Should Lenin Be Buried?

For 65 years Vladimir I. Lenin’s preserved cadaver, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, has been on public display under glass in Moscow’s Red Square. In a country where religion is ideologically scorned, the remains of the Soviet Union’s first leader serves as a secular national icon. Each year, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens and thousands of foreign tourists stand in long lines for the chance to gaze briefly upon the waxen body. But now a few lonely voices are suggesting that the time has come to stop treating Lenin like a sideshow exhibit. They think his corpse should be buried. The recent Communist Party central committee meeting found conservatives reacting to this proposal with palpable shock and unfeigned horror.

If Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, had had her way, there would have been no glass coffin and no panel of expert embalmers--known, perhaps over-optimistically, as the Immortalization Commission--to deny Lenin proper burial. It was Josef Stalin who insisted that the founder of the Soviet state should become an object of public veneration. In 1953, Stalin himself was accorded the same treatment. His body was put alongside Lenin’s, an ironic juxtaposition given the distrust Lenin had come to feel at the end of his life for the man who became his unscrupulous successor.

Stalin stayed put until 1961, when his body was removed in the dark of night and secretly buried in the Kremlin wall. The reinterment followed by five years Nikita S. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing the crimes of the Stalin era. Since then, of course, much more has been officially acknowledged about the tragic costs of Stalin’s homicidal reign. Could it be that old-line Communists worry that taking Lenin’s body off view might be only the first step toward looking more honestly at the crimes of the Lenin era? Those who rule the Soviet Union today in Lenin’s name have reason to be concerned that if his image is desanctified their claim to political legitimacy could be diminished. For that reason, if no other, Lenin is likely to stay just where he is for now, out where everyone can see him, evidence of the continuity claimed by his ideological heirs.