MORE than 80 years after the death of Lenin, his embalmed body is set to be taken from its mausoleum on Red Square and buried in a cemetery.

Georgi Poltavchenko, a former KGB officer and close friend of President Putin, suggested yesterday that Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders no longer deserved their resting places next to the Kremlin.

“Our country has been shaken by strife, but only a few people were held accountable for that in their lifetime,” Mr Poltavchenko said. “I don’t think it’s fair that those who initiated that strife remain in the centre of our state near the Kremlin.”

Before Lenin died, aged 53, in 1924 after a series of strokes, he said that he wanted to be buried alongside his mother in St Petersburg, but Joseph Stalin, his successor, ignored the pleas of Lenin’s wife and insisted that he be embalmed and placed in a specially built mausoleum on Red Square, where he has lain in state since.

Soviet leaders appeared on top of the mausoleum to review military parades and millions of Soviet citizens filed past Lenin’s waxy corpse — which is retouched annually — over the next few decades.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin, the Russian President from 1991 to 1999, tried to have Lenin buried, but he ran into strong opposition from the Communist Party. One left-wing group even threatened to detonate a bomb if Lenin was buried.

After Mr Putin took office in 2000, he calmed passions by postponing the burial plans and reinstating a 24-hour guard at the mausoleum. “Many people connect their lives with the name of Lenin,” he said at the time. “Burying Lenin would mean . . . that they had lived in vain.”

Many older Russians still agree. Svetlana Linnikova, 62, a former machinery factory worker, said that she could not imagine Red Square without Lenin’s mausoleum.

“Why are they talking about burying Lenin? They should bury all those oligarchs first! Lenin did more for us than this lot,” she said, gesturing towards the Kremlin.

Mr Putin has managed to tap into such nostaglia by reviving Soviet symbols, including the national anthem and the red banner as the military’s flag.

This year he stunned Western leaders by declaring that the Soviet Union’s collapse was “the biggest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”.

Human rights groups are also concerned about recent moves to rehabilitate Stalin, including erecting new statues in his honour.

As the Soviet generations grow old, the Kremlin is thought to be keen to move away from its Communist past and define a new national identity. If Lenin is reburied, Russian authorities will most likely also move Stalin’s remains. His body was originally placed in Lenin’s mausoleum after his death in 1953, but was removed and buried beneath the Kremlin’s walls in 1961.

Giorgi Khaindrava, the Georgian Minister for Separatist Conflicts, has offered to rebury Stalin in Georgia, the former Soviet republic where he was born.

LYING IN STATE

January 21, 1924 Lenin dies

January 27, 1924 Coffin placed in mausoleum on Red Square

1924-1972 More than 73 million people visit Lenin's tomb

1953 Stalin's body placed in mausoleum

1961 Stalin's body buried beneath Kremlin

1993 Yeltsin removes honour guard

2001 Honour guard replaced by Putin

2004 Lenin's embalmers say that he can last 100 more years

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