MOSCOW, April 8 (RIA Novosti) - A senior Kremlin
official has said that there is no need no move Lenin from his
resting place on Red Square, and that any attempt to do so
could have serious consequences.
"The recent blast at the Lenin statue in St. Petersburg
led to, as you know, protests. Just imagine for a minute what
would happen if we were to try to move Lenin's body," Vladimir
Kozhin, head of the Kremlin property management department,
told the Tribuna paper.
A St. Petersburg monument to the communist leader was
badly damaged last week by an explosion that caused a large
hole in the statue. The 10-meter high bronze monument was
subsequently taken down for repair work.
Lenin's embalmed body has been on public display in a
glass case in a mausoleum in Red Square since his death
following a series of strokes in 1924. His continuing presence
in the heart of Moscow has been an ongoing source of
controversy since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
However, the Kremlin property chief said that he saw no
reason why the body of the father of the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution should be moved.
"This is our history, however it worked out," he said,
adding that however when the generation for whom Lenin was not
a piece of history, "but a piece of their lives" had died out
then it would perhaps be possible to raise the issue.
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