Tombs of the Great Leaders
Gwendolyn Leick
Since ancient times, tombs and mausolea have been built to ensure that exceptional individuals remain in the collective memory. Memorializing those who have changed the course of history, such sites enable real deeds to become the stuff of legend and consolidate a leader’s repute; but these sites of memory also serve the political needs both of the time and of subsequent regimes. How is politics played out, and history commemorated, in these locations? Why do they become pilgrimage sites? How do these structures convey meaning, and can they safeguard a leader’s immortality, particularly in the context of changing political conditions?
Tombs of the Great Leaders traces the development of the political tomb since the Bronze Age to today, focusing on 20th-century memorials housing communist leaders, from Lenin in Moscow to Mao Zedong in Beijing, to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, and Kim Il-Sung in Pyongyang. It also looks at the attempts by fascist rulers Franco and Mussolini to immortalize their memories. It explores the grand monuments erected for the founders of new nation states, including Kemal Ataturk in Ankara, Ziaur Rahman in Dhaka, Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Karachi, and the Sun Yat-sen on Purple Mountain.
Leick shows how these mausoleums and tombs have become sites of pilgrimage, and describes the actual experience of visiting the sites, the responses they elicit and the context in which they are viewed today. This book is a fascinating and revealing study of the self-perpetuation of politicians and leaders, despots and dictators.
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About Gwendolyn Leick
Reviews for Tombs of the Great Leaders
Choice
Visiting a remarkable amount of (mostly, if not exclusively) dictators resting places worldwide, she photographs and describes them and the careers of the bodies they contain. It sounds morbid, but isnt the result is fascinating, funny and ingenious.
Icon Magazine
Tombs of the Great Leaders is a well-written, richly illustrated and well-researched study of the resting places of those men who sought to address the violence of colonialism, oppression and inequality with another form of violence, often with tragic consequences, or of those less idealistic rogues who simply traded in violence, power and money for their own sake.
Church Monuments
Leicks detailed account . . . both fascinates and appals. This book provides a funerary history of the twentieth century that is unique it its scope, and it is particularly stimulating because it is neither a Euro-centric nor an Anglo-American view of our times but a genuinely global reading . . . laced with humour and surrealism.
The Fortnightly Review