Yet again Boris Yeltsin has stirred up a hornet's nest with his proposal for a referendum on whether to remove Vladimir Lenin from his mausoleum on Red Square and bury him in St Petersburg.
On Sunday, July 6th, a previously unknown group calling itself the
Revolutionary Military Council laid packets of explosive at the base of another Moscow landmark, the huge memorial to Tsar Peter the
Great, in an attempt to blow it up in protest at the plan to rebury
Lenin. Several people are facing charges over the incident.
Yeltsin's desire to bury, physically and metaphorically, the founder of the Soviet state is supported by the Russian Orthodox
Church, whose spokesman called Lenin's embalmed body an "anti-relic and a symbol of evil".
The President's legal adviser has said that displaying Lenin's body next to the Kremlin violates constitutional guarantees against imposing a "state ideology" in Russia. He added: "If a pagan sect wants to worship a mummy, it should be allowed to, but in another place."
The powerful mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, also wants rid of
Lenin, offering to inter him "with all the appropriate honours". The most original suggestion has come from Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has said he is willing to purchase Lenin's body and take it on a
Russia-wide tour.
Yeltsin's suggestion to hold a referendum has been fiercely denounced by a majority in the communist and nationalist-dominated
Duma (parliament), the Communist Party central committee and the president of the Academy of Medical Sciences, who said that burying
Lenin would be "stupid" since it would "ruin a unique experiment in preserving human tissue".
A Duma resolution passed on June 23rd called on the Russian people to "prevent an act of political revenge against Vladimir Lenin and to preserve the historical architecture of Red Square".
On April 2nd the Duma passed a similar resolution denouncing an earlier proposal to remove Lenin from the mausoleum as "vandalism".
In that same week, a previously unknown organisation called the Red
Army of Workers and Peasants claimed responsibility for having blown up the only Russian monument to Nicholas II, in Moscow.
The group released a statement saying the attack on the statue was a reprisal against those who wanted to "profane a national shrine" by removing Lenin's body from the mausoleum.
The religious language of the Communist Party statement of June
21st - which denounced Yeltsin's proposal as "immoral and sacrilegious" - indicates the degree of reverence in which Lenin is still held by many in Russia. The history of the Soviet cult of Lenin explains in some way why this is so.
The cult is generally believed to have started in 1918 after the failed attempt on Lenin's life. Then, in the words of Lenin's Russian biographer, Dmitry Volkogonov, "the inveterate Russian commitment to the idea of the `good tsar' found expression".
The natural sympathy of ordinary people, pumped up by propaganda, laid the foundations for the subsequent deification of Lenin following his death in 1924. In a clear invocation of Orthodox burial traditions, Stalin insisted that Lenin's remains not be "desecrated".
By this he meant they should not be cremated - the preferred revolutionary method to achieve the "democratisation of death".
At the very moment when atheist communist agitators were trying to turn the people away from Orthodoxy by showing them that the
"incorruptible cadavers" of saintly figures were nothing more than wax effigies, the party leadership decided to embalm Lenin's body for all time and put it on display in front of the Kremlin.
The designer of the sarcophagus, the architect Shchusev, called it
"a sleeping chamber for a sleeping prince".
The tomb became a shrine for pilgrims. The party subsequently launched a campaign which idealised, heroised and romanticised Lenin beyond belief. The language of the campaign treated Lenin as a saint, a Christ or an anointed tsar.
The embalming was opposed by Lenin's wife and family, by
Bonch-Bruevich, his secretary and a specialist in religious studies, and by Trotsky, Kamenev and Bukharin in accordance with Lenin's own wishes for a simple burial or cremation.
The growing cult of Lenin was drastically curtailed by Stalin in the 1930s when, for at least 20 years, the god Lenin was demoted by the god Stalin.
After Stalin's death in 1953, the embalmed body of the dictator joined Lenin in the mausoleum where it remained until 1961. Then, following Khrushchev's second de-Stalinisation speech at the 22nd
Party Congress, it was removed for burial by the Kremlin wall.
With Stalin discredited, Khrushchev and his successor, Leonid
Brezhnev, set about restoring the god-like image of Lenin.
One expression of this was the toponymic cult of Lenin, which began in earnest two days after his death on April 23rd, 1924, with
Petrograd becoming Leningrad. It continued apace after Stalin's death.
By the early 1990s, there were 277 cities, large towns, villages and regions named after Lenin.
It was not until three years into the Gorbachev era that Lenin fell under the basilisk stare of the newly-liberated liberal intelligentsia. The culmination of their efforts to decanonise him came in September 1991 with Leningrad becoming Saint Petersburg again.