Lenin's WWII goo adventure

Surprise! We're popping in on a Sunday to answer your questions, many of which were about goo and the Canadian state of Alberta this month. Kara also tells Matt an incredible story from Russia during World War II — the Weekend at Bernie's-style odyssey that kept Vladimir Lenin's corpse safe. We're going to do this regularly, so if you have questions for Matt and Kara send them through as emails or voice notes, to [email protected]. And to ask Matt questions live as the US midterm election results roll in on November 4 at 3PM AEDT, subscribe to our brand new YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:07Speaker 01

  Australia is hurtling into a new political era and the Victorian election will be where the change happens. I'm Raph Epstein and every Friday I'm taking over the Politics Now podcast to explore the forces changing Australian politics. Can one nation turn its popular support into political power? Are voters sick of the Labor Party? And can the Liberal Party finally win in Victoria? Search Politics Now podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uabakal and Gadigal people.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. I realise this is not a day that we usually put out episodes because it's the weekend, but we're trialling something. Where maybe once a month or so, we will put out a special question and answer episode where me and Cara come on and answer any questions that you have about the show and the stuff that we cover on it. And Cara is here and we're going to do that now. Hi Cara.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Hello. Happy to be here.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  There's lots of exciting things happening at the moment.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  We've got a lot going on.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you, you, you, you went away on your honeymoon for a few weeks and now you've come back and like, we've got our own YouTube channel and we're doing live events and the midterms are happening. And so, yeah, look, you know, I hope that you were all relaxed on your trip, but well, now everything is happening all at once.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Ten times more work to do now that I'm back.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  But I'm glad. Very excited about our new YouTube channel.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, it's something that's taken quite some time to, to come about. It's something that people have been asking for, for a long time, but it now exists. You can find the If You're Listening YouTube channel and subscribe to it and you will just get If You're Listening stuff in your feed, which is very exciting. You will get our usual fully produced big episodes. You'll get some of our episodes that we currently do on Tuesdays on the podcast. We'll see if we can put some of those on YouTube as well. And we're also going to try and do live events. I'll go live and answer people's questions about big events as they're happening.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  And our first live, we've chosen a, chosen a very important event to trial this new technology out on, the midterm elections in a couple of weeks in the US.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Very high stakes.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  We're going to start it off, you know, test all the technology on the biggest international news day of the year.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  And, and so we're going to do it at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time, Australian Eastern Daylight Time, I should say, on the day after the midterms. So the midterms, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. And then we're going to come on air on the Wednesday at 3pm. And I've got a formula for why I picked that time, Cara.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Please, please, please regale us.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Well, I discovered after many years of, of, you know, covering US elections and trying to figure out when they were, because, because it's weird, because they, you know, they move around, but they're also, there is some regularity to them. It's like Easter, you know? And the rule is it's on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  First Tuesday. Hang on, for the first Tuesday after the first Monday?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  So the first Tuesday? No.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Well, it basically means that it, yeah, so it basically means that it can't be the first of November.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Okay, yes.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  So it's the first Tuesday on November, unless it's the first day of November, in which case it'll be later than that, right?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Sure, there's a rhyme for that somewhere.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  But the thing is, the, the fun thing is that that formula, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, is also the formula that sets when the Melbourne Cup is.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  It's the same, it's the exact same formula. And I was finding that, you know, the Melbourne Cup would happen and then exactly 24 hours later is when things sort of start to kick off in terms of actual results being found in a US election. The way that you know when to check in on when the results of a US election are, is go from the Melbourne Cup and then wait 24 hours exactly and then check in. And so that's why the Melbourne Cup runs at 3pm on the Tuesday and we will be live analysing the results exactly 24 hours later on 3pm on the, on the Wednesday. There you go.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  I'm not sure if that's easier to remember or harder, but it's good to have the choice now.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  People can give me feedback on that on our live event.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Please.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  So a few weeks ago, the last episode that you wrote the majority of before you went on your holiday was about the attempt from Vladimir Putin to live longer and the discoveries that have been made about the preservation of bodies and specifically the, the goo that keeps Vladimir Lenin preserved, his body preserved. I was out and my kids were hanging out with their grandparents and their grandparents decided to watch my episode. And so they watched the episode about goo. And now my kids just wander around the house saying the word goo over and over like this.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Which has been fun, but have we had any goo correspondence, Cara?

• 5:37Speaker 03

  We have had a surprising amount of goo correspondence. We got an email from Andrew who says, thanks for the show. I've been following it since the early days. I just listened to the Putin Lenin episode. It reminded me of a trip back to the UK after my year in Australia on a working holiday visa. I flew to Singapore and then made my way back overland with stops including Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow. Once I got the route worked out, I realised I could check out three of the preserved revolutionaries. They were all different experiences with Lenin being the least busy. Seeing Gagarin's tomb in the wall nearby felt almost more significant to me.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow, like that's the, that's the

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Big three.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  The big three. The big three in terms of checking out goo corpses.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  And, well, that's very exciting. But yeah, do you think he's got a point there, Cara, that there's, there's something about seeing like the body that kind of takes away from the sombre respectful vibe that you want in a tomb? Because like, you know, you go to, you go to a war memorial and that kind of thing. We don't have preserved, like weird goo bodies in there.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  We don't.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  It might be a statue, but usually it's sort of some sort of a, an object or a tomb that is symbolic of the, the person or the, the concept, rather than a literal gooed up corpse.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think it's because as a child, I had a very formative experience at Madame Tussauds Museum in the UK, where they basically have like questionable wax sculptures. Some of them are very good, some of them are not very good, of various celebrities and historic figures. And there is an uncanniness about being able to see someone kind of in the flesh, like to walk around them and see what their face looks like in 3D, that I do think undermines their status. It's got a bit of a Weekend at Bernie's energy to me, that at any point they could kind of just be like picked up and sat on a couch, you know?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Before we move on from goo though, is there anything that you learned making the goo episode that you, you know, this is inevitably happens with almost every episode, right? We find things out about something that aren't technically relevant to the story, but are fascinating nonetheless. Have you come across any goo related things that we couldn't fit into the episode?

• 8:07Speaker 03

  I absolutely have the most deranged goo story of all time. There's Nazis, there are two guys called Boris, there is a train full of goo and there is a lot of grass clippings. So perhaps that will, yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Okay. So we're going back, going back to June 1941, Germany has invaded Russia. Four days later, as the German bombers are flying over Moscow, the Russians basically get a group of guys together and they're like, we have to make sure that they don't bomb the mausoleum and Lenin's body, because that's going to make us look really bad. We've got to save this guy.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, they were also, they were also like genuinely concerned that the Nazis would take Moscow and then

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Then what, you know, they would take Lenin's body and, you know?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  And we know what they would do with it. Exactly. So they basically established a crack team of guys to come up with what to do. And the first idea, which is a terrible idea, was to fill the entire mausoleum with sand in the hopes that if it was bombed, the bombs would just bounce right off.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  So that's, that sounds brilliant.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Here's the thing, it's like, maybe that could work. I don't know if it could work. Enough guys said, that's probably not going to work. And so they needed to come up with another plan. So another guy comes in, this is Boris, and Boris is the chief goo scientist and he has been for the last 20 years. And he says, look, I don't know how the sand's going to work.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  That's, that's the whole time period, by the way. That's like

• 9:43Speaker 03

  That's the whole, he was, exactly. He was a junior, he was the junior goo guy.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  He was the junior goo and now he's the OG G O O.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Um, so he came in and basically said, look, we've actually got to take him out. The sand and the goo, they, it's not a mix that we want to um investigate. So we've got to take Lennon out of here. Fortunately, there was a secret train station under the mausoleum.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Of course there was.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  And so they prepared the cargo, Lennon's body, for moving. And they decided that, again, they, they got the crack guys together and they said, what's the least bombable town that we have here? Like, where wouldn't the Nazis want to bomb? And they decided that a town called Tuamen, which is a town in Siberia, didn't have a whole lot going on. And that the Nazis probably wouldn't bother with bombing it. So they caught the train there.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  On the Trans-Siberian.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yes. So they had three trains, one train.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Why they build that railway?

• 10:45Speaker 03

  To get Lennon out to Siberia. So.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  I like to imagine that like someone in the mausoleum has like pressed a button and then like the, the, the corpse like goes down. You know, like in, like the Thunderbirds, the sequence where the Thunderbirds slide down various slides and chutes. Uh, in order to get planted into their, um, you know, Thunderbird two. I like to imagine that, that Lennon had to go down a series of slides and chutes down onto a train, you know? And then the train takes off, off to Tu- Tu- Tuamen?

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Tuamen.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Tuamen.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  So they had two, they took three trains. Two of the trains were filled entirely with guards and one of the trains, the middle train, was filled with Lennon and the entire goo science team.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Do they have like a goo card? Do they have like the, the goo, like filled in like oil tankers for three different goos?

• 11:37Speaker 03

  I just imagine, I know again, that he was probably in like a secret goo case, but I just like to imagine that they sat him up on like a sleeper chair. While everyone else was like playing cards around him for the whole week.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  But presumably there was like goo facilities.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Comrade.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Presumably there was like.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Again, it's a Weekend at Bernie's sequel in the making.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Prequel, I suppose.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Or prequel, I guess, yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  So 10 days later, they arrive at this town, Tuamen. And once again, they're looking for the least bombable building in the least bombable city. And the least bombable building is the Tuamen Agricultural Technical College, which is just an agriculture school. So they unpack Lennon from the train, carry him to the school, carry him to the second floor and store him in classroom number 15.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  Just in my mind, like in that closet where they keep backpacks, but like some, somewhere in that room. And he remained there for four years.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Were classes still going, going on in the classroom?

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Classes ongoing. So he's there just four years.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Got their homework splayed out across the case, you know?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  That's right. Um, hanging their hats on, on him. And so he, his body was guarded around the clock and it actually was the most elite ceremonial position, basically. For the Russian guard to be guarding his body was called post number one. And so the guard that was assigned that position basically had to catch this train to Siberia and then just stand outside this classroom. And that happened for four years.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  That is such a, like a, a setup for a sitcom.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  I know.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  The goings on of the school and the teachers and the principal, like, you know, Abbott Elementary or something like that. Except also let it be Lenin's corpse and all of his guards are there. Yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  We've got a YouTube channel now, so if that's some of the bonus content you'd like to see, let us know. Um, meanwhile, back in Moscow, there was another team that was established whose job was to hide the mausoleum. Because they also didn't want the structure to be bombed. Um, so they got another guy called Boris, this is Boris the architect, as opposed to Boris the goo guy. And he was tasked with coming up with a solution to basically conceal the entire mausoleum. So this entire red pyramid in the middle of Red Square.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  And his idea was to build a big scaffold over the whole thing, cover the scaffold in canvas and then paint the canvas to look like a house. And they did the same thing with the Kremlin.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  So they made the Kremlin look like many houses, but still houses. And so they had the entirety of the Red Square, which is, I've looked this up, 73,000 meters squared. Obviously entirely empty, except for these like houses.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Which.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. My address, my address, my address, one Red Square.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Number one.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  The best real estate in Moscow.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  And it actually worked because there had been bombs falling near the Kremlin, but the Nazis never directly hit the Kremlin. And the Russians believe it's because it looked like houses.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  A Potemkin village. Brilliant.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  And then four years later, 1945, Lennon caught the train with the goo scientist back from Siberia to the mausoleum. And he has remained there ever since. And that's the story.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Wow. I mean.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  What can you say?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  I just can't stop thinking about what, what it must have been like for that normal town.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Siberian Heights High, you know, uh, or whatever.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, the cavalcade. Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Um.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Let's put that town on the map.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Uh, so we also did an episode about Canada and we've had a number of emails about that.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yes, we did. We had a great email from Stacy, who is Canadian. She says, regarding the Alberta separatist movement, I think you missed an opportunity to go into the maple syrup MAGA movement. Since the pandemic, this has been an ongoing, loud and very well-funded movement on the far right in Canada. There actually was a whole lot about Alberta that didn't make it into the episode because we wound up having to just focus mostly on Quebec. Um, so what actually is happening in Alberta?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the point that we were trying to make in the episode is really how different Alberta is from Quebec. You know, you have these two provinces in Canada. And the, the interesting sort of point that we were trying to make was that in Quebec, which has a very longstanding, long history of um separatist movements. Those separatist movements are sort of becoming less influential and people are starting to feel more Canadian in Quebec. Whereas in Alberta, which is kind of a, like a petro state. If, if Alberta was its own country, it would be, you know, one of the world's biggest oil exporters.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  It's truly an extraordinary amount of energy products coming out of Alberta and going directly into the United States. And much like, you know, some of the resource states in Australia, they kind of feel like, you know, we're creating all this export revenue. And we're not getting enough of the benefits from it. And so it's, it's not so much that the, it's not so much that they kind of go, we hate being Canadian and we don't want to be Canadian anymore. They, they just feel like they're being taken advantage of. But the interesting thing is that, you know, they, they ended up having this sort of semi referendum, a sort of plebiscite sort of thing.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Where they were sort of voting on whether they would proceed to have another vote, a binding vote on a referendum to leave Canada. And this is sort of what we were talking about at the time. And, and we got a lot of pushback from people in Canada who were sort of saying, this is, you know, a minority perspective. Not very many people in Alberta really want to separate and that kind of thing. And the, the referendum has now been held, uh, and so I can give you the result of it. It was, uh, sort of held last week. The result of the referendum was for question number, let me just go down to question number 10.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  75% voted to remain and 24% voted to, well, to hold a referendum on whether they should leave. And absolutely that is an argument, you know, that, that's an argument for there being, you know, obviously majority support for remaining part of Canada. But I, I, I think a lot of the people who were sort of annoyed at us for talking about it and sort of saying, why are you even talking about this? It's not important. It's such a small number of people.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Is most countries like don't have.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Secessionist referendums, you know.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Even, even ones that are so, that, that are, you know, roundly crushed, as this one was, you know, that is still a quarter of your population that is talking about, you know, not being part of the same country anymore, or at least, you know, proceeding to a, a binding vote on seceding from the country. And I, I don't know that you would find that proportion of West Australians or Queenslanders or Victorians, or even, you know, Californians or Texans that would be sort of keen to do that, that would, you know, would vote to separate from the federation that they are a part of. So, I mean, clearly it's not a

• 19:25Speaker 02

  sign that Alberta is about to secede, but it's certainly a sign that there is disquiet, I suppose.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  So, so yeah, it's, it's interesting that what's going on in Alberta and, and how different it is from Quebec.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  So this week, we are doing an episode about the Israeli elections, which are being held on Tuesday. And I wonder if you can give us any forward sizzle about that episode. It's a kind of, the actual elections are kind of happening at an inconvenient time for us in that they're happening kind of midweek.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Our episode will be coming out probably while the latter stages of voting, vote counting are happening. The episode won't come out before the election. It'll come out sort of during the vote count and as the coalition process sort of starts. And it's fascinating the way that Israeli elections work and how different they are, not just from Australian elections, but from, from really most elections in most parts of the world, because the, the, the key thing that's different is that there's no geographic component. There are no geographic electorates. So the way that Israeli elections work is the entire country votes as a single proportional

• 20:40Speaker 02

  vote electorate. Parties that get 20% of the vote, get 20% of the seats and parties that get, you know, 3% of the vote, get 3% of the seats, although you need to be over three and a half percent in order to get any seats at all. So if you get 4%, then you get 4% of the seats. And that basically leads to a situation where there is only a primary vote and you end up with an enormous swathe of different political parties. And the idea of any political party actually getting a, a governing majority is impossible, essentially. And the way that the Israeli election works is that basically if, unless you get a 50% primary vote, you're not getting a majority. And so every single Israeli government

• 21:25Speaker 02

  is a minority government and works with a whole bunch of different parties. And that is basically unique to Israel because there is no geographic electorates. Even in Germany, where, you know, you have a similar situation of, you know, generally minority governments. If, if one party does really, really well in Bavaria, then they're going to do pretty well in the national election. Sort of flows on and you can get quite a good proportion of seats by campaigning in one part of the country, whereas that doesn't happen in Israel. Israel is one giant electorate and it's really impossible to tell what is going to happen. One of the interesting things though, is that Israeli politicians really trust the

• 22:05Speaker 02

  polls a lot. And so what'll often happen is kind of, one party will start polling sort of very low and they'll just go, okay, well, we, we give up. We don't, we don't want, we, we don't want to be a political party anymore. And they liquidate themselves. And so you've got a situation where every single election, the Likud party, which is Benjamin Netanyahu's party, fights every single election and has done, you know, for, for all of living memory. But they are basically the only party that has existed beyond like three elections. Every other party just kind of in between each election disappears and

• 22:45Speaker 02

  reconstitutes something else and, and new leaders, the, the fame, the, you know, the top leaders sort of change parties all the time and find new alliances. And so every time they come to an election, the ballot paper is a totally different list of parties and Benjamin Netanyahu. And so it's, yeah, it's, it's interesting and it, and it's very different to basically the way that elections work in almost every other country. And it's going to be interesting to see how it all shakes out. And it's almost impossible that there will actually be a result by the time of our episode coming out. So.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  It's going to be fun and interesting for us.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. So how it will work is that we will prob, there may be a person that's leading. And then once somebody is determined as the leader, the way it works is the president, Isaac Herzog, gives that person 28 days to then form a coalition with the other parties. And if the person can form a coalition, that then becomes the governing party. Otherwise it then some, it goes to somebody else and then somebody else needs to.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, someone else tries.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Tries to form a coalition as well, which has happened in the past.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yes. Someone else will try and form a coalition. And then if they fail, then they, they, they'll basically go to another election.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  And I mean, that's why you end up with a situation where, uh, in the last 10 years, Israel has had elections in 2019, in April 2019, in September 2019, in 2020, in 2021, and in 2022. And then they've managed to actually, Bibi Netanyahu has managed to hold his government together for a full term of parliament, um, until this election now in, uh, October of 2026. And that's the first time that any Israeli government has held power for a full term since the eighties, because the coalitions just always collapse in one way or another.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  It could be a, a period of serious chaos in Israel following this vote on the 27th.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. One to watch. And we're going to be looking into some of the implications, depending on whether the leadership stays the same or changes.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Basically looking at what's at stake as those coalition talks begin. So we'll be there with that on Thursday. And, um, we'll also be back on Tuesday with something else. We haven't figured that out yet. We'll, we'll put it out. There'll be something on Tuesday, Israel on Thursday.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  All right. Catch you then.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Thanks, Cara.