Church official: Lenin should be buried
(AP)
Updated: 2005-11-16 11:31

A top Russian Orthodox official said Tuesday the church believes the body of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin should be removed from a Red Square mausoleum and buried, Russian news agencies said.

With the 15th anniversary of the death of the Soviet Union nearing, a debate has been brewing on whether to bury Lenin's body, which has been on display in a mausoleum just outside the Kremlin since 1924.

"Lenin should be buried, because the idea of mummification is outside any cultural and religious context in Russia," Interfax and ITAR-Tass quoted the Russian Orthodox Church's Metropolitan Kirill as saying.

A woman demonstrates against the removal of Vladimir Lenin's embalmed body from the mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, November 13, 2005. [Reuters]

Kirill, who heads the church's external relations department, called the public display of the body "an artificial phenomenon with some sort of very strange mysticism," the reports said.

In an apparent Kremlin attempt to gauge public reaction on the body's removal, a regional envoy of President Vladimir Putin said in September that Lenin's body should be taken from the mausoleum and buried.

Several senior lawmakers in the Kremlin-controlled parliament then proposed he be buried.

Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov warned his party would stage a massive civil disobedience action if authorities tried to remove the body of the founder of the Soviet state. The Communists launched a petition drive against such a move.