The Embalmers

2026 Austin Semifinalist - top 2% of 12, 500 submissions.
When Vladimir Lenin dies on January 21, 1924, Soviet officials face an immediate political problem. Hundreds of thousands of mourners are expected to travel to Moscow, yet Lenin’s body is already beginning to deteriorate. What begins as a request for temporary preservation soon becomes something unprecedented: the Communist Party wants Lenin displayed not for days or weeks, but indefinitely.

Renowned pathologist BORIS ZBARSKY is summoned to the Kremlin and ordered to accomplish what biology says is impossible. Working with Dr. Abrikosov and Dr. Vorobiev, Boris begins experimenting with vascular infusions, glycerol, potassium acetate, alcohol, acetic acid, and other chemical treatments. His nineteen-year-old son, ILYA, becomes his assistant, fascinated by both the scientific challenge and the importance of their subject. Boris’s wife, ANNA, sees something more troubling. The Party is not merely preserving a dead man; it is transforming Lenin into an immortal symbol of political power.

As mourners file through a temporary wooden tomb in Red Square, mold, moisture, discoloration, and tissue collapse threaten the illusion. Boris warns Party officials that biology cannot be commanded, but they make clear that failure is not an acceptable outcome. When he is ordered to sign a commitment to preserve Lenin indefinitely, Boris crosses the line between medical science and political complicity.

Architect Alexey Shchusev designs a permanent stone mausoleum that functions as both tomb and stage. Lenin rests beneath glass while Soviet leaders stand on the tribune above him, presenting themselves as the rightful heirs to the revolution. Beneath the mausoleum, Boris and Ilya establish a secret laboratory where every change in Lenin’s appearance is measured, treated, and concealed. Annual inspections, chemical baths, corrective procedures, and carefully controlled lighting transform preservation into ritual.

Anna remains the family’s moral conscience. She repeatedly reminds Boris that Lenin had a mother and a family who might have preferred a burial. While Boris insists that he is preserving tissue rather than ideology, Anna understands that the distinction is disappearing. The more successful his techniques become, the more completely the regime can use Lenin’s body to manufacture permanence.

Under Joseph Stalin, the work becomes even more dangerous. Stalin personally inspects Lenin and warns Boris that the people must never witness visible change. The scientists’ notes are duplicated for the Party, inspections become unannounced, and a biological imperfection could be interpreted as political failure. Boris realizes that he and his family are no longer merely responsible for Lenin’s appearance; their lives may depend upon it.

When surface treatments no longer suffice, Boris and Ilya close the mausoleum and immerse Lenin’s entire body in a chemical solution. The procedure succeeds. What once seemed impossible becomes an established protocol, and Ilya grows increasingly confident in the work. Boris, however, becomes frightened by their success. They are no longer slowing decay. They are standardizing an illusion.

When Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union in 1941 and Moscow is threatened, the government secretly evacuates Lenin’s body to Tyumen, Siberia. Boris, Ilya, and Anna accompany it aboard a heavily guarded train. Removed from the granite, ceremony, and crowds, Lenin appears strangely ordinary—a dead man on a table in a makeshift warehouse. Yet even in exile, the family must maintain the fiction that he remains untouched in Moscow.

Following the Soviet victory, Lenin is returned to Red Square. The crowds, parades, and political ceremonies resume, but Boris is aging and Ilya is assuming greater responsibility. Then Stalin dies in 1953, and the scientists are ordered to preserve him as well. Stalin’s embalmed body is placed beside Lenin, forcing the laboratory to maintain two political icons with separate chemical cycles and different rates of deterioration.

Boris dies in 1954 and receives the ordinary burial denied to the man he spent three decades preserving. Ilya inherits both the laboratory and his father’s burden. Anna recognizes the bitter irony: Boris lies beneath a simple stone while Lenin remains on display, unchanged for the public.

In 1961, during de-Stalinization, Ilya receives another secret order. Stalin’s body is to be removed from the mausoleum that same night. Without ceremony or public explanation, the former dictator is taken from beside Lenin and buried near the Kremlin Wall. By morning, the plaque bears only Lenin’s name. The regime has edited its own history, and the public ritual continues as though Stalin had never occupied the space.

As the decades pass, preserving Lenin requires increasingly elaborate intervention. Tissue thins, facial contours change, and synthetic supports replace what nature has taken. Under filtered light, the body continues to appear whole. Anna warns Ilya that his father never feared failure as much as he feared success. When she dies, Ilya is left alone with the responsibility that has consumed his family.

By the late 1980s, Soviet citizens no longer approach the mausoleum with the reverence of earlier generations. Tourists replace pilgrims, government priorities change, and questions about how much of Lenin remains original become harder to avoid. Ilya insists that enough remains for Lenin to remain himself, but even he can no longer define what “enough” means.

During the attempted coup and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, power flickers beneath the mausoleum, guards abandon their posts, chemical supplies become uncertain, and state funding disappears. As a new flag rises over Moscow, Ilya and his shrinking staff struggle to preserve the body through failing equipment and political chaos. The state that ordered Lenin preserved has collapsed, but Lenin remains.

Private foundations eventually offer to finance the laboratory, turning a once-sacred duty of the Soviet state into a matter of contracts, donations, and heritage conservation. Politicians, priests, historians, and citizens argue over whether Lenin should finally be buried beside his mother. Ilya does not oppose burial, but he fears that removing Lenin will allow Russia to pretend the system built in his name never existed. Preservation, he argues, forces the country to confront its history rather than erase it.

During one final immersion cycle, the chemical solution distorts Lenin’s face until it is momentarily unrecognizable. Ilya allows the distortion to remain before gently restoring the familiar illusion. He records “Cycle complete,” closes the logbook, and leaves Lenin as generations have seen him—peaceful, unchanged, and suspended outside time.

Lenin remains on public display in Red Square. The Soviet Union is gone, Stalin has been removed, Boris and Anna are buried, and Ilya’s life has passed into history. Yet the body endures, preserved not only by science but by a nation’s unresolved struggle with power, memory, and the dangerous human desire to make history permanent.