Robert Craven - Get Lenin

Kincaid explained: ‘Lenin’s tomb is being transported out to the Ural mountains as soon as our victorious forces near Moscow. I and Reichsfuhrer Himmler have devised a plan with Herr Goering here …. ’ Goering was smiling through what seemed to be a pleasant dream, ‘… to steal Lenin beneath the noses of the Russians. Using a crack commando unit, and a-state-of-the-art airship, we will bring him to German soil. Herr Regan, you will capture the whole thing on film. Naturally with an American financial backer and a famous cameraman, there could be no possibility of a credibility issue. I’ll have every cinema from the west to east coast showing it, with syndicated rights for the Far East and the United Kingdom.’

Eva's mind was for a moment shut down … they were actually going to do it. Kincaid spoke of the footage as if it were a Saturday morning adventure reel.

‘And we will display the tomb in a museum when Speer commences the new citadel,’ grinned Goebbels.

A pretty blonde secretary came in with coffee, pastries and fresh bread rolls. Amid the groans from the sleeping Goering, they sat, smoked and chatted. Regan, animated, told them how he would film it, jumping up and making a frame using his hands. By the way they talked, Eva thought, you’d think they were going to make Lenin an overnight star.

Moscow 17th October 1941

The room went silent as the phone beside Joseph Stalin rang. He listened intently to the message from the Workers' Defence Zone, Moscow district. Looking around the table he made deliberate eye contact with Andreyev, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Mikoyan, Molotov, Khrushchev, Beria and Shvernik. The Politburo had been summoned in haste and they knew by the look on his face the news was the worst.

Stalin replaced the receiver slowly, his face sunken in disbelief. The Russian revolution had lasted twenty-four years and it was almost over. We’ll be the laughing stock of Europe , he thought reaching for his pipe. He looked up at the sitting Politburo’s faces. ‘German panzer tanks have been spotted at the city limits. Let’s get Comrade Lenin out of Moscow while we can.’

Below the city, an armoured train sat low on the rails, steam billowing into the frigid night. The locomotive was camouflaged and the carriages were filled with elite NKVD Internal Troops. Ninety soldiers, fully armed and provisioned, led by their political officers and commissars, boarded quickly.

The largest carriage was reserved for ‘The Boss’, Lenin in his tomb. The interior resembled something between a funeral parlour and a chemist’s laboratory. Constructed to survive tank shells, it sat between two heavily armed troop carriages. A custom gantry had been assembled to allow the sarcophagus to glide into it along a runway. Once the embalmers and chemists had boarded, it was then sealed with double-blast doors. The locomotive slipped out of the underground cavern, gradually increasing speed, out beneath suburbs, bursting out into the open five miles past the city limits.

It was seven minutes past midnight.

The remaining troops, who had escorted the coffin returned to the city barricades in readiness for the German troops.

On board, Dr. Zbarsky and his team set to work on the body with a sense of urgency. The journey was going to take at least 24 hours depending on whether or not they encountered enemy forces. Any exposure to air would lead to further deterioration, though the sub-zero Moscow air was of help.

They worked quickly, injecting preservatives and chemicals into the body. Under the artificial light, Lenin looked fragile and hollow, like a dead moth’s exoskeleton. Using a mixture of glycerine, potassium acetate and hydrogen peroxide for the skin's dark spots, they brought Lenin back to his former glory.

The new sarcophagus was fixed to an on-board generator keeping it at a temperature of 61 degrees and at a constant humidity. On arrival at the new facility at Tyumen, the body would be immersed into a chemical bath consisting of alcohol, glycerol, distilled water, and quinine. With a special suspension system to allow for the rolling of the train, Lenin almost seemed to smile beneath the glass. He appeared for all the world as if he were a day-tripper going to his favourite health spa, enjoying a nap.

German Army Group South/ Forward Command — October 1941

The horizon seemed endless, white on white — snow and sky — merging into a blur. Heading this far north, it was impossible to tell if it was night or day, or the position of the sun.

The summer dust and heat had given way to drastic temperature drops and mud, miles of mud. Entire columns had come to a halt in the mire, stretched beyond the reach of the supply lines. The advance was a mirage; points on the horizon never seemed to get closer.

Captain Klaus Brandt looked skyward, watching along with the other units the Luftwaffe supply drop, a week overdue. The weather had been severe, turning the diesel in the vehicles into a gel that lodged in fuel pipes, resulting in engine blocks being lifted out, stripped down and cleaned. Hot food was freezing in billet cans before it could be consumed.

The Chechen sniper who had joined up a month earlier remarked this was a pretty mild late-Autumn for this region.

Canisters fell from the sky gracefully attached to parachutes from the aircraft banking up into safer skies. Under distant Soviet strafing fire, they were retrieved and brought to the mobile hospital tents by half-starved soldiers. Hoping for food and medical supplies, they were bitterly disappointed when the canisters were prised open.

‘Christ,’ breathed Brandt — pepper, cigarettes and coffee were all they contained — all of them. He allowed a smile to crack along across his drawn features. ‘Only Kant could get his dream supply drop,’ he mused out loud.

The rest of the unit laughed. Sergeant Erik Kant was the only man Brandt had seen who hardly ate at all. Kant drank coffee of a tar consistency and chain smoked even under heavy fire. If it wasn’t for his inclination to act of his own accord, he’d be a model German soldier. Kant gave a lupine grin amid his beard as he stashed his cigarettes into his top pocket.

The canisters were broken open and the parachutes were cut up to be used as extra layers of insulation under uniforms.

A thin army private approached Brandt and saluted. ‘The General wishes to talk with you and the Sergeant, Captain, Sir.’

They made their way across a rutted field where the Engineer Corps were trying to get vehicles moving. The air was filled with men cursing and engines over-revving. Exhaust fumes rose up into the frigid air, forming gun-grey clouds. Horses and mules were strapped up to heavy trucks and supply half-tracks, and were being whipped to pull them from the mud. In the white night it made a depressing spectacle.

General Maximilian Fretter-Pico stood with his general staff in his command tent reading dispatches when the news of the supply drop reached him. ‘At least we’ll get a decent cup of coffee this week, Gentlemen,’ he said dryly.

Four months into Operation Barbarossa, the army was bogged down and his rear units were fighting a cat-and-mouse-war with partisans and the Red Army. Fretter-Pico smiled at one adjutant’s comment that ‘the front was the safest place to be at the moment.’

He instructed the one unit he could rely on, dispatching horsemen back with wagons to collect urgent supplies. They were travelling back with the light-infantry to Army Group Central. These days any re-supply trip was turning into a suicide mission but, if he was to press on, the army needed fuel, food and medicine and luck with the weather. If not, they would start slaughtering the horses for food as Napoleon had done one hundred and thirty years earlier.