Lenin's Mausoleum

Lenin's Mausoleum is a tomb on Red Square by the Kremlin wall, where the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, has been kept since 1924. The pyramid-shaped granite building, designed by architect Alexei Shchusev, served for decades as the country's main reviewing stand during parades and remains a monument of Soviet avant-garde architecture.

After Lenin's death on 21 January 1924, caused by a series of cerebral hemorrhages, the Soviet leadership decided to preserve the body for public viewing. The first wooden mausoleum was built that same January, and a second, more spacious one, in May. The permanent stone building was constructed by the Mosstroy trust to Shchusev's designs: the facing was made of red granite along with black and gray labradorite. The word "Lenin" was carved into a 60-tonne block of labradorite quarried in Ukraine and transported to Moscow by rail with great difficulty. Construction was completed by October 1930 — the new building was three meters taller than the previous wooden one, and its total weight reached about ten thousand tonnes.

Inside the mausoleum are a vestibule, the Funeral Hall, and two staircases. Above the entrance, on the inside, the 1923 State Emblem of the USSR is carved in gray labradorite, and the walls of the Funeral Hall are decorated with a mosaic of billowing banners by the master Vladimir Frolov, who had earlier created the mosaics for the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg. The sarcophagus containing Lenin's body, designed between 1939 and 1945 by scientists and sculptor Boris Yakovlev, takes the form of an inverted trapezoid with sloped glass panels, which makes visitors' reflections invisible.

From 1953 to 1961, the body of Joseph Stalin also lay in the mausoleum, before being reburied by the Kremlin wall. A special scientific laboratory has been responsible for preserving Lenin's body since 1925, having developed unique methods of long-term embalming; in 2013, staff discovered inside the building a bricked-up columbarium with fifty niches, presumably designed by Shchusev himself but never put to its intended use.

After the collapse of the USSR, the mausoleum's status became a subject of public debate: since the 1990s, some politicians and cultural figures have advocated burying Lenin's body, while the monument continues to be maintained by the Kremlin Commandant's Service. In 2005, during mass celebrations on Red Square, the building began to be screened with decorative panels, and in 2012–2013 a large-scale restoration of the foundation was carried out due to ground deformation on the site of the Alevizov moat, filled in during the 19th century.

Today the mausoleum is open for free admission several days a week and remains one of the most recognizable structures on Red Square, embodying the architectural language of the early Soviet period and continuing to provoke debate about its future.