Kamsusan Mausoleum discussion
My traveling comrade at Knife Tricks points to an interesting claim by an L.A. Times Journalist that the body of Kim il Sung on display in Kamsusan Memorial Palace is actually made of wax.
There are currently four communist leaders on display in this manner (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), Ho Chi Minh, Chairman Mao Zedong, and President Kim il Sung), and claims that they are not the actual bodies have been part of travel folklore for some time. Joseph Stalin’s body was on display next to Lenin, but was later removed. Chairman Mao’s body is reportedly swapped out with a wax duplicate occasionally, and people in the former Soviet Union have all sorts of stories about individuals winning “Lenin look-a-like” competitions and then promptly disappearing.
I suspect that all four bodies are at least real bodies. I have seen three of the four myself, and the only reason that I am not four-for-four is because Ho Chi Minh was in Russia getting touched up when I visited Hanoi in 1996. Several years later I had a conversation with an ABC reporter based in Asia who told me that there was in fact a secretive Russian firm that exclusively serviced these corpses. (If anyone knows anything about this firm, please let me know). This seems like a lot of trouble to go through if all they were doing was re-sculpting wax. If this was the case, then I doubt that they would go through all the risk and expense of shipping the bodies so frequently unless–as game theory teaches us–going through all the trouble makes their organic composition seem more likely. Occam’s Razor applies unless someone can give me a reason to believe a more complex scenario.
I have read (although forgotten the cite–so disregard if necessary) that Kim il Sung was supposed to be buried in Kim il Sung Square in the pavilion that is now used for viewing parades and dancing. After his death, plans were developed to construct what is now Kamsusan Mausoleum. One other thing to note, which the LA Times and most other travel accounts fail to mention, is that the softball-sized tumor which grew on the left-hand side (facing him) of Kim il Sung’s neck (which is why official portraits are taken from a slight angle on the right side) was removed (or hidden by the pillow) so that it is not visible at all to the millions who have visited the presidential mausoleum.
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:22 am
[…] I initially posted on this topic here when my friend at Knifetricks pointed me to an LA Times article in which the author insinuated that Kim il Sung’s remains were actaully wax. Naturally, Professor Lankov kows quite a bit more about this topic than the general public and I wanted to excerpt from his writings here to update readers on some little known information: […]