It’s a process described as “not a pretty sight” that involves the

It’s a process described as “not a pretty sight” that involves the extraction of all the blood from a corpse. But if late North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is to be embalmed, then Russia has expertise stretching back to the embalming of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.

The authorities in Pyongyang have not revealed their intentions over the future of the corpse of Kim. But his father and predecessor — Kim Il-Sung who died in 1994 — was embalmed by Russian specialists and currently lies in a mausoleum.

“It’s not a pretty sight,” Russian specialist Pavel Fomenko, who travelled to North Korea as a member of the Russian team that helped embalm Kim Il-Sung, said of the procedure.

Despite the fall of the Soviet Union two decades ago, Lenin’s embalmed corpse still lies in the specially-built mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow.

Its condition is maintained by the Laboratory of the Mausoleum of V.I. Lenin which was set up in 1939 although now, bizarrely, it is known as the Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (VILAR).

Its expertise was also used to embalm the body of Joseph Stalin, although his body was later buried beside the Kremlin walls in 1961 when the wartime dictator’s murderous legacy was revealed.

Other leaders embalmed in a similar way included Bulgarian Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov 1949, Czechoslovak president Klement Gottwald, Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh, Angolan president Agostinho Neto and Gyuana president Forbes Burnham.

Fomenko, 78, said a million dollars had been spent by the North Korean government on the embalming of Kim Il-Sung and he did not expect that money would pose any problem this time either.

The preserved body of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong is in a special mausoleum in Beijing.

Source AFP