November 10, 1993

COLD WAR TO COLD STORE: THE COOLING FIELDS

HOW best to escape the heat in sweltering Hanoi? A long G & T in the Metropole Hotel bar? Visiting the homes of privileged communist party elite?Hunkering down inside one of the new air-conditioned Japanese-built Hanoi taxis? Wrong to all of the above.
The coolest place in town is inside "Uncle" Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, where the constant 12-15 degrees would easily force one into an overcoat.

In the Ho mausoleum, and in the counterpart cool rooms containing Lenin in Moscow and Mao in Beijing, adoring visitors still queue for the macabre pilgrimage to view the refrigerated remains of the strongmen who founded their communist regimes.
But the thaw in the Cold War - perhaps an unfortunate term in this context- has permitted the threat of change to seep into even these once-sacred spots.

In Hanoi, the upright old Vietnamese man in front of me confided, in conspiratorial French, that he had fought with Ho's Viet Minh forces in the independence war against the French.

"Near death" himself, as he admitted, he wanted to pay what might well be his last respects to the "father of my nation".

It was just as well he chose May. By September, the crypt usually closes as Uncle Ho savours the chemical delights of Moscow's Research Institute on Biological Structures for embalming's equivalent of a grease and oil change.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has meant Uncle Ho can't be guaranteed his annual Russian junket. The Muscovite experts who once tended Stalin - and Bulgaria's Dmitrov, Czech boss Gottwald and Angola's Soviet client Neto, among others - now have time on their hands. They fly to Hanoi to keep Ho's cadaver in good nick.

Once a gesture of communist camaraderie, the service has now become strictly business. Vietnam pays in hard currency.

At least in Hanoi, there's none of the fog of "70 per cent right, 30 per cent wrong" that Mao's memory in China has to contend with. The near-carnival atmosphere that surrounds the Mao and Lenin tombs gives way in Hanoi to a score of humourless guards, pristine in white and spaced five paces apart.

Inside the dark room, the communist hammer and sickle - not a sign often seen in today's free-market Vietnam - proudly frames the crystal sarcophagus.

A ghostly Ho lies there in state, eyes closed, his enigmatic mouth perhaps betraying his spiritual hope that he be cremated instead of put out on public display. (Mao and Lenin, too, wanted simple disposals.)

But in freer-market China and Russia, Mao and Lenin are big business.

The souvenir hawkers up to the very steps of the tombs suggests they both adhere to the same principle that many Britons say keeps their royals on their thrones - it's too profitable to consider getting rid of them.

In Beijing, the trendy Chinese girl behind me was pouring out her 22-year-old heart about Chairman Mao while waiting in about 750th position of the 1,200-odd tourists and locals making the macabre pilgrimage to the Great Helmsman.

Swathed in the wave of Mao nostalgia now sweeping China, she had travelled from Tianjin to pay the ultimate homage to Mao's personality cult.

In Moscow, tourists gather just metres from the entrance of the Lenin tomb in Red Square, snapping shutters, swilling vodka and generally being boisterous.

Visiting before communism's fall, I saw a drunk and loud Canadian get beaten by a baton-wielding security guard for his disrespect. Visiting after, I saw the same guard selling his greatcoat for 10 greenbacks to a Japanese tourist.

Authorities from all three nations have long denied persistent rumours that the figures on display in their mausoleums are not actually the real corpses but wax models.

But wax or not, all three have a long way to go before they come anywhere near the preservation standard set by the 16th century Jesuit missionary, St Francis Xavier.

His remarkably well preserved body has been on non-refrigerated display in steamy Goa since 1554.

A restorative regular visit from the Pope and Old Frank comes up smelling of roses - almost.