Production
Elastica
Distribution
Elastica
Duration
1h 30
Lenin’s tomb on the Red Square is more than a resting place: it is the beating heart of an era that shaped the twentieth century. Here, amidst the stillness of red granite, lies the embalmed body of a man that disrupted history and rendered the idea of revolution eternal. But what happens when time passes and the ideology that made him an icon dissolves?
Lenin isn’t just a leader, he is an enigma spanning eras, surviving the fall of the USSR and re-emerging as a symbol in Putin’s Russia of today. From his ascendance to his leading of the Bolshevik uprising, to the illness that heralded his decline, this reading reconstructs the mystery of the body that cannot be put to rest, of memory that can’t be eradicated. Because his death – feared, hidden, forbidden – is also the mark of a power that has always needed his presence to be legitimate.
Following Lenin through his secret rooms, his travels and inaccessible documents for a century, the story unveils the background behind his embalming, entrusted to a reluctant scholar, and the meaning of a political experiment that challenged the very nature of history. A reflection on the Russia of today and yesterday, on its continuities and its fractures, on a body that continues to disrupt the present.
