I see dead people

There are times of course when the best idea in life would be to shut up because you don't know what you're talking about.


I rarely do this.


So I found myself in a hostel in Moscow a few Summers ago all over excited because not only had I been presented with a set to collect that had not occurred to me before, but I was gloriously in the position of having already achieved a full set! See This Post

What is this set of which you speak I hear you cry... Dead communist leaders I answer.

Not just any sort you understand. I refer to the embalmed sort. The brains sliced for scientists of the communist future to examine and understand sort. The presented in a Mausoleum for acts of daily adoration by the proletarian masses sort.

So there I am in Moscow chatting to a couple who are heading off to Beijing the next day on the Trans-Mongolian express. Like me, they had been to see Lenin that morning. We were jawing away about whether or not he was real and so on when the chap half of the pair said he was looking forward to the rest of his travelling so he could collect a full set of dead communists. I assumed he meant Mao and Lenin. I assumed there weren't any more. I realised it hadn't occured to me to 'collect' dead communist leaders. I realised I had already seen all of them. So went my thought processes. Tick tick tickety tick. A full set. Hurrah!

"Hurrah"! I cried over-exuberantly.

"I've already done that". I yelped triumphantly.

"I saw Mao a few years ago". I boasted.

Pride comes before a fall they say and chap answered casually...

"I am looking forward to seeing Mao of course... but what did you think of Ho Chi Minh"?

"Ho Chi Minh" I enquired casually?

"Yes. He is in Hanoi. Didn't you say you've seen all the Dead communists"?

I had of course made this wildly presumptive and totally inaccurate and boastful claim, which turned out to be 33% wrong. I now had to backtrack carefully with a self deprecating story about my experience with the dead Mao.

On arrival at the Mao Mausoleum (pictured above top right), you are presented with a long queue of Chinese in their finest clothes. Mao is still hugely revered and people will save up to come to Beijing to pay their respects. While queueing you are also presented with a plastic flower stall and for Y1 (10p) you can buy a rent a bunch of plastic flowers to lay in front of Mao. Occasionally the queue halts as they close the Mausoleum to empty the flowers out.

After shuffling patiently forward, you enter the building and are reminded to be silent and not to take photos. You turn a couple of corners and it gets darker. A final turn and there he is. Chairman Mao. The Great Helmsman. And he looks like he is internally lit by an orange lightbulb actually inside his head. I almost burst out laughing at the sight of his orange luminescence. Thankfully I manage to control myself just enough to notice that the orange bulbs are in fact wall mounted. His embalming fluid is so reflective it creates a very strange effect indeed however. As you emerge blinking into the sunlight on the other side of the Mausoleum, the exit is blocked by hawkers trying to flog little red books, barbie dolls and toy soldiers.

Still installed in Red Square despite occasional reports to suggest he'll finally be laid to rest in St Petersburg, Lenin by contrast manages to cut a fine figure. Maybe it's the imposing red marble Mausoleum (you can see it behind my McShake in an earlier pic). Maybe it's the icy temperature and dead silence of the interior. Maybe it's the frost on the beard that suggests his is a real body. Or maybe it's the four guards of honour and their machine guns,. Either way, seeing Lenin instills a sense of awe and grandeur I didn't feel when I saw Mao.

Nothing comes close to the grandeur that is seeing Kim Il Sung, the dead but preserved dictator of North Korea though (Mausoleum Palace pictured below). You see the last laugh with the chap from Moscow is that he now thinks he has a full set of three dead communists, but there are in fact four. In the joining instructions to my North Korea tour was the enlightening information that one of the days involved a trip to the Mansundae Palace Mausoleum to see Eternal President, Kim Il Sung laid to rest in this rather stunning building. It is so large that there are travelators to get you in and out. Seriously. In a country that doesn't have electricity after dark, they power you in on three 400m long travelators to look at the man that has brought the country to this state.





The full grandiose experience will have to wait for another moment as it deserves a blog all to itself.

For the record, I am yet to see Ho Chi Minh, but as long as they don't embalm Castro before I do, I will indeed then have a full set of Dead Communists.