For a long memory. Who else, besides Lenin, was preserved for posterity
On January 27, 1924, Lenin's coffin was placed in a wooden mausoleum built in a matter of days on Red Square. The decision not to bury the body was not unprecedented: there were earlier cases of embalming. But not with regard to figures of such magnitude. However, the example of the leader of the world proletariat proved contagious. Over the next half century, the bodies of many political figures were mummified.
Lenin's successor died on March 5, 1953, and four days later his coffin was transported on a gun carriage from the House of Unions to Red Square. At midday, an artillery salute thundered over the Kremlin, and the entire country fell silent for five minutes. Stalin's body lay in the mausoleum until 1961, when the 22nd Congress of the CPSU decided that "Stalin's serious violations of Lenin's precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honest Soviet people and other actions during the personality cult make it impossible to leave his coffin in the Lenin Mausoleum." A day later, Stalin was buried near the Kremlin wall.
The mausoleum of the long-time leader of the People's Republic of China is one of the main attractions of Beijing. The mausoleum was erected on Tiananmen Square in 1977. The area of the structure is more than 57 thousand square meters. In addition to the hall for visitors, where the crystal coffin with the mummified corpse of Mao is placed, the mausoleum has a hall of revolutionary achievements, and on the second floor there is a cinema. There they show the documentary film "Tosca", dedicated to the life of the idol.
After the founder of the North Korean state, Kim Il Sung, died in 1994, his son Kim Jong Il ordered the leader's residence to be converted into a mausoleum. Officially, it is called the Kumsusan Memorial Palace of the Sun. In 2011, Kim Jong Il's body was laid next to the sarcophagus of the Eternal President of the DPRK. Photography, loud talking, and wearing bright clothes are prohibited in the mausoleum.
The first president of North Vietnam asked in his will to be cremated, to place his ashes in three ceramic urns and to bury them in different parts of the country. But his will was not fulfilled. When the politician died in 1969, Soviet specialists embalmed his body. At first, the mummy was kept in a secret place to protect it from American bombing during the Vietnam War, and the glass coffin was moved to the mausoleum in Hanoi six years after Ho Chi Minh's death. Around the mausoleum there is a garden where about 250 species of flora from different regions of Vietnam grow.
The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, who was called the "Bulgarian Lenin", died in 1949 in Barvikha near Moscow, where he had come for treatment. His body was taken to Sofia, embalmed and placed in a mausoleum. It lay there until 1990, when the communist regime fell. At the request of his relatives (according to the official version), Dimitrov was reburied and the crypt was demolished.
Eva was the wife of Argentina's President Juan Peron, and was considered the spiritual leader of the nation for her active civic position. The woman died at the age of 33 from cancer, and her embalmed body was put on public display. After Juan Peron was overthrown in 1955, the mummy was transported to Milan and buried. Having regained his presidency, Peron sent Eva's body back to his homeland and placed it in the family crypt.