Lenin's embalmed body lies in Moscow's Red Square VIDEO What do Russians think? CNN's Steve Harrigan finds out (July 13) Windows Media 28K 80K

July 13, 1999
Web posted at: 12:00 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT)

In this story: Symbolic burial of communism? Even tourists don't seem to care RELATED STORIES, SITES

From Correspondent Steve Harrigan

MOSCOW (CNN) -- Vladimir Lenin, the founder of Soviet communism, has been dead for 75 years, felled by a massive heart attack at the age of 53.

His successor, Josef Stalin, ordered doctors and scientists to find a way to preserve Lenin's body. They succeeded, and Vladimir Ilich Lenin still lies in a specially designed mausoleum on Red Square, where Russians and tourists alike come to see him.

Stalin's body, too, was displayed alongside his mentor's following his death nearly 30 years later. And there he stayed until Stalin's draconian policies fell into disfavor with the Soviet government under Nikita Khrushchev. Under cover of night, the corpse was removed and buried beside the Kremlin wall in 1961, eight years after his death.

But Lenin remained on display through the Cold War, through the end of Communist rule and through the breakup of the Soviet Union in late 1991.

Symbolic burial of communism?

Statues of the Bolshevik Revolution leader watch over Moscow in 1999, as the fate of his remains is debated in political circles.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin, with only a year left in office, has resurrected the subject again, telling a newspaper he intends to bury Lenin at long last.

The move would be symbolic: Russia's first democratically elected president burying Soviet communism's founder.

"For him to bury communism, to bury Lenin, means to fulfill his historical mission," said political analyst Andranik Migranyan.

Yeltsin's Communist opposition leaders consider the talk of interment heresy and are determined to prevent it.

"No one with a head on his shoulders would do this," said Parliament member Sergei Reshulsky. "It will tear our society apart."

Even tourists don't seem to care

But on a park bench under the shadow of another Lenin statue, Muscovites show little concern about the impending battle.

"It's really not a big problem," one Russian said.

Even the tourists seem unfazed.

"Let them do whatever they want with him," one woman said. "He's dead, so put him in the ground."

The line outside the mausoleum is steady. A few hundred people a day file by to pay their respects or just to see the embalmed corpse of the man who led a revolution.

And Lenin is monitored by embalmers who periodically change his suit and bathe his body in a special chemical preparation to prevent tissue decay.

Still, despite their best efforts, Lenin's body is slowly deteriorating. And if Yeltsin has his way, the most visible sign of Russia's Soviet era may soon be buried, hidden from the eyes of the curious and the reverent alike.

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