Recently in The New York Times there appeared an article that was both funny and fascinating at the same time. The headline for the story read, With Lenin’s Ideas Dead, What to Do With His Body? The story centered on what to do with the body, the physical remains of Vladimir Lenin, the founder and former leader of Russia from 1917-1924.

You may remember that Russia was once ruled by a monarch known as the Czar, and the last of those Czars was killed as part of an overthrow of the Russian government led by a group known as the Bolsheviks. Lenin was the leader of that movement and became leader of the country until his death in 1924 at the age of 53. In honor of their fallen leader, the Russian government sealed Lenin’s embalmed body in a glass mausoleum so that people could file by his grave and pay their respects.

That must have been viewed as a fitting way to revere the man who forged the doctrines by which that country was run. For about 70-years the movement started by Lenin resulted in the creation of a political and military superpower known as the Soviet Union. That nation was the rival of the United States for a period of time known as the Cold War. Hostilities between our two countries lasted from the end of World War II until the fall of the Soviet Union on November 9, 1989. That was the day the Berlin Wall that symbolically divided the east from the West was torn down, and that was the day when the great Soviet Empire began to unravel.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s we lived in daily fear of being attacked by atomic weapons launched from the Soviet Union. We would practice getting underneath our desks at school as protection from the blast of the rockets. My former congregation, St. Paul Baptist Church in Montclair, New Jersey had been designated as an air raid shelter and had been stocked with supplies to provide for people if an attack were to take place. The whole world was living on edge as a result of the constant tension between the two superpowers; the Soviet Union and the United States of America.

You may remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the Soviet Union attempted to set up missiles on the island of Cuba; just 90 miles south of the state of Florida. For about two weeks, the world may have come closer to total annihilation than at any time before or after in the history of the planet. I cannot count the number of movies and TV shows that centered on the great danger that the Soviet Union posed to our country and to the rest of the world. Even though Lenin was long since dead, the political ideology he established controlled nearly one-half of the land and half of the people on the face of the earth. At the heart of that vast empire was the city of Moscow, and at the heart of the city of Moscow was Lenin’s tomb where his actual embalmed body was on display every day.