Now They Intend to Bury Lenin : Monuments: Remains of the Soviet founder may finally leave Red Square for the cemetery.

Only moments after they effectively buried the Soviet system Thursday, members of this country’s Parliament were urged to bury its founder as well.

For most of the years since he died in 1924, the embalmed remains of V. I. Lenin have rested under glass in a stone mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, an icon of Soviet and Communist rule. Millions of reverent Soviet citizens have filed past to pay their respects or to gawk.

But as the emergency session of the Congress of People’s Deputies drew to a close Thursday, Leningrad Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak proposed to his fellow members of Parliament “that we fulfill the last wish of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and bury him according to religious and national customs.”

Lenin, who once dismissed monuments as attractive only to pigeons, had requested that he be buried next to his mother in Leningrad’s Volkovo cemetery.

Two years ago, a suggestion similar to Sobchak’s brought gasps and a thunderclap of righteous Communist fury in the Parliament. But times in the Soviet Union, the state that Lenin forged, have truly changed.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, chairing the session of the congress, said he wasn’t “rejecting or tossing out” Sobchak’s recommendation, in itself a significant reaction. Instead, he referred the matter to the Supreme Soviet, the nation’s legislature.

Sobchak, who has emerged in the recent Soviet political crisis as one of the country’s most influential leaders, later said he is certain Lenin’s remains will soon be removed from the Red Square mausoleum.

“I assure you that this will happen within a month. We shall bury Comrade Ulyanov, also known as Lenin, in St. Petersburg,” Sobchak said in an interview, referring to the pre-revolution name most Leningraders now want restored to their city.

Why is the location of Lenin’s body so important?

“I have a premonition that the hex will not be lifted from our country as long as this corpse stays on display in our main square,” Sobchak said.

Exhibiting the dead, he said, is a flagrant violation of Slavic traditions.

“Lenin was a Christian and deserves a proper burial,” the mayor said.

Since the attempted coup by conservative Communists last month, statues and images of the bearded, bald Bolshevik have become targets across the country for opponents of the socialist order that he forged.

Sobchak said he is asking mayors to ship their dismantled Lenin statues to Leningrad, where the Communist agitator piloted his party to victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution.

“We plan to set up a special park, dedicated to the activists and figures of the October Revolution,” Sobchak said. “This is for posterity, for the new generations who will come to see for themselves what is freedom, and what is totalitarianism.”