The World’s Embalmed Leaders

When Hugo Chavez’s embalmed body is laid in a glass casket sometime next week, he will join at least eight other world leaders whose remains are on display for all eternity . . . or at least for as long as their keepers can preserve them

 

1)The Soviet Union's Vladimir Lenin's body has been embalmed in a large tomb near the Kremlin since shortly after his death in 1924, preserved by a steady 61 degree temperature and a strict regimen of mild bleachings and soaks in glycerol and potassium acetate

 

2)Joseph Stalin’s embalmed body was put on display next to Lenin on March 9, 1953. Soviet authorities ordered it removed from the tomb Oct. 31, 1961, and had it buried during a period of “de-Stalinization.” 

 

3)Mao Zedong,known as Chairman Mao's remains rest in the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in the center of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square

 

4)Body of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founding president  lies under glass for viewing purposes in a former presidential palace

 

5)Ferdinand Marcos, who died in 1989, has lain embalmed in a public mausoleum in the northwest Philippines since the government allowed his body back into the country in 1993