Friday, October 10, 2008

The Yearly Bath of Lenin's Embalmed Body


For some very disturbing viewing: check out Charonboat's online photo show of Lenin's preserved corpse being given its yearly bath in the Moscow Mausoleum which has publicly housed it since 1924. Apparently, the formula for the bath is a mixture of formaldehyde, methanol and ethanol. Note: Not pretty.

Thanks, Kriszta, for alerting me to this.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

yes! i did not watch the video, but the photos are pretty strange. love your site! i referenced this lovely post on my new site (http://www.umich.edu/~atkolkma/kunstkammer.htm)
under a photo of lenin's deathmask in case anyone was wondering how he was lookin these days!

Anonymous said...

He looks considerably better than he did before his demise; by the end he was looking like a cross between Bill the Cat and Poopdeck Pappy.

Margaret said...

The first two photos show him with a neatly buzzed head and trimmed beard, but the bathing pictures show someone with longer, unkempt hair and no beard. And the body looks a lot more withered and badly preserved than those first shots. Are we sure they are the same person?

Matt said...

Not the same body. Lenin's right hand is a fist. One taking bath has fingers fully extended.