Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 9 – Since 2017, the share of Russians who favor burying Lenin and closing the mausoleum in Red Square where his mummified body has long been displayed dropped has dropped from 63 percent of Russians to 30 percent, according to VTsIOM polling data.
Andrey Koryakovtsev, a Marxist sociologist from the Urals, argues that this trend makes perfect sense and says that paradoxically, “those who today most actively demand the liquidation of the mausoleum are the ones who are contributing to the growth in interest in the figure of Lenin” and thus to keeping his body where it is (nakanune.ru/articles/123905/).
On the one hand, he says, many have noted that Lenin is already buried because his body is kept below ground level even now. But on the other, and this is more important, those calling for the mausoleum to be shuttered are only attracting the interest of many younger Russians who have been told little or nothing about what Lenin did.
Their attacks, Koryakovtsev continues, only call make such people more curious about the Bolshevik leader and less inclined to seek to bury him; and he adds that “Russian society thus is not only not prepared for sharp changes regarding the Mausoleum but is showing an opposite reaction in response to aggressive anti-Soviet propaganda.”
Nikolay Arefuev, a KPRF Duma deputy, agrees. And he says that calls to close the mausoleum and bury Lenin will open a hornet’s nest because the Kremlin will have to decide not only what to do with Lenin but also what should happen to “the more than 400” bodies buried adjoining the Kremlin wall.
If that issue arises, the deputy says, there will be an upsurge in interest not only in Lenin but in each of them, many of whom were close followers of the Bolshevik leader and important figures in the communist movement, people about whom few Russians today know very much but will seek to learn more if calls for reburying them persist.
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