Upset to learn that my kids have been under communist influence and the even worse realization that lutefisk have been discovered on Mars, I decided to engage in some light reading this weekend, and what could be lighter than reading about Stalin?
First I read excerpts of Milovan Djilas's "Conversations with Stalin." And then I read the even more interesting "Lenin's Embalmers" by Ilya Zbarsky, biochemist, and the son of Lenin's embalmer and his wife, who happened to be Boris Pasternak's lover.
Stalin - who had been an Orthodox seminarian before becoming a "revolutionary" - had a real appreciation for sainted relics and the way they provided power to their possessors, not metaphysical power, but pyschological power. There is really nothing more fascinating in Stalin's use of Lenin than the use he made out of Lenin's corpse in order to translate that essentially religious power to himself - while at the same time declaring religion to be the opiate of the people.
Let me start though, with Djilas, who was honest enough to have written, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, basically a non-fiction treatment of Orwell's famous remarks about telling the difference between "pigs and man" at the end of the great allegory Animal Farm:
Djilas is one of the most interesting people in the tawdry history of communism - a true believer who went to see Stalin thinking he was going to see God and ended up with a ring side seat - he was No. 2 to Tito in the first communist Yugoslav government - at the first anti-Soviet rift in Communist history, that between Yugoslavia and the USSR.
Although Tito, like all 1930's and 1940's communists - Trotsky, who was holed in up in Mexico City until Soviet agents found him and split his head with an axe, excepted - worshipped Stalin, although he received a tremendous amount of British military aid that was comparable, and may have exceeded, Soviet aid, Tito regarded himself as being under Stalin's orders. What was then Yugoslavia - in another part of its tragic history in the 20th century - had been invaded and conquered by Germany, in part for vengence against the coup d'etat by Prince Peter II, in part to bail out Mussollini from another botched invasion - this the invasion of Greece. It is not widely remarked by historians, but it seems very likely that this invasion, the invasion of Yugoslavia, delayed the Nazi invasion of Russia by at least a month, maybe two, months that would prove critical in the German failure to take Moscow and the Caucus oil fields.
Yes, by the way, World War II was a dangerous fossil fuel war not only in the Pacific, but in Europe as well.
The Yugoslav resistance to Hitler was intense and did much to suck the strength out of the German Army. It is a vastly under-rated element of World War II history.
Anyway, Djilas was the Yugoslav Communist Resistance ambassador to the Soviet Union. He hoped, he prayed, for an audience with Stalin, but for a long time he simply waited around in Moscow for the inscrutable God to summon him into his presence. He doubted that it would ever happen, but then, one day, to his great awe, surprise, and relief, he was summoned to an audience with Joe himself. As things developed, Djilas would get to know Stalin quite well, and would spend considerable time getting to know him, coming to the conclusion that God/Stalin was not only vicious, but increasingly, at least toward the end, senile.
The ultimate break between Tito and Stalin came in 1948, 5 years before Stalin's death, a death which could have come none too soon.
Djilas was a brilliant observer, and stripped of his youthful illusions, he was transformed into one of the most honest men of the 20th century, so honest that - in spite of the Soviet/Yugoslav break in 1948 - his criticism of the official Yugoslav position on the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 made clear - he would be consigned to the same prison by the Yugoslav Communist Party - in which he had served time for being a Yugoslav Communist before the war.
But it is fascinating to see the process of stripping away illusions.
In "Conversations with Stalin" Djilas writes:
Knowing that in the thick skulls of the Soviet leaders and politicl officials that every criticism was transformed into an anti-Soviet attitude, we spontaneously entrenched ourselves in our own circle when in the presence of Russians...
...The Soviet representatives must have taken note of this. Thje tension and suspicion grew apace.
By that time Lenin's sarcophagus, which had been hidden somewhere in the interior during the war, had been brought back to Red Square. One morning we went to visit it. The visit itself would have had no importance had it, too, not provoked in me, as well as in the rest, a new and hitherto unknown resistance. As we descended slowly into the mausoleum, I saw how simple women in shawls were crossing themselves as though approach the reliquary of a Saint. I, too, was overcome by a feeling of mysticism, something forgotten from a distant youth. Moreover, everything was so arranged as to evoke just a feeling in a man - the granite blocks, the stiff guards, the invisible source of light over Lenin, and even his body, dried and white as chalk, with little sparse hairs and though somebody had planted them. Despite my respect for Lenin's genius, it seemed unnatural to me, and above all anti-Materialist and anti-Leninist, this mystical gathering about Lenin's mortal remains.
(cf. Djilas, "Conversations with Stalin" translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Michael Petrovitch, 1962, Harcourt Brace, pp 165-166.)
Personally, I have never confused either Stalin nor Lenin with God, but that's hardly much news since I have no God of any kind.
Still this is a fascinating little book for the serious historian. Djilas was a man at the center of 20th century history, and I cannot help but admire him.
As for dead Lenin to whom Djilas's book refers, Ilya Zbarsky's book is equally fascinating. Growing up, Zbarsky would lead a very privileged life in the Soviet Union, mostly because of his connection with his father, Boris Zbarsky, whose most important value to the Soviet State involved having the right amount of chemical insight to keep Lenin's corpse preserved.
It is most interesting to note that in the early Soviet Union, science was held in contempt, because because it was seen as having no role in the political "struggle" to build "socialism," just as in the modern Soviet State - whoops I mean - Republican State, science is held to have little value in dealing with issues like say, energy, or biology.
As it happened the best equipped scientific lab in the Soviet Union was the mortuary lab dedicated to maintaining the sacred corpse. Perhaps in spite of his father - for whom his contempt is thinly veiled - Ilya Zbarsky developed a strong interest in science and struggled for access to it. (He would go on to become - in spite of having grown up in a climate of Lysenkoism where the science of genetics was officially forbidden - one of the world's experts on the cellular nucleus.) As it turned out the only science job worth having in 1930's Stalinist Russia was as Lenin's embalmer, and Ilya Zbarsky took the job that his father offered him.
Ilya Zbarsky had a ring side seat in Soviet history - maybe comparable to that of Djilas, and the list of people he knew personally is astounding, Zinoviev, Bukarhin, Stalin himself, Khruschev, Beria, and many others.
In fact, he lived with Boris Pasternak, and in fact, Boris Pasternak was sleeping with his mother.
Later he would learn that his own scientific mentor, the irreverent co-embalmer of Lenin, Vorobiov, a sybarite supreme in a dire time, had once raped his sister-in-law, but that's another tale.
You don't get much more fascinating than that I think.
Zbarsky and his father would both lose their jobs near the end of Stalin's life, when Stalin was planning a pogrom to rival those of the Czars, maybe even that of Hitler's. Boris Zbarsky would be sent to a labor camp, and Ilya would suffer long bouts of unemployment and poverty - although Stalin died before he could be arrested.
Anyway, some description of chemical processing in Soviet times:
(Vorobiov) began by getting rid of the sutures that had been used to sew up the head and chest after the autopsy. Then having removed the lungs, liver, spleen and other viscera, he ordered the inside the ribcage to be flused out with distilled water. He next fixed the tissues with formalin...Wads of cotton wool steeped in a 1 percent solution of formaldehyde were laid over the face, hands and body...
...(he) did not want to use an ordinary metal bath, the surface of which might interact chemically with the components of the liquid, only a glass bath would rule out the risk...but frantic appeals from the OGPU to all laboratories in Moscow succeeded in proving only that such a bath was not to be found in Russia...
Vorobiov then considered the possibilty of a rubber bath and Dzerzhinsky [head of the Soviet OGPU predecessor to the KGB] went in person to a rubber factor on the outskirts of Moscow. He was disappointed to find out... that it was a Saturday and nobody was working...He then scoured the neighborhood until he found the manager and then made him sound the factory alarm...this brought the workers running thinking there was a fire...the following Monday Lenin could be put in a rubber bath...
There's a lot of other fascinating stuff about being terrified of handling the sacred corpse - the penalty for screwing up was death - and then this:
The liquid in the bath had been modified. The content was now 20 percent alcohol, which has the property of improving the color of the skin and making it more permeable...after six days the percentage was increased to 30% and 20 percent of glycerine was added. The body remained immersed in the solution for two weeks...
Next large jars of potassium acetate were poured into the bath, which by the end of June contained 240 liters of glycerin, 110 kg of potassium acetate, 150 liters of water and 1 and 2 percent quinine chloride as a disinfectant...
Cool, or blech, or something...
If you want to read accounts of what they did every time a spot appeared on the sacred corpse, the book is published by Harvill Press, 1997, translated from the original French by Barbara Bray. The text is excerpted from pages 87-89, transcription is mine.