Lenin to be buried at last?


An aide in Vladimir Putin's Kremlin regime has suggested that the time to remove Lenin's embalmed body from the mausoleum in Red Square has arrived.

Coming from a senior figure whose remit covers the square, this suggestion must be taken seriously.

Certainly, burying the body would remove a potent symbol connecting the new Russia to the Soviet era. Given the capitalist development of modern Russia this only seems fitting.

The move will anger Communists and an older generation who have largely missed out on the country's growing prosperity and remain nostalgic for the certainties of the USSR.

Comments

Hernandez said…
Ah, but is that REALLY Lenin's body lying there or a dummy? We all know what those Ruskis are like with all their lies and deceptions :-p

I think it would be a shame if they removed it - look at all the tourist money he attracts.
12 October 2007 at 13:05
Owen Polley said…
I'd imagine that the mausoleum's attraction to tourists won't be the most pertinent factor.

The symbolic significance of burying Russia's communist past will be the pressing consideration.

On one hand Putin's Russia is very much about making money, put on the other he has never moved to disclaim totally Russia's Soviet period and indeed has said that Russians "have nothing to be ashamed of".

The question of burying Lenin or continuing to preserve his corpse is loaded not just with political ideology but with a nation's self-esteem.
12 October 2007 at 16:09
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more