RUSSIA: Prof Valery Bykov likes to work as quietly as possible. His team slips in with minimal fuss, attends to its business and discreetly leaves, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow
Then the guards reopen Red Square and the public return to gaze, unknowingly, upon the work of Mausoleum Group.
Prof Bykov has unique access to the granite and marble tomb which opened 80 years ago this weekend to house the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin. He has spent much of the last two decades ensuring that the Communist revolutionary does not crumble in a manner ill- befitting someone he calls "one of the truly great figures of world history".
The Mausoleum Group still attends to Lenin every week under the guidance of Prof Bykov, who is only the fourth man to lead a shadowy committee of top scientists whose work was a state secret during the Soviet years.
The first group was rapidly assembled in January 1924 after Lenin died of his fourth stroke and they were ordered to preserve his decomposing body through six weeks of lying in state. At the same time, workers toiled day and night in freezing temperatures to build a modest temporary mausoleum for the body.
After Lenin's state funeral, the Soviet leadership ignored his request to be buried alongside his mother in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) and decided to preserve his body indefinitely and put it on permanent display, commissioning architect Alexei Shchusev to design the mausoleum.
He fashioned a squat pyramid in reddish brown and black, intended to evoke the colours of revolution and mourning as well as blend in with the Kremlin walls beneath which it stood and where it was officially opened on August 1st 1924.
The final version of the mausoleum was completed in 1930 and finished in the finest polished stone. Josef Stalin's embalmed corpse also lay here for a while before he was denounced and reburied in the Kremlin wall. And it is here, filing in silence through the tomb under the heavy gaze of armed guards, that thousands of visitors still survey Lenin's body every year.
Prof Bykov and his colleagues are happy in the anonymity of their work, looking for the slightest sign of deterioration in a corpse that was revered like a holy relic in Soviet days but which many people now want to see removed from its Red Square tomb.
It is an idea that finds little favour with the Mausoleum Group.
"These people are mostly fools," Prof Bykov says of politicians who want Russia to bury Lenin, close his tomb and let his legacy lie. "They have left no mark on history and never will. They are of no interest to us. We do what we do, whether current leaders like it or not."
Prof Bykov's team checks Lenin's body for damage caused by the lighting in his mausoleum or changes in temperature or humidity. They treat him with a chemical solution developed in secrecy over decades and periodically change his clothes.
"Lenin is in a fine state and we will make sure he remains so for our descendants," Prof Bykov says. "We can guarantee preservation of his body indefinitely, certainly for a century and more."
The Mausoleum Group is based at Moscow's Biomedical Technology Centre, an institute shrouded in mystery for decades and still assailed by macabre rumours.
Some say the basement contains a host of Lenin look- alikes, ready to take his place in Red Square should his corpse ever collapse. Others say his real body was replaced long ago by a wax effigy. Newspaper reports have also claimed that the cash- strapped scientists earn dirty money embalming mafia bosses killed in turf wars.
"If I must respond to such questions, then the answer is 'no'," Prof Bykov says. "This is a scientific institute, not a public morgue."
He admits though, that his team mummified leaders from across the old Communist world, each of them eager to follow Lenin into his own peculiar after- life.
Heads of state from Angola to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria to Mongolia passed through the Mausoleum Group's expert hands and they still help to maintain the bodies of China's Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam.
What about Kim Il-sung, the embalmed "Eternal Leader" of Stalinist North Korea, perhaps the world's most secretive state? "That's not a matter we discuss."
He says that while his scientists are highly professional with every body they handle, their relationship with Lenin cannot fail to be unique.
"There are emotions involved, of course. My approach to Lenin is not just scientific, but deeply respectful, and no one who works directly with him allows himself the slightest degree of slackness or inattention. They all understand the importance of what they do."
Many of the Mausoleum Group's old Communist charges have ended up being quietly buried as their political stars fell. It is not a fate which Prof Bykov envisages for Lenin.
"The important thing is that the people who come after me continue to work respectfully and conscientiously, independent of political intrigues," he said. "This work bears huge emotional and historical responsibility."
"Generations have come and gone looking after Lenin. My colleagues and I represent but a transient phase."