MOSCOW, January 17: Short on cash, the embalmers of Lenin's corpse have started looking for private clients, selling their services, patching up and preserving the bodies of rich businessmen shot dead in contract killings and accidents. Russian Interfax news agency quoted Yuri Romakov, the deputy director of the Scientific Centre of Biological Structures as saying that specialists in the institute are forced to use their skills for private clients, who pay them big amounts of money to restore the bodies of victims of contract killings, explosions and car accidents."It's often a terrible lack of funds that forces them to do this," said Romakov, who has tended the body of world proletarian leader since 1952. He said that many younger scientists have taken private orders from people in Russia to restore bodies for funeral ceremonies. In some cases, bodies are especially "spiced" for long-term preservation in private mausoleums.
In 1993, Yeltsin stopped the funding for maintaining Lenin as he was at the timeof his death in 1924. Currently, the corpse is maintained by the Lenin Mausoleum Charitable Foundation, although the Kremlin still pays for the single officer and two guards on duty inside the mausoleum as well as the contingent of about 30 that mans the tomb during public visiting hours.
The fate of Lenin's embalmed corpse has become a key battleground in the Communist-dominated state Duma's ongoing war of nerves with the Kremlin. Russian President Boris Yeltsin has reiterated on many occasions in the past months his determination to remove the corpse of the Bolshevik leader from his mausoleum at Red Square and bury it beside his mother in St Petersburg as Lenin himself was said to have requested before his death. He has even proposed that a referendum should be held to decide whether to remove Lenin from his red marble tomb.
But Communists remain adamantly opposed to Lenin's removal from the Red Square. The opposition-dominated Duma has even passed a resolution urging Kremlin to keep their hands off thegenius of the October Revolution and let him stay in his mausoleum.
It is only the money from conventional research at the Scientific Centre of Biological Structures that enables a team of 12 specialists to continue tending Lenin's corpse voluntarily.
Twice a week, members of the team visit the mausoleum to apply special reactants to the corpse. Every two years a major overhaul is also performed.
Lenin's 1.34 kg brain has been spread among 30,000 microscope slides, once studied for clues to his genius, it is now stored and ignored in a Moscow laboratory of the Institute of the Brain.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
