The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

masterpiece” of design simplicity replaced a wooden mausoleum in 1930, was a site of
solemn pilgrimage and tourist curiosity for more than sixty years, under the watchful
eyes of round‐the‐clock ceremonial guards. During this time, members of a special
team of embalmers applied special reactants to the corpse, which was also given a
major chemical overhaul every two years. Located “at the very heart of Russia”, the
preserved body of Lenin enshrined in the mausoleum, was invoked by Stalinist
authorities to represent immortality and eternity, and convey a sense of permanence of
the socialist order.
After his death in 1953, the body of Stalin was placed in the mausoleum alongside
Lenin’s, but was removed to a grave alongside the Kremlin walls. There Stalin’s body
lay alongside those of other top Soviet leaders, while the ashes of dozens more lay
buried in the Kremlin walls, inside which there was also a mass grave of Bolsheviks
killed in the 1917 revolution. But it was the ‘holy relic’ of Lenin’s body that became the
main attraction of the cemetery landscape of Red Square, and it was incorporated into
Red Square’s listing by UNESCO as a protected landmark. 87 It was at the apex of a
biographic cultural landscape through which the making of socialism was equated
with the political achievements of Lenin’s life.
With the break‐up of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Stalinism in Europe since
the late 1980s and early 1990s, the biographic landscape of Lenin veneration faced
unprecedented political challenges. After showing an impressive ability to survive for
more than sixty years after Lenin’s death, the ‘cult of Lenin’ began to disintegrate.
According to Smith, “monuments and memorials to Lenin began to fall like
dominoes”. The people of Leningrad chose to restore the historical name St
Petersburg. The Lenin State Library changed its name to the Russian State Library.
While Leninist texts were not purged from the library, Lenin was reduced to just
another philosopher and “merely a ‘historical figure’ in his nation’s saga”. Gigantic
Lenin statues were toppled in Kiev, Tashkent and the Kremlin courtyard. In Tashkent,
87 Trevor J Smith, ‘The Collapse of the Lenin Personality Cult’, pp 332‐338; Chris Bryant, ‘Remains
of the Deity’, p 17.
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