Communist Proteins: Lenin's Body and the Origin of Life

• In Event: Infrastructures, Maintenance and Care - II

Abstract

Lenin, the leader of the Russian revolution died in 1924. His body was preserved and displayed in the Mausoleum in Moscow. The project of maintaining Lenin’s body, now in its 95th year, involves multiple treatments and procedures to which Lenin’s body has been continuously subjected and that cannot stop, even for a day. Some of these treatments are repeated daily, some monthly, and the most complex procedures of full re-embalming and re-sculpting are repeated every year and a half. This ongoing intervention by biochemists, anatomists, technicians and sculptors developed in the context of unique political imaginaries of the communist project. The task of this work is to reproduce the form, suppleness, and material “presence” of Lenin’s body, to never let it decline and deteriorate -- to keep it in a state of “suspended animation,” as if this body were emergent, future-oriented and living. Even today Lenin’s body remains flexible and whole, its skin is elastic, and its muscle tissues and bone structures are intact. Professor Lopukhin, a leading scientist of the Lenin Lab, calls this body a “living sculpture” to distinguish it from a decomposing corpse or a stiff mummy. My presentation will discuss how a complex infrastructure of scientific teams, procedures, materials and equipment, and of political commissions and communist party supervisors, created a body that has no precedent in history. The analysis is based on my ethnographic research and interviews in the Lenin Lab in Moscow.

Author

• Alexei Yurchak, University of California Berkeley