Posted on 05/02/2015 1:08:04 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
Russian scientists have developed experimental embalming methods to maintain the look, feel and flexibility of the Soviet Union's founder’s body, which is 145 years old today.
For thousands of years humans have used embalming methods to preserve dead bodies. But nothing compares with Russia's 90-year-old experiment to preserve the body of Vladimir Lenin, communist revolutionary and founder of the Soviet Union. Generations of Russian scientists have spent almost a century fine-tuning preservation techniques that have maintained the look, feel and flexibility of Lenin's body. This year Russian officials closed the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square so that scientists could prepare the body for public display again in time for the Soviet leader's 145th birthday anniversary today.
The job of maintaining Lenin's corpse belongs to an institute known in post-Soviet times as the Center for Scientific Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies in Moscow. A core group of five to six anatomists, biochemists and surgeons, known as the "Mausoleum group," have primary responsibility for maintaining Lenin's remains. (They also help maintain the preserved bodies of three other national leaders: the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and the North Korean father–son duo of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, respectively.) The Russian methods focus on preserving the body's physical form—its look, shape, weight, color, limb flexibility and suppleness—but not necessarily its original biological matter. In the process they have created a "quasibiological" science that differs from other embalming methods. "They have to substitute occasional parts of skin and flesh with plastics and other materials, so in terms of the original biological matter the body is less and less of what it used to be," says Alexei Yurchak, professor of social anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
Communism was to become a religion. And Lenin, peace be upon him, was its prophet
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