The last leader of the Soviet Union said today that it was time to consider burying the body of Vladimir Lenin.

Mikhail Gorbachev said that Lenin’s body should be removed from the mausoleum on Red Square and buried, as the Bolshevik revolutionary’s family had wanted. But the former Soviet president gave no indication of when he believed the corpses of Lenin and other Soviet leaders would be removed from the Kremlin.

“One day we will come to see no cemetery or Lenin’s body near the Kremlin Wall. He should be committed to the ground,” Mr Gorbachev told reporters in Moscow. “I think this will happen. Time will tell.”

The issue remains highly sensitive for Russia’s leadership, even though most acknowledge the absurdity of keeping Lenin on display 16 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The mausoleum used to attract long lines of visitors during Soviet times as school parties, tour groups, and true-believers queued to pay their respects to a figure elevated to almost mythical status by party propaganda.

Russia’s much-shrunken Communist Party still lays flowers at the mausoleum to mark Lenin’s birthday and death. Otherwise, the only people who visit now are tourists curious for a glimpse of the embalmed body 84 years after Lenin’s death.

Boris Yeltsin ended the tradition of changing the Kremlin honour guard each hour outside the mausoleum. But neither he nor Vladimir Putin were willing to order Lenin’s burial. Mr Putin cautioned in 2001 that removing the founder of the communist state from Red Square would amount to telling a generation of older people “that they have been following false values and that they have lived for nothing”.

Mr Gorbachev has also previously opposed moves to bury Lenin, saying in 2005 that “this moment has not come yet”. The Communists threatened then to mount a campaign of civil disobedience against attempts to bury Lenin.

Mr Gorbachev, 77, also backed a campaign to establish a fitting memorial to the millions of people who were persecuted by the Soviet regime and died in the gulags. The campaign is being led by the Memorial human rights organisation, which has documented the repressions that began under Lenin and peaked with the purges launched by his successor Joseph Stalin.

“This is a big problem for our country. It touches almost every family, millions of our country’s people. We should do much more. The rehabilitation of the victims is still not complete,” said Mr Gorbachev.

“There is of course the literature, the archives, the memory passed on by our parents but there isn’t a single space to bring together this sadness.” Mr Gorbachev supported calls to establish part of the memorial at Moscow’s notorious 18th Century Butyrka prison, where detainees were taken before being sent into prison camps spread across Central Asia and Siberia.

A statement signed by Mr Gorbachev and other prominent intellectuals criticised recent moves to rewrite Russian history and restore Stalin’s image as a great leader. It said: “The true history is giving way to myths and coldly written paragraphs in textbooks. On the basis of a voided memory, Stalin’s sinister image is returning, this time as an effective administrator.”

Critics have accused Mr Putin of glossing over the horrors of the communist past in a new history textbook for schools, which described Stalin as “one of the Soviet Union’s most effective leaders”.

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