---
title: The Lenin cult after 1924:an embalmed body, a mausoleum and a doctrine called "Leninism"
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/
description: Within days of Vladimir Lenin's death on 21 January 1924 the Politburo renamed Petrograd after him, staged an oath-like eulogy over his body, and by that…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: an interwar radio-and-newsreel intelligence collage with a 1930s map of Europe and propaganda poster proofs.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-interwar.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# The Lenin cult after 1924:an embalmed body, a mausoleum and a doctrine called "Leninism"

At a glance

Within days of Vladimir Lenin's death on 21 January 1924 the Politburo renamed Petrograd after him, staged an oath-like eulogy over his body…

- **When:** January 21, 1924
- **Actor:** The Soviet Communist Party leadership and state institutions: the Politburo's funeral commission…
- **Target:** The Soviet public…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/)
- **Regime:** [Soviet Union under Stalin](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/soviet-union/)

Full details

- **Actor:** The Soviet Communist Party leadership and state institutions: the Politburo's funeral commission chaired by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Institute of Lenin, the mass 'Lenin Enrollment' recruitment drive, and Joseph Stalin as the self-declared chief systematiser of 'Leninism'
- **Target:** The Soviet public; the international Communist movement; and, inside the party, rival claimants to Lenin's political inheritance

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/#sources)

On this page

**In one line:** Within days of Vladimir Lenin's death on 21 January 1924 the Politburo renamed Petrograd after him, staged an oath-like eulogy over his body, and by that spring decided to embalm and permanently display him rather than bury him, over the published objection of his widow; the following years built a mass recruitment drive, a codified doctrine called "Leninism" whose chief systematiser was Stalin, a chain of renamed cities and, by 1930, a granite mausoleum and the state's highest medal, all bearing his name.

![Diagram: Lenin dies 21 January 1924; Stalin's eulogy oath and the Leningrad renaming follow within days; the body is embalmed rather than buried over Krupskaya's objection; Stalin's Foundations of Leninism lectures codify doctrine while Lenin's Testament is kept off the 13th Congress floor; the Lenin Enrollment and the 1930 Order of Lenin and granite mausoleum seal the name into the state](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/lenin-cult-after-1924-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **21 January 1924.** Lenin dies at his home in Gorki, outside Moscow, at 6:50pm, after a series of strokes. The Central Committee announces his death the next morning; the Politburo forms a funeral commission chaired by security chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, which becomes the standing "Commission for the Immortalisation of the Memory of V. I. Lenin."
- **23-27 January 1924.** The body lies in state at the House of Unions' Hall of Columns in Moscow; hundreds of thousands file past in temperatures reported well below freezing.
- **26 January 1924.** At a mourning session of the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets, Stalin delivers a eulogy built as a five-part oath, each section closing with the refrain "we vow to thee, Comrade Lenin"; each vow commits the party to a specific task (guarding party unity, the "dictatorship of the proletariat," the worker-peasant alliance, the union of Soviet republics, and the Communist International) rather than to Lenin's memory alone (Stalin, *Works*, vol. 6, "On the Death of Lenin," 26 January 1924). Within days, the Petrograd Soviet's request to rename the city is ratified: Petrograd becomes Leningrad.
- **27 January 1924.** State funeral; the body is placed, not buried, in a temporary wooden mausoleum on Red Square that architect Alexey Shchusev's team built in three days in sub-zero weather.
- **30 January 1924.** *Pravda* publishes a letter from Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, asking that mourning not become "outward veneration of his person": "Do not raise memorials to him, name palaces after him, hold magnificent celebrations in his memory... If you want to honour the name of Vladimir Ilyich, build day nurseries, kindergartens, houses, schools, libraries" (as quoted in Tumarkin 1983 and widely cited since; translations of the letter vary slightly). Her request is not followed.
- **February-May 1924.** The party runs the "Lenin Enrollment" (*Leninskii prizyv*, Ленинский призыв), a recruitment drive admitting new members "in Lenin's name"; historians commonly cite a figure of roughly 240,000 new members by the 13th Party Congress in May, sharply increasing the party's working-class share and diluting the pre-1917 "Old Bolshevik" cadre (see, e.g., Service 2000; Fitzpatrick 2008).
- **By spring 1924.** Facing continued public demand and the body's visible deterioration, the commission decides against burial and orders permanent embalming. Pathologist Vladimir Vorobiov and biochemist Boris Zbarsky develop a formaldehyde, alcohol, glycerol and potassium-acetate treatment; the body still receives periodic re-treatment today (Zbarsky and Hutchinson 1998, a memoir by Zbarsky's son).
- **April 1924.** Stalin delivers a series of lectures at Sverdlov University, published later that year as *The Foundations of Leninism*, defining "Leninism" as "Marxism of the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution" and presenting himself as its authorised systematiser. He revises and republishes the text in 1926, folding in his position of "socialism in one country," which he was then using against Trotsky and, later, Zinoviev and Kamenev (the factional fight itself is covered on ['Trotskyism or Leninism': the press campaign that removed Trotsky from Soviet leadership (1924-1929)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/)).
- **May 1924.** Simbirsk, Lenin's birthplace on the Volga, is renamed Ulyanovsk, after his actual family name (Ulyanov). At the 13th Party Congress the same month, Lenin's "Testament" — dictated notes from December 1922 to January 1923 criticising several leaders and recommending Stalin's removal as General Secretary for being "too rude" — is read privately to the heads of each delegation rather than to the full Congress floor, after Zinoviev and Kamenev argue against public disclosure; it is not published in the Soviet Union in Stalin's lifetime.
- **August 1924.** A second, larger wooden mausoleum, also by Shchusev, replaces the first.
- **1930.** The wooden structure is replaced by the permanent stepped granite, marble and labradorite mausoleum, again designed by Shchusev, that still stands on Red Square. On 6 April 1930 the Order of Lenin is instituted as the Soviet Union's highest civil and military decoration, bearing his profile.
- **Ongoing through the decade.** Streets, squares, collective farms, factories and schools across the USSR are renamed "imeni Lenina" (in Lenin's name); the practice was never a single decree but a continuous, centrally encouraged wave that outlasted the 1920s.
- **1961, for comparison.** During de-Stalinisation, the Soviet leadership removes Stalin's body — which had lain beside Lenin's in the mausoleum since 1953 — and reburies it by the Kremlin Wall. Lenin's body and the mausoleum itself are left untouched, a documented sign that his cult specifically, as distinct from Stalin's, was treated as load-bearing for the state's own legitimacy.

![Close head-and-shoulders portrait photograph of Lenin in a suit and tie, looking directly at the camera](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/lenin-cult-bain-portrait-c1920.jpg)

*Lenin, photographed by the Bain News Service, c. 1920-1925. Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-34971. This is the kind of press likeness that the cult's later posters, busts and medal profiles standardised into a single, repeated public image.*

![A 1931 postcard photograph of the newly completed granite Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square, Moscow, with two guards standing at the entrance below the lettering "ЛЕНИН" and the Kremlin wall behind it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/lenin-mausoleum-red-square-postcard-1931.jpg)

*Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square, Moscow, in a 1931 postcard, showing the permanent granite structure completed in 1930. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Postcard filing series. The card carries a Glavlit (Soviet censorship-office) approval mark, visible evidence that even a tourist postcard of the site passed through state clearance.*

## How it works

- [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/): keeping the body above ground and putting it on permanent public display, against the explicit objection of his own widow, fused the person of Lenin with the continuity of the state itself; visiting the mausoleum became a civic and eventually a compulsory-feeling ritual (school trips, delegation visits, newlyweds), and the "Lenin corner" — a portrait and bust displayed in the position a religious icon corner had occupied in workers' clubs and peasant homes — carried the same fusion into daily life. Doubting the value of the display, or of "Leninism" as the party defined it, risked reading as doubting the revolution's legitimacy itself.
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): renaming Petrograd, Lenin's birthplace of Simbirsk, and thousands of streets, factories and farms attached his standing to geography and to institutions that had nothing to do with him personally; the 1930 Order of Lenin did the same for the state's own system of honours, so that receiving the USSR's highest award meant receiving Lenin's name.
- [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): the 26 January eulogy and the surrounding press coverage repeatedly called Lenin "genius," "the great teacher" and "leader of the world proletariat" without pointing to a specific act or decision that the word was meant to describe; the words asked for reverence rather than an argument that could be checked.
- [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/): the freezing crowds at the funeral, and the flood of resolutions from workplaces reportedly demanding the body be preserved, were presented as the country's own spontaneous, unanimous verdict; the Lenin Enrollment was likewise framed as workers volunteering to join the party out of grief rather than as a centrally organised drive that the party Secretariat, then run by Stalin's allies, controlled the admission of.
- [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): Stalin's *Foundations of Leninism* was published as a neutral systemisation of the dead leader's thought, not as one faction's political programme; its later editions quietly absorbed Stalin's own evolving positions while claiming unbroken fidelity to Lenin. The management of Lenin's Testament worked the same way in reverse: the party's own record of what Lenin actually wanted was curated (read to a controlled audience, kept from print) rather than published in full, so that the "authorised" account of his wishes served the leadership that controlled it.
- [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/): reported turnout at the mausoleum queues, at the funeral, and in enrollment numbers were treated as proof of the cult's rightness rather than as one fact among others; a wave that "everyone" was joining made not joining conspicuous.

## Then and now

The mausoleum did not stay a one-off. Soviet embalming specialists were involved in preserving and advising on the display of Ho Chi Minh's body (Hanoi, from 1975) and Mao Zedong's (Beijing, from 1977) — Mao's own personality cult had much earlier roots, covered on [The Mao cult before the state: 'Mao Zedong Thought' and 'The East Is Red', 1943-1949](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/), but his mausoleum reused the specifically Soviet, post-1924 technique of embalming and display rather than burial. North Korea's Kumsusan Palace has held Kim Il Sung's body since 1994 and Kim Jong Il's since 2011, and its cult of personality is covered in [The Kim leader cult, the anti-US month and the leaflets sent back](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/kim-dynasty-leader-cult/). Each case reused the same techniques — the body kept rather than buried, the site turned into a pilgrimage destination, the leader's name attached to institutions and honours — as a deliberate, acknowledged copy of the Soviet original, not an independent invention.

The scale and political stakes differ enormously by country and era, and this page does not rank them. What is comparable is the mechanism: a one-party state facing a founding leader's death, choosing display and doctrine-codification over ordinary burial and remembrance, as a way to fix legitimacy in an institution that could outlive the man.

## Positions on the record

- **The party's stated position at the time.** Official coverage and resolutions framed the mourning as the people's own spontaneous grief and the funeral commission's decisions as a response to that grief, not as a deliberate campaign; party texts of the period explicitly denied that the commemoration amounted to turning Lenin into a religious object, even as they built the apparatus of one (Tumarkin 1983 traces this tension in the contemporary record).
- **Krupskaya's and other critics' position, at the time.** Krupskaya's 30 January 1924 letter in *Pravda*, quoted above, asked that mourning take the form of building schools and hospitals rather than monuments and named institutions; it was published but not acted on.
- **Trotsky's later position.** Trotsky, recovering from illness in Sukhumi (in Abkhazia, on the Black Sea) at the time of the funeral, later wrote in his memoir *My Life* (1930) that he believed the date he had been given for the funeral made his return impossible, and he did not attend; other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin among them, served as pallbearers. In later writings, including *The Revolution Betrayed* (1936), Trotsky described the mounting cult as a symptom of what he called the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution. Whether the funeral date given to Trotsky was in fact designed to keep him away, as he came to believe, is not established here; his own account is the primary source for the claim, and it is a documented part of the record without being independently confirmed. The wider Stalin-Trotsky fight over the succession is covered on ['Trotskyism or Leninism': the press campaign that removed Trotsky from Soviet leadership (1924-1929)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/), not here.
- **Later Soviet position.** Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "Secret Speech" denounced the "cult of personality" built around Stalin, and in 1961 Stalin's body was removed from the mausoleum during de-Stalinisation. Lenin's own cult and his mausoleum were left standing throughout, including after 1991, when the Russian Federation kept the mausoleum open rather than closing it, even as some proposals to bury the body have periodically resurfaced without being carried out.
- **Scholarship.** Nina Tumarkin's *Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia* (Harvard University Press, 1983) is the standard academic study, arguing the cult was a substantially engineered project — drawing consciously on the visual and ritual vocabulary of Orthodox relic veneration — built to give the young Soviet state a legitimacy that no longer depended on one living man. Benno Ennker's German-language study *Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion* (1997) covers the cult's earliest institutional steps in comparable depth. Robert Service's *Lenin: A Biography* (2000) and Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson's *Lenin's Embalmers* (1998) cover the funeral, the embalming decision and its scientific execution.
- **What is documented.** The dates and content of Stalin's 26 January eulogy, the Leningrad and Ulyanovsk renamings, Krupskaya's letter, the Lenin Enrollment's rough scale, the Foundations of Leninism lectures and their later revision, the Testament's restricted reading at the 13th Congress, the 1930 completion of the permanent mausoleum and the Order of Lenin, and the 1961 removal of Stalin's body while Lenin's remained.
- **What is contested.** How far Stalin personally drove the embalming decision, as opposed to it emerging from Dzerzhinsky's commission and the wider Politburo under pressure from crowds and provincial party demands, is argued differently by historians; Tumarkin's account gives it a broader, more collective origin than the popular shorthand "Stalin built a cult around Lenin" suggests. What Lenin himself would have wanted is not established: he left no instruction calling for embalming or a mausoleum, and the surviving objections from people close to him (Krupskaya, and reportedly his sisters) point the other way, but that is not conclusive evidence of his own wishes either.
- **Not ruled on here.** Whether Bolshevik or Soviet rule was legitimate, whether Lenin's policies were sound, and the merits of the Stalin-Trotsky succession fight, which is the separate subject of ['Trotskyism or Leninism': the press campaign that removed Trotsky from Soviet leadership (1924-1929)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/).

## Same-method test

The same definitions apply to non-Communist and democratic cases. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, the United States built a comparable, though differently governed, leader cult: [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) in the dozens of U.S. counties and towns named or renamed for him in the years that followed; [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) in "Honest Abe" and "the Great Emancipator," terms that stood in for specific, arguable claims about his record; and [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) in a civic calendar and curriculum (Lincoln's Birthday observances spreading from the late 19th century, the Lincoln Memorial dedicated in 1922) that made questioning his record feel, in some settings, like questioning the Union's cause. The Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans' organisation, actively promoted Lincoln veneration in ways that had real political payoffs for the Republican Party for decades afterward.

The differences are structural, not just of degree. No single party controlled who could publish about Lincoln or claim to interpret him correctly; competing and critical accounts of his presidency were published freely throughout, including hostile ones, without state suppression comparable to the treatment of Lenin's Testament. No one was expelled from public life, imprisoned or worse for declining to venerate Lincoln, and the monument-building was funded through a mix of public appropriations and private donation drives that were themselves debated in the press, not decreed by a Politburo commission. The technique — attaching a state's founding legitimacy to a dead leader's name, image and relics — is the same; the apparatus enforcing it, and the cost of dissent, were not.

## How to spot it

- Ask who controls physical access to the leader's remains or relics, and who is seen standing beside them at the ritual moments (a funeral, an anniversary). That position is often a claim to succession, not only an act of mourning.
- Check whether the leader's own most candid documents (letters, a testament, private criticism of allies) are published in full or curated: read to a controlled room, summarised, or withheld, while an "authorised" version circulates instead.
- Watch the speed and scale of renaming. A wave of place names, honours and institutions attached to a leader within days or weeks of death, before any public debate about whether to do it, is a marker of an organised campaign rather than organic memory.
- Notice when objections from the people closest to the deceased (family, oldest allies) are publicly recorded and then overridden. That gap between the stated tribute and the family's own wishes is often visible in the documentary record, as it is here.
- Ask whether "true" interpretation of the founder's thought is anchored to one successor's writings, and whether that interpretation's content shifts over time to match that successor's current political needs while still claiming unbroken fidelity to the founder.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below (`make_diagrams_rtp_lenincult.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Lenin, head-and-shoulders portrait, c. 1920-1925 | [Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection](https://www.loc.gov/item/2014715123/), LC-DIG-ggbain-34971 | No known restrictions on publication (LOC rights statement) |
| Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square, Moscow, 1931 postcard | [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Postcard filing series](https://www.loc.gov/item/2025715153/) | No known restrictions on publication (LOC rights statement) |

*The 1931 postcard shows the permanent granite, marble and labradorite mausoleum shortly after its 1930 completion; the card itself carries a Glavlit (Soviet censorship-office) approval mark, visible evidence of state control over what could be published about the site.*

### Image gaps

- **The 1924 wooden mausoleum's construction, and photographs of the funeral crowds and delegates at the site (including a widely reproduced June 1924 photograph of Comintern delegates and Trotsky leaving the mausoleum).** Wikimedia Commons holds 1924 photographs from this period, but their authorship is unknown or unclear and their US copyright status, given the URAA restoration issue that affects unrenewed Soviet-era works of uncertain authorship (the same issue that excluded contemporary Chinese photographs from [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/)), is not established. Not hosted here for that reason.
- **A photograph of a physical Order of Lenin medal.** A clean, CC BY 2.0-licensed museum photograph exists on Wikimedia Commons ("Order of Lenin type 4.jpg," by Flickr user Thomas Quine), but Wikimedia's media-serving domain returned repeated rate-limit errors (HTTP 429) to this build environment and the file could not be downloaded. Fillable on a retry.
- **A daylight photograph of the current granite mausoleum, or of the "Lenin corner" tradition.** Multiple CC BY-SA-licensed Commons photographs exist (see the file "Lenin's Mausoleum at Night.jpg," CC BY-SA 4.0, and others in Category:Lenin Mausoleum), but the same Wikimedia rate-limiting blocked their download during this build. Fillable on a retry.
- **Krupskaya's 30 January 1924 Pravda letter itself, and the original printed text of Stalin's 26 January eulogy.** No openly licensed scan of the original newspaper pages was found; the texts are quoted here from secondary and translated sources instead.
- **A photograph of the interior of the mausoleum or of the embalmed body.** Photography inside the mausoleum has historically been prohibited to visitors, and no openly licensed image was found.
- **A period photograph of Simbirsk/Ulyanovsk renaming signage, or of a "Lenin Enrollment" recruitment scene.** No openly licensed image was found.
- **"Russians Pay Homage to the Memory of Lenin" (1925), Library of Congress control number 90709939**, showing a crowd at Lenin's tomb, exists in the LOC catalogue but is marked "available at Library of Congress campus" rather than online, so it could not be retrieved for this page.

## Sources

- Stalin, Joseph. "On the Death of Lenin: A Speech Delivered at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets," 26 January 1924, in *Works*, vol. 6 (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953): [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/01/26.htm).
- Stalin, Joseph. *The Foundations of Leninism* (lectures delivered April 1924, Sverdlov University; first published 1924, revised 1926): [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/).
- Krupskaya, Nadezhda. Letter to the Soviet people, *Pravda*, 30 January 1924, as quoted and discussed in Tumarkin (1983) below.
- Trotsky, Leon. *My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography* (1930): [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/); *The Revolution Betrayed* (1936): [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/).
- Khrushchev, Nikita. "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences," closed speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, 25 February 1956.
- Tumarkin, Nina. *Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia*. Harvard University Press, 1983.
- Ennker, Benno. *Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion*. Böhlau, 1997.
- Service, Robert. *Lenin: A Biography*. Macmillan, 2000.
- Zbarsky, Ilya, and Samuel Hutchinson. *Lenin's Embalmers*. Harvill Press, 1998.
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila. *The Russian Revolution*, 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2008 (for the Lenin Enrollment and its effect on party composition).
- Deutscher, Isaac. *The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929*. Oxford University Press, 1959 (for the 13th Congress and the Testament's restricted reading).
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division: ["Lenin" (Bain News Service, c. 1920-1925), LC-DIG-ggbain-34971](https://www.loc.gov/item/2014715123/); ["Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow" (postcard, 1931)](https://www.loc.gov/item/2025715153/); ["Russians Pay Homage to the Memory of Lenin" (1925), control number 90709939](https://www.loc.gov/item/90709939/) (catalogued; access and rights status for this record were not clearly resolvable from the build environment, so it was not used).
- Wikimedia Commons, Category:Lenin Mausoleum, Category:First wooden Lenin Mausoleum and Category:Second wooden Lenin Mausoleum (consulted for provenance; files not hosted here, see Image gaps).