One can’t help musing about how one of the most advanced scientific societies of the 20th century resorted to improvements on ancient Egyptian mummification techniques to embalm the leader of their revolution. It seems as though the Russians could not let go of Lenin even in death and so have entombed him as a permanent immortality-symbol. Here is a supposedly “secular” society that holds pilgrimages to a tomb and that buries heroic figures in the “sacred wall” of the Kremlin, a “hallowed” place. No matter how many churches are closed or how humanistic a leader or a movement may claim to be,
...more
