DISCUSSION TOPIC:  OF THE ROMANOVS' BONES AND LENIN'S BODY

INTRODUCTION

Anthropologists and political scientists have long noted the relationship between the individual body and the health of the collective "body politick."  In today's democracies, analysis of prostitution, homosexuality or the War on Drugs can intersect with broader social concerns in complex but nonetheless powerful ways.  In the case of monarchies, the connection is often more immediate.  "The Queen is dead; Long live the Queen."  One thinks, for example of Louis XVI's head being held high to the Parisian crowd.  Britons' ideas about authority can be captured not only in the execution of Charles I, but in the posthumous reattachment of his head, and in the after-death severing of that vital appendage of Oliver Cromwell.

This exercise asks you to analyze contemporary Russians' assessment of the legacies of their 1917 revolutions through an examination of recent debates about what to do with the bodies of the last czar and the first communist leader.

Czar Nicholas II was executed by the Bolsheviks with members of his family and attendants on July 17, 1918 in the Siberian town of Yekaterinburg.  In 1991, the year in which the Soviet Union came to an end, the bones were exhumed.  Seven years later, on the eightieth anniversary of the killings, the Romanovs were honoured with a state funeral and with burial in St. Petersburg's Peter and Paul Cathedral, the traditional final resting spot for Russia's rulers.

If Nicholas's body was doused in sulfuric acid in 1918, the revolutionary Lenin's body was preserved through periodic immersions in a mixture of glycerol and potassium acetate after his death in 1924.  He wished to be buried alongside his mother in St. Petersburg, the city that once but no longer bears his name.  Instead, he was put on display in a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square.

By 1991, an increasing number of Russians were insisting that Lenin be sent to his grave.  "Unless we bury Lenin," noted First Vice Premier Boris Nemstov, "Russia will remain under an evil spell."  Lenin's embalmers, faced with decreased government funding, decided to supplement their income by establishing Ritual Services, Inc., a company that helped to patch up and preserve the bodies of the bullet-ridden gangsters who have become a part of the contemporary Russian economy.

READING ASSIGNMENT

 

Browse carefully in several of the web-sites listed below.  You should visit sites about both the Romanovs and Lenin.

 

1)  THE ROMANOVS' BONES:

2)  LENIN'S BODY:

THE PRIMARY QUESTION: What do the post-1991 stories of the bones of the Romanovs and the body of Lenin reveal about Russians' relationship with their past and their revolution?

 

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