If there are going to be memorials, monuments and statues to great people, like the Lincoln Monument, for example, the actual person's body is a kind of cool variation of those institutions. The actual person's body is , I don't know, heavier/deeper, if one is not skiddish about dead bodies. In a way, oddly, it is more human (?) than a stone statue or monument.
Did you tell me once or did I hear that they closed or moved the Lenin museum at the end of Red Square there ? Anyway, they already had the museum. John Reed and Big Bill Haywood are outback with Stalin. It really is a political and symbolic decision and issue. There was also the change of Leningrad back to St. Petersburg. The issue is does one think the movement and struggles Lenin led ,and now his body emblemizes, are still important guides for what is to be done today. I almost want to make the sad commentary that Lenin dead could be more fresh and lively than almost all of today's actually living leaders and movements in Russia and the world. But to say so would be unLeninlike. There is irony and paradox. Lenin's theory and philosophy was the antithesis of rigi (spelling) mortis , stiffness, unmotion, death. His dead body is an ironic emblem of life, motion, revolution, movement. There also is a paradox related to the Marxist ,anti-great man theory of history, a little dialectic maybe, even. Of course, Lenin would not have approved of putting himself on display because he didn't have a Napoleon complex :>). He was physically little though. He must have been 5' 4' or something (?) Hopefully, the Cubans will clone Fidel. ^^^ by Chris Doss I wish they would follow his wishes. he wanted to be buried or cremated, I forget which. I doubt that anyone wants to be put on permanent display... jd --- It's a political decision. It was outrage a lot of conservatives (in the Russian sense of the word). Most people think he should be buried and the mausoleum turned into a museum. Wasn't putting Stalin into the mausoleum alongside Lenin the former's decision? He was in there a few years (now he's about 20 meters away).
