September, 2002

BETTER RED AND DEAD

Embalmed revolutionaries are the preserve of obsessive tomb raider Eric Ellis

I HAVE an odd passion; for dead dictators, preferably Communist, interred in mausoleums and the more lavish the personality cult the better - though I'll settle for a religious figure in a shroud.

Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, Ho, Mao, Kim, St Francis Xavier - I've done them all. Strange I admit, macabre even, but an obsession no less abiding for its lack of convention.

I encountered my first dead commie in Moscow in 1990, albeit in name only. Despatched to learn Russian in the wilderness of Moscow's south-western suburbs, I enrolled at the Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University.

The campus was named after the charismatic Congolese revolutionary, a Malcolm X lookalike for whom Moscow worked hard to sell as Africa's Che Guevera until his mysterious 1961 plane crash.

Thirty years on, passions for Lumumba died hard in Moscow. The university was built to educate the Third World's struggling masses, whom the Kremlin must've then also included Australia, with me the only student from an OECD member.

I shared classes with young Colombians, Chileans, Mexicans and Filipinos - from countries not part of the Soviet bloc. Pravilnye! Correct, explained tutor Vladimir. Better for the USSR to educate impoverished countries in the Western orbit. That way, he said, students returned home to foment Marxist revolution.

Neat idea but, as we know, didn't quite work out. Nor did my Russian fluency as this was the era of Moscow's day-long queue. Vladimir spent his days lining up for a pathetic splash of state-sanctioned vodka instead of teaching me the Cyrillic alphabet. Still, he boasted, he got paid for it anyway, which explains why the Union is no longer Soviet, or even a Union.

Vlad's non-attendance had its upside. I 'wagged' the classes he never gave to notch up a brace of dead reds, starting with Lenin - past whose waxy body I filed in his Red Square mausoleum.

My first actual corpse, Lenin's ear had been rumoured to have been bitten off by a zealous Italian tourist. It was disappointingly intact so I then moved to Stalin, evicted by Kruschev from the same mausoleum to a modest plot in the Kremlin flower beds. Near Joe was the American communist John Reed, the KGB founder Felix Dherzinsky and the original spaceman Yuri Gagarin.

I returned to the West via Prague, where the Czech dictator Klement Gottwald was next, or at least the amazing Zizkov Monument. Gottwald's embalmed body was displayed here from 1953-1962, when it was cremated because the dud Czech leaked formaldehyde.

In London, Marx in Highgate cemetery was an easy score so the following year I gawked at St Francis Xavier in Goa. His cadaver's laid there since 1605, separated from equatorial India by a straggly calico shroud and a glass casket. St. Frank is in remarkable condition, slivers of flesh clinging to a skeleton much-pillaged by pilgrims and souvenir-seekers.

But 1993 was one of my best - China's Mao Zedong in Beijing and Vietnam's "Uncle' Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. The two differed in death as in life; Mao's tomb in Tiananmen Square a jumble of souvenir sellers, noise, gaeity; Ho's refrigerated vault a study in solemnity. You can linger around Mao but humourless soldiers shuffle you quickly past Ho's ghostly remains - a shame as the Arctic air-con is a respite from Hanoi's heat.

In 1994 came my proudest pilgrimage of all - a summit with North Korea's 'Great Leader' Kim Il-sung. Or at least his statue. Kim's death was so recent that, barely six months later, North Koreans were still weeping at the foot of the 100m high bronze effigy by Pyongyang's Taedong River. Better still was just to be in Pyongyang to see this remarkable devotion. Foreign journalists are banned but I managed entry on tourist's visa - occupation golf course developer.

This was deification of the most sycophantic order. Training it from Beijing, I was whisked from Pyongyang station, rushed through immigration and limousined to the statue, where thousands of distraught devotees bowed at Kim's out-stretched arm. A team from North Korea's state TV positioned to get a good shot of the foreigner, me, paying my 'respects.' I made a deeper bow, giving prime time viewers a nice shot of my bald patch.

In 1995, in Ulan Batar, I notched Sukhe Bator and Choilbalsan, Mongolia's Lenin and Stalin, but they were only in urns. And I'm disappointed to have missed Bulgarian strongman Georgi Dmitrov - cremated in 1990, his Sofia mausoleum detonated in 1997. In 1998, it was Brasilia, that Oscar Neimeyer-designed folly of a Brazilian capital and the stunning mausoleum of the city's inspiration, President Juscelino Kubitschek.

I reckon I've almost exhausted the list. There's old socialists Augustinho Neto in Angola and Guyana's Forbes Burnham and the re-habilitated Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa but strongmen are running out.

Kim's son Jong Il in Pyongyang is barely 60 and the way 76 year-old Fidel Castro has salsaed since 1959 in Cuba, I'll be gone before he does. Still, Zimbabwe's Mugabe provides some hope for concrete contractors as does Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. And in Burma, someone will surely turn off 90-something Ne Win's life support soon.

In China, I think the show's over. Given the vigour that Beijing embraces capitalism, current President Jiang Zemin is more likely to be buried on Wall St than Wanfujing. Alongside U.S Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Perhaps.