Мавзолей В.И. Ленина на Красной площади
Granite tomb holding a century-old embalmed body, maintained by a secretive scientific team to this day.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow returns to March 1924, when Vladimir Lenin's body, on display in a hastily built wooden structure, began visibly decaying before the public. You'll hear how chemist Boris Zbarsky and pathologist Vladimir Vorobyov proposed an untested method to preserve it indefinitely, working in secret through the spring under a government that did not forgive failure. The guide follows their formula of glycerol and potassium acetate, and the summer the mausoleum reopened to see whether it had worked.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Cathedral of the Archangel
Royal necropolis crowned with five domes, holding the tombs of tsars beneath frescoed vaults.
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
Eternal flame and red porphyry memorial to an unidentified World War Two soldier, guarded hourly by an honor detail.
Donskoy Monastery
Fortified sixteenth-century monastery and cemetery where a Soviet-era crematorium once stood beside ornate aristocratic tombs.
Novospassky Monastery
Fortified Orthodox monastery and ancestral burial vault of the family that founded a tsarist dynasty.
Novodevichy Cemetery
Park-like burial ground of angels and sculpted monuments beside a sixteenth-century convent, resting place of writers, composers and statesmen.
New Tretyakov Gallery
Soviet modernist gallery of twentieth and twenty-first century Russian art beside a graveyard of toppled Soviet statues.