Set In Stone: How Lenin's Mausoleum Was Built And Rebuilt, 100 Years Ago

Lenin’s mausoleum (right) on Red Square in October 1962.

Among the spires of the Kremlin and the candy-colored domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, Lenin’s mausoleum has been a landmark of central Moscow for 100 years. But the site once looked very different.
 

Bolsheviks at the opening to a memorial relief on the Kremlin walls.

In the years immediately following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the site of today’s mausoleum hosted this bas-relief that commemorated communists who were killed during the 1917 revolution and buried in mass graves at the base of the Kremlin walls. In this November 1918 photo, Vladimir Lenin (center left, touching cap) is standing on almost the exact spot where his embalmed corpse would be placed a few years later.


 

The statue of a worker on Red Square photographed in the 1920s. 

In 1922, this plaster monument of a generic worker was emplaced a few meters south of where Lenin’s Mausoleum would soon be built.
 

Senior Bolsheviks, including Feliks Dzerzhinsky (standing third from left) -- the notorious founder of the Soviet secret police who organized many of the mass killings carried out by the Bolsheviks -- view the body of Lenin in late January 1924.

After Lenin’s death, debate had broken out over what to do with his body. Josef Stalin pushed to have the corpse embalmed for public display, saying the preservation would “not contradict old Russian customs.” Leon Trotsky, another Bolshevik leader, recoiled at the idea of making a saint-like relic from a godless revolutionary. Preserving the corpse for public veneration would have “nothing in common with the science of Marxism,” he protested. 

The first mausoleum for Vladimir Lenin’s corpse, photographed probably in late January 1923.

The day after Lenin died, architect Aleksei Shchusev was summoned to the Kremlin and ordered to build a monumental structure to house the body in time for the Soviet founder’s funeral -- in just three days’ time. The wooden monument was completed on schedule and thousands of Soviet citizens began filing in to view the body.
 

Bolshevik leaders, including Josef Stalin (third from right, looking toward the camera), on the viewing platform of the second mausoleum in 1926. 

In March 1924, this more substantial wooden mausoleum was built by Shchusev. Several issues had been encountered with the first, smaller design, including warmth generated from the constant flow of mourners that risked rotting Lenin’s remains.

One of around 100 draft plans for a mausoleum to Lenin that were submitted in 1925.

In January 1925, a contest was held for the design of a permanent mausoleum to hold Lenin’s embalmed body. 

 

Another draft mausoleum plan showing how Red Square could have looked. 

The foundations of Lenin’s mausoleum being built in the late 1920s.

Architect Aleksei Shchusev submitted a sketch for a red and black granite mausoleum echoing his two earlier wooden constructions that eventually won. The black granite was to represent "mourning," while the chunky stepped design suggested the idea that “Lenin died, but his work lives on,” he later explained. 

 

Visitors enter what had become the Lenin and Stalin mausoleum, in August 1957.

After Josef Stalin’s death in 1953, his corpse was embalmed and put on display next to Lenin’s. The mausoleum was adapted to display both Soviet dictators' names above the entrance.
 

The discarded granite block from the Lenin and Stalin mausoleum in its resting place near Moscow in 1993.

In 1961, amid “de-Stalinization” in the Soviet Union, the ethnic Georgian’s body was removed from the mausoleum and buried alongside the walls of the Kremlin.

 

A parade on Red Square in 1970. Soviet leaders can be seen lined up along the viewing platform of the mausoleum.

The mausoleum served as the symbolic core of Soviet power, and as such has been the target of scores of attacks, including a suicide bombing in 1973 that killed the bomber and a couple entering the mausoleum behind him. Lenin’s body was reportedly unharmed by the blast.

 

Lenin’s body inside the mausoleum in 1993.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mausoleum and the century-old corpse it houses have become awkward relics for Russia. The mausoleum is usually obscured during military parades, and debate over whether to finally bury the figurehead of the leftist ideology that destroyed countless innocent lives has simmered since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. 

A 2017 survey found 63 percent of respondents favored burying Lenin, while 31 percent thought his corpse should remain in the mausoleum. That majority opinion, however, appears to be moot for now. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said the body would remain where it is, "at least," he said, "while we have very many people who connect their own lives with this."