Grappling with the ghosts of communism past

Stalin ordered Lenin's body be put on display. Picture / Reuters

ST PETERSBURG - On the fringe of a sprawling cemetery, an unsmiling statue of Maria Ulyanova, Lenin's mother, peers into the distance as if waiting for the return of her son.

Eighty-one years after his death, his wish to be buried alongside his mother in Volkovskoye, St Petersburg, remains unfulfilled.

Instead, his embalmed corpse, replete in its three-piece suit, continues to lie in a glass case in a mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square.

It is exactly what his successor Stalin decreed, judging the mausoleum would feed a cult of personality around Lenin and boost the popularity of stalinism by association.

Yet "Uncle Joe" died in 1953 and communism is old hat. Russia has turned its back on Lenin's ideology, and many of his statues have fallen across the former Soviet Union.

Yet still the curious and the reverential troop through the tomb in Moscow. But for how much longer?

Calls for his corpse to be removed were first heard shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Then President Boris Yeltsin said Red Square should not "resemble a cemetery" but national sentiment meant he had to content himself only with scrapping "Sentry Post Number One" - the honour guard that grandiosely protected the cadaver of the "leader of the world proletariat".

The debate resurfaced this year when Georgy Poltavchenko, a prominent aide to President Vladimir Putin, said he felt it was time to close the book on Lenin.

Those who now back his relocation include famous directors, nationalist politicians, the head of the Orthodox Church and St Petersburg's Governor.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has also said he wants the body removed.

"Russia has parted with communism. Imagine Hitler lying in the centre of Berlin. Who would believe Germany had parted company with nazism?"

Public opinion on the issue seems to have shifted, too. A poll from the All-Russian Centre for Public Opinion Studies this month showed 52 per cent of Russians now think Lenin should be buried, up from 43 per cent in 1999.

Putin has remained silent on the issue, preferring to see how the debate plays out. In 2001, Putin was opposed to reburying Lenin because it might suggest that an entire generation of Soviet-minded people "had lived in vain", and lead to civil unrest.

Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the modern-day Russian Communist Party, said reburial was "sacrilegious ... irresponsible and provocative".

"With their filthy hands and drunken heads they [Kremlin officials] are crawling into the sanctuary of the state. The desire to rake up the remains of the dead is a great sin."

Though more than 150 million people are estimated to have shuffled past Lenin's waxy features since his internment in 1929, the flood has ebbed substantially to a trickle of tourists.

For communists the mausoleum is a temple and Lenin, who receives a bath of chemicals every 18 months to keep him fresh, is a secular saint.

Volkovskoye Cemetery is very different. Lenin's family plot, close to a busy road and hulking factories, carries an air of neglect.

Two women closely studying the statue of Lenin's mother believe it is time he was laid to rest properly.

One woman said it was right that Lenin was moved to be with his mother, as this was his wish.

The other repeated a superstition that has long haunted post-Soviet Russia. "Russia will only move on and leave the past and all the problems of the past behind when Lenin is properly buried. That's what people say. Why do we need that awful mummy?"

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