Put Lenin to rest

Scripps Howard News Service: One bit of unfinished business remaining from the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union was what to do with Vladimir Lenin, the architect of that unlamented 74-year excursion into totalitarianism.
Lenin's body -- or what passes for it, since the figure evokes Madame Tussaud's wax museum more than a mortuary -- is on public display in a granite mausoleum just outside the Kremlin walls.
In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, Boris Yeltsin sought to have the old Bolshevik properly buried, either in accordance with his wish to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg, the former Leningrad, or in Moscow along with other Communist luminaries. He balked in the face of opposition from the still-vigorous Communist Party. And Vladimir Putin, when he took office, said reburying Lenin wasn't worth the strife it would cause.
Lenin has been on display since he died in 1924 at age 53, and his tomb has been a constant in Russian life ever since, although now a tourist attraction rather than a place of pilgrimage.
But in September a senior aide to Putin floated what was clearly a trial balloon, saying Lenin should be removed from the tomb and buried. Last week a top prelate of the Russian Orthodox Church, which suffered terribly under Lenin's policy of "down with religion and long live atheism," said he should be buried "because the idea of mummification is outside any cultural and religious context in Russia."
Church and state would seem a formidable combination, but the Communists have threatened massive protests if the body is moved.
The tomb could be rededicated to the unknown victims of the forced famine, the purges and the gulag that Lenin laid the groundwork for. Or he can remain as a ghoulish reminder of a grisly past.