The decision to preserve and enshrine Lenin's corpse was opposed to not only by his family, both his two sisters and brother objected to it as did Lenin's wife, but also likely by the great man himself. Lenin in his waning days had noted he wanted wither a simple burial or a cremation. The reason for not honoring these wishes was twofold. Firstly, there were no crematoria available in Moscow for Lenin's corpse, thus preventing the family from immediately pushing for Lenin's desired funeral. Second, a simple funeral was something not in the offing for the emerging political culture of the Soviet state. When Lenin died in 1924 there was already a strong cult of personality that surrounded him as the guiding light of the Revolution and the founder of the Soviet state. Lenin alternated between being leery of this cult of personality, but also encouraging it. Therefore it was quite natural for the Central Committee would plan a grandiose funeral and tomb.
But it was not a straight line between constructing a massive mausoleum and putting an embalmed corpse on public display. A number of members in Lenin's funeral commission opposed the idea as somewhat grotesque, but the embalming idea had two very powerful backers: Felix Dzerzhinsky and Stalin. The former would say:
if science can preserve a human body for a long time, then why not do it, the tsars were embalmed just because they were tsars. We will do it because he was a great person, unlike any other.
The duo were able to steamroll any opposition to the embalming proposals and win over a number of the inner circle to their side. The funeral committee had already used embalming methods to preserve the body for the initial throngs of viewers, so this was an evolutionary step despite the vocal opposition of Lenin's family.
The exact rationale behind the embalming of Lenin's corpse is somewhat unclear. Many of the pro-embalming camp were quite chary to explain their exact rationale for wanting to do so or admitting that embalming served the immediate interests of the Soviet state. The Central Committee member Avel Enukidze justified the embalming as a gift for future generations so that they would know the physical features of the founder of the USSR, but explicitly denied they were turning him into a quasi-spiritual relic for the Soviet state. But despite Enukidze's denials, there was an immediate propaganda value for embalming Lenin. The novel use of embalming, which preserved Lenin's skin and features, was a way to showcase Soviet science and progress. The then-recent discovery of Pharaoh Tutankhamen in 1922 was a global event and heightened awareness of mummies and other preserved bodies. The state commissioned the prominent architect Alexey Shchusev to design a permanent mausoleum and the resulting elegant design fused modern Constructivist styles with Mayan motifs, suggesting not only the inherent modernity of Lenin, but also cementing his place in global history.
These stylistic elements of the mausoleum and its displayed occupant opened up criticism that Soviet leaders were creating a religious shrine in an avowedly atheistic state. The state's encouragement of visits to the mausoleum and production of Lenin paraphernalia aped the religious practices of pilgrimages to Orthodox shrines and the household veneration of icons. Although defenders of embalming like Enukidze explicitly denied this, this secular religiosity surrounding his corpse was something immediately apparent to contemporaries and likely occurred to the Central Committee as well. Stalin was a former seminarian and Dzerzhinsky had at one point studied for the Catholic priesthood, so both were familiar both with the mechanisms of religious worship and veneration of objects. The mausoleum not only featured Lenin's body, but was adjacent to the newly established Lenin Museum that featured many personal relics of his life and work such as the gun that shot him in a failed assassination attempt, as well as the bullet extracted from Lenin's body. Many of the official tours of the mausoleum included in their itinerary a stop at the museum.
Lenin's state funeral and display helped cement a grandiose funeral culture among the USSR's leaders that would remain in place throughout the lifespan of the USSR. Although Stalin aspired to have the same preservation as with Lenin going so far to have his corpse preserved by the same methods, de-Stalinization put an end to his attempt to be elevated to the same status as Lenin. But while Lenin's preserved corpse brooked no rivals, state funerals in the USSR were both events that sanctified the individual and the current political order. The state funeral of assassinated party boss Sergei Kirov was a major media event and mass state ceremony during the Stalin period was indicative of this trend. Part of Stalin's own emerging cult of personality was for him to be the most prominent pallbearer for a figure celebrated by the state. This trend of politicized funeral processions continued despite de-Stalinization. Being afforded a prominent place in a state funeral was a sign of political power and ascendancy and one of the intelligence tasks of CIA analysts during the Cold War was to parse out political hierarchies based on Committee members' positions within the funeral process. The average Soviet citizen was also aware of the importance of Soviet funerals to existing political power structures. One Brezhnev era joke highlighted the gerontocracy of the USSR's leadership:
a Kremlin guard sought to stop a Politburo member from entering into the funeral of yet another Central Committee member by asking to see his funeral pass. The Politburo member brushed the guard's request aside by saying "I have a season pass."
The enshrinement of Lenin and the quasi-temple structure of his mausoleum gave the Soviet state a site from which to perpetuate its funeral culture that mixed death with the existing political order.
The fall of Communism might have ended the display of the corpse, and there were many voices calling for its removal, but the corpse had taken on a life of its own as one of Moscow's more prominent tourist attractions. Although it no longer received Soviet-size crowds, rumors of the corpse's imminent removal prompted waves of visitors to see it for one "last" time. The obvious fascination with seeing such a morbid curiosity lent a certain inertia for state authorities to keeping Lenin's corpse where it was. The post-1991 Communist Party also pushed for keeping the corpse in place, especially as it turned increasingly post-91 towards celebrating a variant of Russian nationalism that saw Soviet accomplishments as Russian ones. The relatively weak Russian government of Yeltsin did not want to cross the Communists in the Duma on this issue. The Putin government has made a further commitment to the keeping of the corpse on display, with the state subsidizing the embalming efforts to keep Lenin looking as he did in 1924. As with other figures of the Russian past celebrated in the Putin era like Peter I or Potemkin, it is not his specific ideology that the Putin government celebrates, but Lenin's reputation as a state-builder who elevated the power of the state. In this, there is a degree of overlap between the early USSR and the Russian Federation that has given Lenin's corpse a life of its own.
Sources
Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. Penguin Group USA, 2014.
Plamper, Jan. The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Tumarkin, Nina. Lenin Lives!: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.]: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997.