The World - News from April 28, 1989

A Soviet stage director’s televised suggestion that V. I. Lenin’s body be removed from the mausoleum on Red Square has caused a furor reaching into the Communist Party Central Committee. Lenin’s mausoleum at the Kremlin Wall is visited by millions of Soviets every year, reflecting the reverence in which the Soviet founder still is held. Two candidate members of the Central Committee this week criticized Mark Zakharov, director of Moscow’s Leninsky Komsomol Theater, for suggesting that Lenin’s body be removed from the mausoleum, where it has been kept since his death in 1924, and buried. He and other speakers said the mausoleum should be turned into a monument to the Soviet founder without his body.