Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

by David Remnick

The Mystery—the theological notion that the acts and purposes of the deity are unknowable—was always a critical part of the pseudo-theology of the atheist state. Stalin must have gotten the idea during his failed career in the seminary. One of the keys to his own mystery was to stay out of sight; hence, a pockmarked mediocrity becomes a god. For decades, the Thursday-morning meetings of the Politburo were more mysterious than sessions of the College of Cardinals; transfers of power were more difficult to decipher in the Kremlin than in the Vatican. The catechism language of Vremya, the iconic posters of the great leaders, all added to the Mystery. And now it was all but gone. Now we learned from the press the details of the Lenin Mausoleum; it turned out that there were other floors beneath the holy of holies, and on one of them there was the gymnasium for the guards and a bathroom and buffet for visiting luminaries; beneath that there was a “control room” which carefully monitored the temperature and deterioration of Vladimir Ilyich. Yeltsin’s memoir, Against the Grain, became an underground best-seller precisely because it hacked away at the Mystery.