Lenin: Death Mask, Eternal Body, Living Sculpture

The Soviet communist project was organized around the figure of “Leninism” -- the discursive and material construct that consisted of Lenin’s texts and quotes, images and sculptures, and Lenin’s physical body in the Mausoleum. In practice, Lenin’s texts were always misquoted and censored, Leninist images were invented and retouched, Lenin’s physical body was re-sculpted and re-embalmed. How did the political, the artistic, and the biological intersect in this unique project? What does this perspective tell us about the iconoclastic movements directed at Lenin’s images today?

By Alexei Yurchak, professot at Berkeley University and laureate of the DEA programme.