New Views of Lenin

The embalmed body of V . I. Lenin may soon be removed from the marble mausoleum on Red Square where it has been displayed since his death in 1924.

* Leningrad Mayor Anatoly Sobchak proposed that Lenin should be reburied “with all due honors” next to his mother and other relatives in the city’s Volkhovskoye Cemetery. The new Soviet legislature will be asked to approve.

* The move would have great symbolic impact. Each year, thousands view Lenin’s body in a glass-covered sarcophagus in Red Square. The body of Josef Stalin was initially placed on display in Red Square after his death in 1953, but he was reburied behind the Kremlin wall in 1961.

* Residents of Leningrad, which was named for Lenin after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, voted in June to return the city to its original name of St. Petersburg, and the switch became official last week.

* Moscow’s mayor recently caused a stir among die-hard Communists by having the Central Lenin Museum closed. Conservative Soviet deputies denounced this as vandalism and asked President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to save it, as have employees and Lenin’s elderly niece.