Post by radovic on Nov 20, 2007 15:00:58 GMT -5
Goodbye Lenin?
by Barbara Frye
20 November 2007
Many people are questioning how much longer the father of the Bolshevik Revolution will remain on display in his Red Square mausoleum.
MOSCOW | Alexander Lebedev had come to praise Vladimir Lenin, not to bury him.
“We have come here today to venerate our great leader, the organizer of the great socialist revolution,” Lebedev announced, standing in Red Square while bemused foreign tourists snapped photos.
Lebedev was one of about two-dozen gray-haired communists who, a few days before the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on 7 November, led a slow march across Red Square, hammer-and-sickle flags held aloft. They trailed a short, shuffling man who carried a placard bearing a bas-relief of Lenin. The group stopped at the Bolshevik leader’s mausoleum. Young guards unclipped the chains that keep strollers in Red Square from cutting in the line to enter the tomb – no one was waiting – and let the marchers file in to drop carnations near Lenin’s waxy corpse.
Their devotions done, they stood in the freezing winter wind, solemnly recounting a time when human achievements were at their zenith and paying homage to the leader who ushered in that era.
“The Soviets gave the world a sense of community that people had never known before,” Valentin Kondratiev, another party member, told the small crowd. “In the 1920s and ’30s, the Soviets reached levels of social and technological development that humans had never known before.”
Aging communists have been a source of pity or ridicule in the West since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent discrediting of its economic system. But the display this year on Red Square was particularly poignant, coming as it did a month after a member of the Russian Presidential Administration suggested it might be time to bury Lenin.
“Of course, a necropolis in the center of the capital is nonsense. But whether it should be there or not, let others decide,” the state-run Rossiskaya Gazeta quoted Vladimir Kozhin, who heads the Kremlin’s property department, as saying. In the 10 October interview, Kozhin called for a national referendum on the issue. “And if 80 percent of the people say that Lenin should be moved and buried, then it is up to us to act on that decision,” the newspaper reported him saying.
Photo by Andy Markowitz
EMINENCE GRISE
Lenin has lain embalmed in his Red Square mausoleum since his death in 1924. The current red and black granite structure was erected several years after his death, replacing a wooden version. Lenin is refreshed regularly with embalming fluid and, less regularly, given a chemical bath.
The question of burying Lenin comes up periodically in post-Soviet Russia. Boris Yeltsin said in 1999 that it would definitely happen, but he didn’t say when.
The Russian Public Opinion Foundation, a Kremlin-aligned polling group, has asked Russians several times if they think Lenin should be buried. Although the level of support has fluctuated slightly over the years, a majority has consistently favored it, most recently in 2004 by a margin of 56 to 30 percent.
The human rights group Memorial has called for Lenin's body – and those of other Soviet leaders buried in Red Square, including Joseph Stalin – to be moved to a cemetery, saying it is inappropriate for those who had a hand in the era of Soviet terror to lie honorably in Red Square, especially when the country has almost no memorials to those who died in the terror. Before exhumation, though, the group favors a national discussion on the issue.
Back in Red Square, Lebedev was having none of that. “This is a holy place for our country,” he said, casting the matter in a religious light that might have sent the atheist Lenin spinning in his nearby mausoleum. Burial “is out of the question!”
Sensitive to such objections, one government official has suggested that the last generation of Soviet-era communists might have to die out before Lenin can go to his final resting place. “I would not like old people – even if we think they were wrong – to be hurt so seriously at the end of their lives,” Vladimir Lukin, the country’s human rights commissioner, told the Interfax news agency in late October.
There are capitalists, too, who want to keep this founding father of Soviet communism on display. Among the guides pestering those in line, offering to get them into the mausoleum ahead of everyone else for a fee (admission is free), stood a tall, slick-haired man wearing a leather jacket, earpiece, and sunglasses on a sunless winter day. He would identify himself only as Pyotr, and he was ready with a response.
“According to the church rules, he’s below ground, so everything is OK,” Pyotr said, referring to the Orthodox teaching that a body must be given to the ground upon death. Visitors descend a few steps, as they would enter a wine cellar, when they visit the tomb.
Pyotr, who said he “guides” about 100 people per day to the mausoleum, would not say how much he earns from his business or how much he charges. “This is an immodest question,” he sniffed. He conceded, though, that burial would be bad for business. “Of course it would affect it negatively.”
But for all of Pyotr’s doctrinal theories and Alexander Lebedev’s nostalgia, the indifference of youth might well pound the final nail into Lenin’s coffin.
Nadezhda Belova, 24, stood several meters from the mausoleum, having had her picture taken in front of it minutes earlier. “He should be buried,” she declared. “The time has come; his era is over. As a symbol, he’s done his job. We’ve had enough of him.”
by Barbara Frye
20 November 2007
Many people are questioning how much longer the father of the Bolshevik Revolution will remain on display in his Red Square mausoleum.
MOSCOW | Alexander Lebedev had come to praise Vladimir Lenin, not to bury him.
“We have come here today to venerate our great leader, the organizer of the great socialist revolution,” Lebedev announced, standing in Red Square while bemused foreign tourists snapped photos.
Lebedev was one of about two-dozen gray-haired communists who, a few days before the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on 7 November, led a slow march across Red Square, hammer-and-sickle flags held aloft. They trailed a short, shuffling man who carried a placard bearing a bas-relief of Lenin. The group stopped at the Bolshevik leader’s mausoleum. Young guards unclipped the chains that keep strollers in Red Square from cutting in the line to enter the tomb – no one was waiting – and let the marchers file in to drop carnations near Lenin’s waxy corpse.
Their devotions done, they stood in the freezing winter wind, solemnly recounting a time when human achievements were at their zenith and paying homage to the leader who ushered in that era.
“The Soviets gave the world a sense of community that people had never known before,” Valentin Kondratiev, another party member, told the small crowd. “In the 1920s and ’30s, the Soviets reached levels of social and technological development that humans had never known before.”
Aging communists have been a source of pity or ridicule in the West since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent discrediting of its economic system. But the display this year on Red Square was particularly poignant, coming as it did a month after a member of the Russian Presidential Administration suggested it might be time to bury Lenin.
“Of course, a necropolis in the center of the capital is nonsense. But whether it should be there or not, let others decide,” the state-run Rossiskaya Gazeta quoted Vladimir Kozhin, who heads the Kremlin’s property department, as saying. In the 10 October interview, Kozhin called for a national referendum on the issue. “And if 80 percent of the people say that Lenin should be moved and buried, then it is up to us to act on that decision,” the newspaper reported him saying.
Photo by Andy Markowitz
EMINENCE GRISE
Lenin has lain embalmed in his Red Square mausoleum since his death in 1924. The current red and black granite structure was erected several years after his death, replacing a wooden version. Lenin is refreshed regularly with embalming fluid and, less regularly, given a chemical bath.
The question of burying Lenin comes up periodically in post-Soviet Russia. Boris Yeltsin said in 1999 that it would definitely happen, but he didn’t say when.
The Russian Public Opinion Foundation, a Kremlin-aligned polling group, has asked Russians several times if they think Lenin should be buried. Although the level of support has fluctuated slightly over the years, a majority has consistently favored it, most recently in 2004 by a margin of 56 to 30 percent.
The human rights group Memorial has called for Lenin's body – and those of other Soviet leaders buried in Red Square, including Joseph Stalin – to be moved to a cemetery, saying it is inappropriate for those who had a hand in the era of Soviet terror to lie honorably in Red Square, especially when the country has almost no memorials to those who died in the terror. Before exhumation, though, the group favors a national discussion on the issue.
Back in Red Square, Lebedev was having none of that. “This is a holy place for our country,” he said, casting the matter in a religious light that might have sent the atheist Lenin spinning in his nearby mausoleum. Burial “is out of the question!”
Sensitive to such objections, one government official has suggested that the last generation of Soviet-era communists might have to die out before Lenin can go to his final resting place. “I would not like old people – even if we think they were wrong – to be hurt so seriously at the end of their lives,” Vladimir Lukin, the country’s human rights commissioner, told the Interfax news agency in late October.
There are capitalists, too, who want to keep this founding father of Soviet communism on display. Among the guides pestering those in line, offering to get them into the mausoleum ahead of everyone else for a fee (admission is free), stood a tall, slick-haired man wearing a leather jacket, earpiece, and sunglasses on a sunless winter day. He would identify himself only as Pyotr, and he was ready with a response.
“According to the church rules, he’s below ground, so everything is OK,” Pyotr said, referring to the Orthodox teaching that a body must be given to the ground upon death. Visitors descend a few steps, as they would enter a wine cellar, when they visit the tomb.
Pyotr, who said he “guides” about 100 people per day to the mausoleum, would not say how much he earns from his business or how much he charges. “This is an immodest question,” he sniffed. He conceded, though, that burial would be bad for business. “Of course it would affect it negatively.”
But for all of Pyotr’s doctrinal theories and Alexander Lebedev’s nostalgia, the indifference of youth might well pound the final nail into Lenin’s coffin.
Nadezhda Belova, 24, stood several meters from the mausoleum, having had her picture taken in front of it minutes earlier. “He should be buried,” she declared. “The time has come; his era is over. As a symbol, he’s done his job. We’ve had enough of him.”