Lenin's Embalmers by Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson Harvill 215pp, £12.99 in UK
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was demented and facially deformed by his final illness and required great biochemical skill and cosmetic artistry when the regime decided to preserve his body and display it for evermore as their most revered secular icon, the founder of the Soviet Union.
This straightforward history of the embalming of Lenin, read in an almost inevitable mood of morbid frivolity, can be relished like Evelyn Waugh's thanatological satire, The Loved One, with two Russian embalmers in the role of Mr Joyboy of Whispering Glades.
Lenin abhorred pomp. His widow, in Pravda in 1924, addressed the nation accordingly: "Do not let your sorrow be transformed into demonstrations of adoration of Vladimir Ilich's personality," she pleaded. "Do not put up buildings or monuments in his name. When he was alive he set little store by such things; indeed, he actively disliked them."
Her interpretation of his wishes was ignored. The Communist Party inaugurated Lenin's personality cult with a state funeral, renamed Petrograd Leningrad, and, in response to a suggestion by Stalin in conference with the Politburo, organised the permanent exhibition of Lenin's body in a grand mausoleum beside the Kremlin.
As the task of embalming Lenin was not begun until two months after his death, the embalmers necessarily were no ordinary undertakers but senior academics of advanced technical sophistication - Professor Vladimir Vorobiov, head of the anatomy department of Kharkov University, and Professor Boris Ilich Zbarsky, Assistant Director of the national Institute of Biochemistry, the father of the co-author of this bizarrely entertaining book.
The younger Zbarsky, also a distinguished biochemist, worked in the mausoleum laboratory for eighteen years. He shared the original team's anxiety about the job. Failure, they feared, might have meant their liquidation, as the authorities called the process of falling out of official favour and becoming non-persons.
Success, however, which had to be maintained perennially, was richly rewarded, with roubles, decorations such as the Order of the Red Flag of Labour and, though the Zbarskys were Jews, immunity against pogroms. For many years, their ability was considered unique. When Dimitri Ulyanov, Lenin's brother, was invited to view the embalmed corpse, he said: "I'm very moved. It takes my breath away. He looks as he did when we saw him a few hours after he died - perhaps even better."
One of the embalmers' principal benefits was access to a well-equipped, well-supplied laboratory in which they could conduct their own scientific research. And, at least once in a festive mood, Vorobiov found the embalming fluid an effective drink. It was 96 proof.
When the Germans threatened Moscow in 1941, Lenin was moved in a special train to a specially prepared sanctuary in Siberia, with the embalmers in attendance. After the Hitler War, the corpse was returned to Red Square. It remains there now, though Yeltsin has promised a referendum to decide whether to bury Lenin with his wife.
Since 1991, a new generation of embalmers from the mausoleum laboratory have ventured into free enterprise. There is a profitable trade in embalming the gang-warfare casualties of Russia's so-called Mafia.
Ilya Zbarsky, in his eighties when he embalmed his memoirs, apparently regards preservation of "the nouveaux riches" to be undignified. There are photographs that prove this point.