From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 12/14/2005 2:22 PM
Lenin’s mausoleum / Photo from www.weltfoto.com
Lenin’s mausoleum / Photo from www.weltfoto.com
Good-Bye, Lenin?
Created: 21.11.2005 11:27 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 11:28 MSK > document.write(get_ago(1132561732)); </SCRIPT>
Lisa Vronskaya
MosNews
I have never seen Lenin in my life, never been to the Red Square mausoleum and have never felt like going. Like most people my age, I think, whose school years coincided with the last decade of the Soviet Union’s existence I grew up in the shadow of the great revolutionary.
Lenin was everywhere — in our schoolbooks, in the songs we sung, in the films we watched, on TV, on the badges we wore, in the names of the streets and squares… We did not need a mausoleum to be aware of his ubiquitous presence.
At the age of seven all Russian schoolchildren were supposed to join the Oktyabryata — a children’s organization one step below the Pioneers. Oktyabryata wore little star-shaped badges with a picture of the little curly-headed Vladimir Ulyanov pinned to their school uniforms.
A couple of years later we exchanged them for pioneer badges and red pioneer ties, which were later to be substituted with Komsomol pins and membership in the Young Communist League. All those badges featured a Lenin picture. Being among the brighter pupils in our class I was one of the few kids who had the honor of being inducted into the pioneer organization at the Lenin Museum near Red Square.
The Bolshevik leader was a part of our life, so inseparable that, ironically, no one even noticed his presence. He was always there, like heaven and the sun. We knew that his body would always be there in the Red Square mausoleum, in films, songs, and jokes.
The Soviet Union was notorious for queues in its half-empty grocery and consumer goods stores. But the largest line I’ve ever seen here was the queue to the Lenin Mausoleum in the 1980s. People stood for hours to have a glimpse at what had been preserved of a man who overthrew the Russian Tsar but fell short of making this country a happy place to live in.
As a child I heard some adults laughingly suggesting that the queue was staged, as if the people who stood on Red Square had actually been ordered to do so. Back then I was outraged to hear such suggestions, genuinely believing that people were sincere in revering Lenin.
These days, the calls to remove the remains of the Bolshevik leader from his mausoleum are becoming increasingly louder. The debate has raged since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
In recent months, public figures such as St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko have pushed for Lenin to be moved, saying that Russia “is not Egypt” and not a place for mummified bodies.
Last month, the president of the southern Russian republic of Kalmykia, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, offered to provide $1 million to move Lenin, and his mausoleum, to Elista, the capital of his region.
The communists, for their part, began gathering signatures this month to protest those calls. Their leader, Gennady Zyuganov, has criticized the possibility of a burial, declaring, “We will stage acts of civil disobedience and will not let such things happen.”
Meanwhile, ordinary Russians appeared divided over the final resting place for Lenin, according to a survey released by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center. 40 percent of respondents believe the presence of the former leader’s body in the Red Square mausoleum is incorrect and unnatural. Conversely, 31 percent saw no problem with the mausoleum and regard it as a tourist attraction, and 22 percent believe the body of Lenin deserves to be at its current location.
As for who should decide on Lenin’s eventual resting place, 30 percent suggest holding a nationwide referendum, 24 percent think the former Soviet leader’s relatives should have the final say, and 16 percent would leave it up to Putin. Only 12 percent of those polled said they would categorically protest if Lenin’s body were buried.
I agree, it is high time to let Lenin go. After all, if his historians are to be trusted, before he died Lenin himself had warned against idolizing his figure…
But I am strongly against turning his re-burial into a political show. Some observers here see our senior officials’ proposals to commit Lenin’s body to earth now as a Kremlin attempt to gauge public opinion on the issue.
Well, if by pushing to bury him Putin and his associates seek to boost their ’democratic’ image, the move will hardly help. Putin is no democrat, just as Russia is no democracy and never will be, not in our lifetime, whether Lenin remains where he is now or not.
On the other hand, if the communists think he must be left to rest in peace, why don’t they take up the maintenance of his remains and the burial-vault, which adds a fair bit to the country’s budget annually?
But will ordinary Russians miss him, if he goes? I wouldn’t dare to speak for everyone, but none of my friends or relatives that I have asked told me they would. The general idea is that we have so many problems to tackle here nowadays that the dispute over Vladimir Lenin’s reburial seems to have been stirred up intentionally to avert the public’s attention from more important matters.
I remember my teacher at school telling the class that each Soviet pupil must visit Lenin’s Mausolem and pay tribute to the great man. I came home that day and told my grandmother that my homework task was to go there. She said: Have you seen the queue?
Have you ever been there yourself, I asked. She said, yes, it’s a horrible sight…
Will I miss Lenin, if he goes? I don’t think so. But he will live on in my childhood memories — as a smiling old chap on a photo in a Soviet-era history book.
http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2005/11/18/lenin.shtml
