Source: Encounter 1956-11

In 1956, Italian writer Alberto Moravia visited USSR and published articles about it in the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Later, in 1958, he published a book Un mese in Urss. Below is the second chapter Il mausoleo di Lenin e Stalin.

II.

THE TOMB OF LENIN AND STALIN

I joined the queue about four in the afternoon of a cold, rainy day. A capricious wind which seemed to come from all sides was blowing, so at one moment I felt my face stung by the thin rain, at the next the back of my neck. In front of me stood two hefty blonde girls dressed in flowered cretonne summer dresses. They bore the rain with indifference, the pinkish flesh of their shoulders showing through the sopping cotton stuff. Behind me there was a typical Soviet family: he perhaps a worker, wearing a dark blue suit, but without a tie, tall, pale, his wide face expressing gravity and compunction; she a matron with ample breasts and shoulders and a stolid face; between them a little girl about ten years old whom the father tried to shelter from the rain with a corner of his jacket. For the rest, the entire queue supported the rain with characteristic Moscovite insensibility: I could see only one umbrella from one end to the other of the whole procession.

The queue wound like a snake across a good half of that part of the Red Square which slopes slightly upwards. And it seemed to point directly at the many-coloured domes shaped like onions, pineapples, boys’ tops, and turnips that rose above the church of Saint Basil which stood out at the rear of the square. Actually, half-way across the square, the queue bent at a right angle in the direction of the tomb’s truncated pyramid. A white line on the pavement indicated where the queue should stand. Policemen, distributed all along the file, would give warnings, not without some roughness, to all those who stepped over this mark.

I had purposely joined the Russians and so I had to wait along with them. But foreign delegations were not obliged to do this and were permitted to go straight into the tomb, without any waiting. I saw one of them, Chinese or Indo-Chinese, little yellow men in tunics and wide blue pants, who passed at a run in the direction of the tomb. But I wanted to do exactly what a Russian from the provinces passing through Moscow would do. Who knows? perhaps by doing the same things as these Russians, so patiently waiting in front and behind me under the rain, I might succeed in experiencing the same emotions. Which emotions? Well, they would take in a little of everything, starting with mere curiosity and going all the way up to admiration, devotion, veneration, fanaticism. It occurred to me that in this queue there could very well be standing two or three of those innocents, today liberated and rehabilitated, who, according to Khrushchev’s report, had spent, due to Stalin’s “errors,” some years chopping down trees in remote concentration camps in north-eastern Siberia. What were their feelings while they waited in file beneath the rain, patient as always, to enter the tomb? A question for which Dostoevsky might have found a reply; I did not feel quite up to answering it. The human heart is profound and complicated; as for the Russian heart, it is truly unfathomable.

Meanwhile the crowd crept forward in short spurts. Now I am at the centre of the Red Square, on one side of me the long, low buildings in neo-Slavic style of the Gum department store, and on the other the beautiful red, crenelated walls of the Kremlin. And now, here is the entrance, guarded by two armed sentinels. Other guards inspect one by one all those who go in. Swift, expert glances, given by profound judges of the social and political fauna. One peasant was compelled to untie his faggot and show the hen it contained. An awkward student type was asked what he was carrying in his leather briefcase. At last, here I am, inside the tomb.

The entrance was a completely bare room whose walls, floor, and ceiling reflected the gleam of the marbles with which they were covered. Still in file, one traversed this antechamber, descended a few steps, and then, passing through a door, finally penetrated into the crypt. Here, in a brightly illuminated, large glass case, I saw the two dictators spread out supine in their coffins like two Egyptian Pharoahs in their uncovered sarcophagi. The glass case was set on a platform which divided the crypt into two equal parts, one lower, the other higher. Visitors had to ascend a few steps at the side of Lenin’s corpse, walk in file beside the case for a brief flat stretch, then descend again other steps that went alongside Stalin’s corpse.

First of all I looked at the two dictators together. Both lay stretched out on their backs, slightly on an incline, the head higher than the feet, the hands clasped over their stomachs, and the eyes closed. Up to the chest the two corpses preserved the shape and outline of the human body; yet one had the disconcerting impression that, from the chest down, they ended in two flat, thin forms similar to two empty sacks. Lenin seemed very pale, bloodless, and at the same time shiny and solid, as if he were made of wax or ivory. What struck me were the lines of his face, which, if not indeed Mongolian, were certainly somewhat Asiatic: a round, wide face, high cheekbones, eyes drawn up at the corners. The arches of the brows, raised almost at an acute angle under his bald forehead, gave a look of concentration, attention, and also authority to his entire face. It was a face without any brutality or coarseness, of a fineness of contour completely intellectual and wise. The mouth, enclosed by the moustaches and the small pointed beard, had a firm, bitter expression. My eyes almost involuntarily travelled from the corpse to the faces of the visitors: attentive but inexpressive, tense but atonic, it was impossible to know what they were thinking.

Now I was at Stalin’s flank. Looking at him, as I walked down the four steps and those following me pressed forward, I could not help but remember a famous passage from Manzoni’s The Betrothed, when the innkeeper, after having, on the evening of the riots, put Renzo to bed, “paused for a moment to gaze at this irksome guest, raising his lamp over his face.” Manzoni explains the innkeeper’s gesture as being due to “the kind of attraction which sometimes makes us regard an object of our dislike as attentively as an object of our love, and perhaps is nothing else than the desire to know what it is that works so strongly on our emotions.” At the moment I thought that in this case I would have to substitute a somewhat stronger word for Manzoni’s “dislike,” indeed a much, much stronger one; and then I looked at him. Stalin’s face was not as fine as Lenin’s, nor as waxy. He still retained the colour of life, a certain bilious yellowishness on the forehead and around the eye sockets, and almost the shadow of a beard speckled with small tobacco-coloured dots on the cheeks. His hair was thick, a regular grey fleece, the small eyes hidden under heavy brows, the nose typically Georgian (in Georgia one sees such noses at every street corner), curved, fleshy, prominent, the moustaches grey and drooping. Beneath these moustaches, the mouth had a very definite expression, at once distrustful, brutal, discontented, and falsely good-humoured. It was the mouth of a man who grumbles, who threatens, who plays a game, and who is suspicious. The whole face had something heavy and slack about it—it was, in short, the face of a tired but tough old man. In contrast to Lenin who, as I have said, had an expression of intellectual and speculative lucidity, Stalin’s face one would say was rather that of a man not so much intelligent as rich in humours and temperament. I thought that it was not by chance that he had been called, in the period of the “cult of personality,” “the father of the people,” even if he had been a father on the style of Saturn who ate his own children. But meanwhile the crowd was pushing against me and I had to go out. I took a final glance at the Georgian dictator and then I went down the last step and was outside, once again under the rain.

The visit to the tomb of Lenin and Stalin is one of the obligatory stops of political tourism at Moscow. I can’t imagine what impression this visit makes on the many Asians who flock in pilgrimage to Moscow; probably, to these men who come from the steppes of Central Asia, the mountains of Tibet, or the rice fields of China, the public exhibition of the embalmed remains of the two dictators must seem a normal thing. In fact one must not forget that Asia, even in the midst of the present Communist upsurge, is still the continent of the most idolatrous and bizarre cults. But for the European the affair doesn’t go so smoothly. After his visit to the tomb, the first question that comes to the European’s mind is this: Why? Why have the Russians embalmed the two corpses and exposed them to the curiosity and veneration of the multitude, rather than, as has been done for centuries in Europe and also in Asia, closing them up in two tombs, even magnificent ones, and letting their bodies disintegrate in peace beneath the bronze and marble?

In this tomb of Lenin and Stalin there is something which, strange to say, contradicts both the Marxist conception of life (and also of death) and the idea which one in Europe holds of death, its mystery and dignity. Marxist are certainly the moving graves I had observed from the train, on the stretch between Kiev and Moscow, where lay the partisans who had died attacking that railroad line when it was in German hands: each grave had a plaque inscribed with a name, and a small staff at the top of which was fastened the Red Star; Christian, according to the European tradition, are the closely ranked tombs of the Moscovite Czars in the cathedral of the Archangel, inside the Kremlin. But the tomb of Lenin and Stalin makes one think of very modern America where, quite similarly, in the “funeral homes’’ “morticians” embalm, retouch, and put make-up on the dead so that they can be preserved for ever and exhibited to the gaze of their dear ones. In this tomb there is expressed a primitive religiosity, of an archaic type, not unlike that of the Americans and probably also the Asians, for whom the dead person is not spirit, is not soul, is not memory, is not history, but is himself in person, with his particular eyes, his mouth, his nose, his hair; an unbelieving religiosity, so to speak, which, even before affirming survival in another world, is anxious to deny the corruption of the body here; a religiosity, in short, similar to that of the Egyptians or other ancient peoples who placed in the tomb foodstuffs, playthings, toilet articles, jewels, as though the dead person, after death, continued to live in the same way as when he was alive.

This religiosity clashed, in the tomb of Lenin and Stalin, with the anti-metaphysical conception of Marxism, and the outcome has been a kind of compromise: a tomb without religion yet the centre and object of a devotion which smacks much of the religious; the two dictators embalmed and preserved as they were in life, but not so much to assert their immortality as their glory. Thus it is obvious that the tomb of Lenin and Stalin was not born out of political, propagandistic calculation, but rather came from a specific historical and psychological background, from a specific society which has simultaneously very modern and very primitive characteristics.