and is even titled the same. Unbelievably bold plagiarism.

complete non sequitur but in the same vein (boosh) if you are into weird body stuff check out this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hunter_%28surgeon%29

I wonder what their endgame is here. Seems like Sisyphus has met his match.

> I wonder what their endgame is here

MechaLenin.

Hey, it worked for Nixon and they only had his head in a jar, not the whole body.

No need to worry, if that happens we will just reactivate Jeremy Bentham.

I think they're hoping he'll just wake up and walk away eventually.

Simpsons did it. https://vimeo.com/87962641

Reminds me to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNuy12-cxPw

Lenin is basically a love doll.

"Now, I am become love doll, the destroyer of men's opression" - Vladimir Lenin, 2015

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