Boris Zbarsky (Martin Julien, left) and Vladimir Vorobiov (Hardee T. Lineham) work out some friction in a scene from Vern Thiessen's play Lenin's Embalmers. (Chronic Creative)

It’s one of the classic images of the Soviet era: long lines of reverent Russian peasants queuing to view the body of Lenin, embalmed and encased in a glass sarcophagus at a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. Apart from representing the atheist Communist state’s desire to deify the leader of the Russian Revolution, the preserved corpse once stood as a testament to the great achievements of Soviet science.

'My relatives who had emigrated from Russia, they told me a slew of great jokes about the Soviet Union. That’s when I started to think, This play needs to be a comedy.'

— Playwright Vern Thiessen

The two men responsible for that miracle of corporeal pickling were Boris Zbarsky and Vladimir Vorobiov. Their own fate is also emblematic of the ironies – and tragedies – of the Soviet Union. Zbarsky and Vorobiov are the central characters in Lenin’s Embalmers, a new black comedy by Governor General’s Award winner Vern Thiessen, receiving its Canadian premiere this month in a co-production by the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre and Toronto’s Harold Green Jewish Theatre.

In the play, directed by Geoffrey Brumlik, the Communist leadership approaches the biochemist Zbarsky (Martin Julien) shortly after Lenin’s death in 1924 with the task of preserving the chief Bolshevik’s body in perpetuity. Although Lenin (Harry Nelken) had requested a simple burial, his successor, Joseph Stalin (David Fox), wants to capitalize on the Russian passion for saints and shrines by elevating him to iconic status – part of his plan to turn Communism into the new secular religion.

To accomplish this unheard-of feat of embalming, Zbarsky calls on his old schoolmate and fellow Jew, Vorobiov (Hardee T. Lineham), a brilliant anatomist. Together they try to come up with a means of mummifying Lenin, under the most intense pressure: Succeed and they’ll be Soviet heroes. Fail and they’ll wind up in the Gulag, or worse.

Playwright Vern Thiessen. (Chronic Creative)

Thiessen’s play was inspired by Lenin’s Embalmers, a 1999 memoir by Zbarsky’s son Ilya, who served as his father’s assistant at the mausoleum. But Thiessen, a New York-based Canadian playwright, says the story of Zbarsky and Vorobiov also had a more personal appeal for him.

“My parents are Mennonites from Russia,” he explains by phone from Winnipeg, “and their experience, and the experience of my grandfathers in that time period, is quite akin to these two characters.” Thiessen’s parents, natives of southern Ukraine, grew up with Stalin’s picture on their schoolroom walls and aspirations to become Soviet heroes. In the 1930s, their fathers became victims of the Stalinist purges and were shipped off to the Gulag for supposedly traitorous beliefs. “My mother’s father never returned and was never heard from again,” Thiessen says. “My father’s dad returned after 10 years of hard labour and was a broken man for the rest of his life.”

Although Vorobiov and Zbarsky succeeded in their embalming experiment – Lenin’s corpse remains on display to this day – the Stalinist regime would later cook up excuses to oust them from their comfortable positions as eminent scientists. Both met, in Thiessen’s words, “pretty sorry ends.”

This isn’t the first time Thiessen has written a play about significant but little-known scientists. He won his 2003 Governor General’s Award for Einstein’s Gift, a drama about Einstein’s contemporary Fritz Haber, the godfather of modern chemical warfare. On the strength of that, New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre commissioned him to write Lenin’s Embalmers, using funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation earmarked for popularizing science in the arts.

That led Thiessen to seek out an expert, Dorothy Hutchins from the American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Service, who acted as his consultant on the scientific aspects of the play. He says that, beyond discussing the chemistry involved, Hutchins was invaluable in giving him a sense of the mystery and ritual that accompanies the act of embalming.

“In the play, the scene where Boris and Vlad embalm Lenin onstage ends up being quite an emotional thing,” he says. “Suddenly this black comedy gets turned on its head and becomes something that’s quite moving and magical. Which is what embalmers do. They’re a bit of a magician, a priest and a scientist, all in one.”

A scene from Vern Thiessen's play Lenin's Embalmers. (Chronic Creative)

Thiessen’s curiosity didn’t extend to witnessing an actual embalming, however. “I chose to keep it a mystery,” he says, adding with a laugh: “Maybe I just knew that I would probably faint.”

But he wasn’t squeamish about using macabre humour in the play. Boris and Vlad are portrayed as ambitious rivals who engage in comic bickering, while Lenin’s corpse occasionally comes alive and jumps off the table to crack jokes. The New York Times, reviewing the Ensemble Studio’s debut production last March, dubbed Lenin’s Embalmers “a spunky dark comedy.” You could say this spunkiness also comes from Thiessen’s parents.

“They lived through some of the worst horrors that you can imagine,” Thiessen says, “and they laugh more than anybody I know. And when I talked to my relatives who had emigrated from Russia, they just told me a slew of great jokes about the Soviet Union. That’s when I started to think, This play needs to be a comedy.”

The playwright’s parents immigrated to Western Canada in the late 1940s and still live in Winnipeg, where Thiessen was born in 1964. “They’re alive and well and in their 80s,” he says.

The Lenin mausoleum isn’t doing as well. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, its government funding was cut and it began hiring out its embalming services to private clients, including the Russian mafia. Today, Thiessen says, the mausoleum is slowly being closed down as interest in viewing Lenin’s waxy remains has waned. “I would not be surprised if, when the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution comes up [in 2017], they might finally bury him.”

Lenin’s Embalmers runs at Winnipeg’s Berney Theatre Oct. 14-24 and at Toronto’s Al Green Theatre Oct. 30-Nov. 21.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.