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28th September 2005, 15:39
Kremlin aide wants Lenin's corpse buried
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A top Kremlin aide said on Wednesday Vladimir Lenin should be taken from his Red Square mausoleum and buried, reigniting a discussion about the Soviet leader's final resting place.
The fate of Lenin's embalmed body has been controversial since the end of the Soviet Union, where his tomb was an essential site of pilgrimage for generations of communists, with 1990s debate being postponed by leaving him where he is.
"Our country has been shaken by trouble more than once ...," said Georgy Poltavchenko, President Vladimir Putin's envoy in Central Russia, according to Interfax news agency.
"I do not think it is entirely correct that those who started these troubles should be located by the Kremlin, at the very center of the state," he said.
Passions ran high over the issue after the Soviet collapse. One leftist group threatened to detonate a bomb in Moscow if Lenin, whose red granite mausoleum dominates the cobbled expanse of Red Square, was buried.
Putin calmed passions in 2001 by saying Lenin, who died in 1924 after leading the Bolshevik revolution, could stay where he was until a majority of people wanted him to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg.
Poltavchenko seemed to think that time was nearly at hand.
"I think that the time comes for all of us to be buried in mother earth," he said.
09/28/05 10:34
© Copyright Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of Reuters Ltd.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A top Kremlin aide said on Wednesday Vladimir Lenin should be taken from his Red Square mausoleum and buried, reigniting a discussion about the Soviet leader's final resting place.
The fate of Lenin's embalmed body has been controversial since the end of the Soviet Union, where his tomb was an essential site of pilgrimage for generations of communists, with 1990s debate being postponed by leaving him where he is.
"Our country has been shaken by trouble more than once ...," said Georgy Poltavchenko, President Vladimir Putin's envoy in Central Russia, according to Interfax news agency.
"I do not think it is entirely correct that those who started these troubles should be located by the Kremlin, at the very center of the state," he said.
Passions ran high over the issue after the Soviet collapse. One leftist group threatened to detonate a bomb in Moscow if Lenin, whose red granite mausoleum dominates the cobbled expanse of Red Square, was buried.
Putin calmed passions in 2001 by saying Lenin, who died in 1924 after leading the Bolshevik revolution, could stay where he was until a majority of people wanted him to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg.
Poltavchenko seemed to think that time was nearly at hand.
"I think that the time comes for all of us to be buried in mother earth," he said.
09/28/05 10:34
© Copyright Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of Reuters Ltd.