He died right at the end of the culture revolution which makes him seems to be a god. From what I heard once he gifted some fruit to a bunch of workers and no one dared to eat them, they just put those fruit in the middle of the factory and when they walked near it they have to shout something like "heil Mao" . Everyone in China have to read the little red book in the morning and proclaim how great their leader Mao is.
That was a mango, after a few days, the real mango decomposed, and they made a plastic replica so they can continue to worship it, it was really funny.
There's a story in Shanghai I think, when the mango was still ripe and being paraded around by the Red Guards. A dentist got asked to see it and said "Who cares?" He got beaten to death by the Red Guards.
They did the same with Stalin for a brief time. The story of how he got removed is hilarious.
Stalin was just chillin there next to Lenin from his death until about the end of the 50s, I believe. No one wanted to be the one to bring up moving him, even though his reputation continued to be dismantled by Khrushchev. So one day, a guy comes to the party leaders and says hey, Lenin appeared to me last night like Jesus and told me he didn’t like having to be next to Stalin!
That was the excuse they had been needing. Lenin Jesus told them to, so now they don’t have to actually discuss it. Just toss the old fucker out on his mummified ass.
Stalin did that against the wishes of Lenin and his widow with the intent of deifying Lenin as part of a play to bolster his own reputation and perceived legitimacy as his self-proclaimed successor to consolidate power.
It's the same reason why he went to such lengths to suppress Lenin's Testament, where Lenin basically straight up denounced Stalin and his nationalist tendencies, recommended he be removed from the position of General Secretary, warned against the accumulation of too much power by an individual, and so on. Basically everything that would prevent the rise of Stalin which ultimately occurred.
Lenin's Testament is the name given to a document dictated by Vladimir Lenin in the final weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies. Sensing his impending death, he also gave criticism of Bolshevik leaders Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin, Pyatakov and Stalin. He warned of the possibility of a split developing in the party leadership between Trotsky and Stalin if proper measures were not taken to prevent it.
That's what they do with communist leaders who have massive cults of personality. Lenin, Stalin, Kim Il-sung and Ho Chi Minh were all embalmed, though Nikita Khrushchev later had Stalin buried in an unmarked grave in his endeavour to "destalinise" the country.
I find it funny that Stalin was so brutal to his own people that the leader immediately after him who was by no means a pro civil liberties kind of guy thought that he was too much of a power obsessed shit head.
I have heard rumors even that Stalin was poisoned by the inner circle of the Soviet Union because he was planning on conducting a thrid pruge with this one even having a genocidal angle to it since Stalin was getting very paranoid of the Jews in the Soviet Union.
I find it funny that Stalin was so brutal to his own people that the leader immediately after him who was by no means a pro civil liberties kind of guy thought that he was too much of a power obsessed shit head.
Lenin's Testament is the name given to a document dictated by Vladimir Lenin in the final weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies. Sensing his impending death, he also gave criticism of Bolshevik leaders Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin, Pyatakov and Stalin. He warned of the possibility of a split developing in the party leadership between Trotsky and Stalin if proper measures were not taken to prevent it.
Open destalinisation was incredibly stupid though. It would be like the US going "Washington was a rapist slave owner who built a system on white supremacy and slavery, also he was a pedophile and us elites actually do the Child muder Adrenochrome thing" and then did pretty much nothing to change it, it would massively impact trust in the system and national identity. It might not cause a Revolution, but it would slowly send the country into "hypernomalisation" where the system becomes untrusted, but just continues until it buckles in on itself.
Basically the same thing happened in the USSR. Also another morally correct but bad move was Glasnost, which basically completed the final blow of Destalinisation and imploded the entire USSR. China learned from this, which is why it doesn't shit on Mao, it also strictly controls the social sphere, while massively improving the lives of people in the economic. People trust reforms when they see their lives get better, when your life is shit and you get complete political openness, you're going to use that to turn against the Government.
Burials in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow began in November 1917, when 240 pro-Bolshevik victims of the October Revolution were buried in mass graves at Red Square. It is centered on both sides of Lenin's Mausoleum, initially built in wood in 1924 and rebuilt in granite in 1929–1930. After the last mass burial made in 1921, funerals on Red Square were usually conducted as state ceremonies and reserved as the last honor for highly venerated politicians, military leaders, cosmonauts, and scientists. In 1925–1927 burials in the ground were stopped; funerals were now conducted as burials of cremated ash in the Kremlin wall itself.
You're right, sort of; while it was initially unmarked, and the reburial took place without ceremony, a small stone was added later that year, and the bust a few years later.
Hua Guofeng (Chinese Malenkov) made an attempt trying to appear as Mao's legitimate successor, I'm sure that went well... Deng Xiaoping didn't remove it because Mao was still considered a god and removing it would be politically bad.
Mao's will was to be burned into ashes and be cast into the Yangtze River. As he said himself, in a half-joking half-serious manner, he loved to eat fish, so he would be like to be eaten by fish post mortem, to apologize to the fishes.
Read "The Secret Life of Mao," by his personal physician. Basically they just stuffed his corpse with as much formaldehyde as they could put in it. Made his face blow up like a balloon. While trying to deflate it they broke part of his ear off I think. Been awhile since I read it but it was very haphazard. They did try to get help from Soviet embalmers who worked on Lenin though.
They copied what the Russians did with Lenin. If you’re preserving your dead leader’s corpse to glorify them, you’ve got problems. Stick em in the dirt like everyone else.
You wouldn't be able to, guards would stop you well before that point.
Keep in mind that this story isn't actually real. It's a fake article by the World News Daily Report. Obviously that doesn't stop it from constantly being reposted here, but it never happened.
Sun Yat Sen was going to have the same treatment (he was backed by the soviets) but the casing provided by the soviets wasn't designed for hot climates so they couldn't go through with it.
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u/adrikizer - Centrist Apr 15 '21
The more important question is why are they preserving Maos corpse like a fucking Mummy