Mr. Mayakovsky too died in the gulag,

[Grover Furr-FM]

All too often, this kind of nonsense is what passes for history about 
the Stalin period:

> Mr. Mayakovsky too died in the gulag,
>
> claims the NYT:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/theater/28embalmer.html?scp=1&sq=Fred%20Kaplan%20Theater&st=cse
>    

And this:

> Stalin had insisted on preserving Lenin’s body as a way to prop up the 
> regime’s legitimacy

I have never seen any evidence that this was "Stalin's" decision. It 
could hardly have been -- Stalin was only one of 5 or so leading figures 
at the time.

Then the writers contradicts himself!

> This idea dovetailed with a movement within Russia’s radical 
> intelligentsia, called god-building, that saw Bolshevism as the basis 
> for a new religion. ..., two of its leaders, Leonid Krasin and Anatoly 
> Lunacharsky, supervised his immortalization, as the process was 
> officially called. 

I've read this about Krasin but never looked into it.

Is there a decent historical study of how the decision to embalm Lenin's 
corpse was arrived at?

Grover Furr
Montclair State U.

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