Lenin's Embalmers

Categories: History , Science , Rediscoveries , Nonfiction

1958 was an interesting time to be born, because World War II, though long past, was still a part of everyone's collective memory, and the Cold War was really gearing up.  Most of my friends and teachers believed Hitler had been a communist, and our games of Russian Interrogation and Nazi Interrogation were identical:

Those were simpler times when children played healthy outdoor games like this rather than evil videogames.

Lenin's Embalmers is the story of Ilya Zbarsky, the son of Boris Zbarsky, one of Lenin's two main embalmers.  Ilya worked as a lab assistant and later as a chemist  on the project, and the book is a deft combination of embalming details and daily life in Soviet Russa and beyond.

Before the death of Lenin in 1924, Ilya Zbarsky's family lived alternately in comfort and squalor, at one point in an unheated single room.  His parents divorced, and Ilya lived unhappily with his father.  For example, Ilya complains, his father once insisted that he work in a room contaminated with mercury fumes despite his increasingly disturbing physical symptoms.  He was released only when another scientist intervened. 

University life in Stalin's Russia was also disappointing: The chemistry and biology departments had been dismantled, and Ilya was forced to join the College of Work Physiology.  The teaching system involved students, divided into groups of three or four, "who were supposed to study together from 8 in the morning till 2 in the afternoon."  Ilya's brigade members had had only four years of elementary school, and so Ilya had to spend most of his time teaching them algebra.

Embalming was not a new concept, but the goal with Lenin was to make the body viewable indefinitely.  Scientists contemplated whether to freeze the body or to inject it and soak it in a solution of glycerine and potassium acetate.  Two months passed, and the chemical method was chosen.  After two months, the process posed many challenges; however, the work was successful, and the scientists continually improved their techniques.  Their laboratory was probably one of the best in Russia, which helped Ilya greatly in Ilya's graduate studies--and provided lab workers with 96 proof alcohol, ordered as part of the embalming solution.

In 1941, the Zbarskys moved with Lenin's body to Siberia, where they were relatively unaffected by the War.  Their experiments improved the condition of Lenin's body even more.  Afterwards, Ilya helped loot Berlin for chemicals.  Between weekly correction of small problems with Lenin's body and an 18-month cycle of major overhauls, the laboratory embalmed other communist heads of state. 

Ilya's father believed that his Jewish family would be saved from increasingly anti-semitic purges because Stalin believed the Zbarskys' embalming techniques could not be replicated by other scientists.  However, the senior Zbarsky was imprisoned and Ilya fired from the lab and from his other prestigious positions.  Their punishment ended only with Stalin's death.

Stalin was embalmed in the same laboratory, and his body put on view next to Lenin's for eight years before being buried in the Kremlin.  After the fall of communism, the State, which had supported the laboratory, withdrew most of its funding, and the laboratory now spends most of its efforts profitably embalming Russian gangsters.  Zbarsky, who was still alive in 2004, spends a fascinating chapter scornfully describing the funerals of these nouveau-riche criminals.  He has come to believe that embalming is barbaric.

The idea of burying Lenin comes up every so often, but somehow no one seems to want to do it quite yet.

Vivid pictures, both of Lenin and of the Russian gangsters.