Russian Orthodox Church 'favours burying Lenin'
A top Russian Orthodox official today said the country’s dominant church believed the body of Bolshevik Revolution leader Vladimir Lenin should be removed from display in a Red Square mausoleum and buried.
“Lenin should be buried, because the idea of mummification is outside any cultural and religious context in Russia,” Interfax quoted Metropolitan Kirill, who heads the Russian Orthodox Church’s external relations department, as saying.
The comment came amid debate over whether to bury Lenin’s body, which has been on display in a stone mausoleum just outside the Kremlin since 1924. Kirill called the public display of the body “an artificial phenomenon with some sort of very strange mysticism”.
In what appeared to be a Kremlin attempt to gauge public reaction to the divisive issue, a regional envoy of President Vladimir Putin said in September that Lenin’s body should be taken from its Red Square mausoleum and buried in a cemetery along with the remains of other Bolshevik dignitaries.
Several senior politicians in the Kremlin-controlled parliament followed up on his call, proposing burial.
Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov warned that his party would stage a massive civil disobedience action if authorities tried to remove the body, and the Communists launched a petition drive this month soliciting signatures against such a move.
The Interfax report did not say whether Kirill had indicated whether Lenin’s body should be buried soon or whether he was speaking more generally. Earlier this month, Kirill suggested that a national referendum might be the right way to decide the fate of Lenin’s body.
He said then that the issue was politically charged and cautioned that care should be taken not to inflame passions.
The Russian Orthodox Church was harshly persecuted under officially atheist Communist rule, after the 1917 revolution, but it has experienced a strong resurgence since the Soviet collapse of 1991.
