21.01 Documents Reveal Mammoth Hunt for a Suit for Dead Lenin

MOSCOW, January 21 (Kevin O’Flynn for The Moscow News) – It was a task for the finest tailor: Create a new suit for the country’s most revered dead man. Except where do you get a top tailor and the right material in the late 1960s Soviet Union?

As Soviet leaders prepared to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967, the workers in the Lenin Mausoleum noticed that Vladimir Ilyich’s suit was looking a bit shabby after 40-plus years of lying in state on Red Square, and thought of finding him a new one.

The saga of getting a suit for Lenin would last almost a year, involve thousands of Soviet employees, numerous institutes and a parcel from New Zealand, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Monday on the 90th anniversary of Lenin’s death, citing newly declassified documents.

It was "epic work," Lyudmila Antonova of the Russian State Archive’s branch in Samara told the newspaper.