In memoriam

Legend has it that Kim Jong Il's birth coincided with a shooting star, which brought forth a spontaneous change from winter to summer. A double rainbow was said to have been seen in the heavens.

Now, after his death from "physical and mental exhaustion," the "Dear Leader" is going to be embalmed, preserved for eternity and laid to rest next to his father, Kim Il Sung. Since dying in 1994, the body of the "Eternal President" has lain in the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

According to recent reports in the North Korean media, a new bronze statue of Kim Jong Il is to be erected as well as "towers to his immortality." Pictures of the smiling dictator will be put up all over the country and his birthday, February 16, will be renamed the "Day of the Shining Star."

Thus, the personality cult will be perpetuated and Kim Jong Il will join a long line of socialist dictators who have had the dubious honor of being embalmed and put on public display.

Cult of personality

Although the cult of personality was important in National Socialist Germany, fascist Italy and several authoritarian regimes in the Arab world and Central Asia, embalming and enshrining leaders seems to be unique to socialism.

Lenin was the first modern-day leader to enjoy the privilege despite his own opposition to the practice and that of his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

"I have a great request of you," she wrote in an open letter to the Russian people, which was published in the party newspaper Pravda. "Do not permit your grief for Ilyich [Lenin] to take the form of external reverence for his person. Do not raise memorials to him, palaces named after him, splendorous festivals in commemoration of him. To all this he attached so little importance in his life, all this was so burdensome to him."

However, Stalin ignored this request, well aware of the symbolism of Lenin's death and how it could be orchestrated to serve him and the party.

After the first attempt to embalm Lenin failed, the anatomy professor Vladimir Vorobyov was brought in to carry out the gruesome task. He removed all the internal organs, cleaned the body with distilled water and injected it with a cocktail of chemicals. He put in false eyes, sewed up his mouth and sprayed the face with hydrogen peroxide to give it a rosy complexion. A mausoleum was built on Moscow's Red Square and Lenin's body remains on display today.

For a short period, Lenin even shared his place of rest with Stalin, but after Khrushchev denounced his legacy in a speech to the Twentieth Party Congress and initiated a de-Stalinization process, the second Soviet dictator's embalmed body was removed and buried behind the Kremlin.

The costs for maintaining Lenin's embalmed body amount to $1 million each year - every 18 months, Lenin's body undergoes a special chemical bath - but all previous attempts to bury him have failed, as he remains a revered figure among the older generation in particular.

Propaganda potential

It is this perceived reverence among the population and the potential for propaganda which convinced the party apparatus in Vietnam and China to later embalm leaders Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong respectively, despite their explicit requests to be cremated.

But no other leader was given this privilege after them - the process takes at least a month, is extremely expensive and maintenance costs are very high.

However, once again, Kim Jong Il is defying tradition. In death, as in birth, the Dear Leader is being given special treatment.

Author: Rodion Ebbighausen / Anne Thomas (AFP)
Editor: Darren Mara