A team of scientists has kept one corpse lifelike for over a century
A team of scientists has kept one body looking alive for a century. The cost, and the secrecy behind it, might surprise you.
Image: Vladamir Lenin's body has been preserved for the past century | stock.adobe.com
He lies behind glass, hands resting on his thighs, moustache neatly trimmed, dressed in a dark suit.
At first glance, you might think this is a waxwork. But it isn’t. It’s the real body of one of history’s most divisive political figures.
And more than a hundred years since his death, he looks essentially the same as he did in life. It’s all due to a team of scientists who work around the clock to painstakingly preserve his body.
The plan nobody thought would last this long
When Vladimir Lenin died at just 53 in January 1924, there was never a plan to preserve him for a century. The original autopsy nearly ruined any chance of it. The pathologist who examined the body cut the major arteries, not realising anyone intended to embalm it, a move that would later complicate everything that followed.
For a few weeks, the plan was to freeze him. Officials even sourced specialist refrigeration equipment from Germany. Then two chemists proposed something different: a chemical process that could keep his skin, muscle and tissue looking alive rather than simply stopping decay. It had never been attempted at this scale before. It worked well enough that within months, his body was put on public display in a purpose-built mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow, to a reaction of stunned approval.
What began as a way to let mourners file past the coffin for a few weeks became something nobody had a plan for once it succeeded: a body that now had to be kept this way, indefinitely.
The secret work that never really stops
A small team, known informally as the Lenin Lab, still visits every few days to check on him. Roughly every 18 months, he is taken down to a lab beneath the viewing room for a full re-embalming.
Anyone can visit the mausoleum for free. But not everything you see is original.
His organs were removed decades ago. His brain went to a Soviet institute set up specifically to study it, and pieces of it are still kept at a research centre in Moscow today. Where skin and tissue have degraded beyond saving, scientists have replaced them.
The technique proved so effective that the same lab was later trusted with other bodies, including Ho Chi Minh, and for a period, Stalin himself lay in the same mausoleum.
The embalmment process is a mystery, and has always been a closely guarded state secret. Even specialists who were sent abroad to maintain other leaders' remains were often told only what they strictly needed to know.
A high cost, and an uncertain future
Unsurprisingly, the cost of keeping a 102-year-old body embalmed doesn’t come cheap. The last time the Russian government made the figure public in 2016, it revealed that keeping Lenin in this state costs around 13 million roubles (about £140,000) a year, paid from the federal budget.
That number alone is enough to divide opinion as to whether it’s actually worth it. Funding was pulled in 1991, and the mausoleum survived only on donations for years before the state stepped back in. But a poll of thousands of Russians found the majority now want him properly buried. Lenin’s widow wanted it, too. The Kremlin has never agreed to it.
Soon, they may be forced to. The scientists who understand this work are ageing, and few young researchers want to take their place. Scientists believe the body could be preserved for centuries more, if someone keeps doing the work. Whether anyone is actually prepared to is far less certain.
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