Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 20, 1993 TAG: 9310200048
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's request to President Boris Yeltsin - the first such official action taken - was an attack on the holiest of communism's relics, all buried along the Kremlin wall except for Vladimir Lenin.
The mummified remains of the Soviet founder have been on display under glass for decades inside the red marble-and-granite mausoleum built on Josef Stalin's orders.
Lenin, whom generations of children were taught to revere and whose brain is preserved for scientific study, remained untouchable even when anti-Communist mobs toppled Soviet monuments after the failed 1991 Soviet coup.
Among Communist heroes buried amid the spruce trees behind Lenin's tomb are former Soviet leaders, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and American journalist John Reed.
The bodies of about 500 revolutionaries killed during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution also line the red-brick Kremlin wall.
"There is a serious problem here. Red Square has been turned into a cemetery, and it shouldn't remain that," said Anatoly Krasikov, a spokesman for Yeltsin. "Some believe that not only Lenin but all those buried beneath the Kremlin wall should be buried in accordance with their relatives' will."
Momentum has been building for Lenin's removal since Yeltsin crushed an uprising this month by Communists, nationalists and other hard-liners who often marched beneath Lenin posters and red Soviet banners.
ehe government on Oct. 6 withdrew the goose-stepping ceremonial guards from outside Lenin's tomb, where his body has been on display since his death in 1924.
Luzhkov suggested that all the bodies except Lenin's be buried at Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery or other places preferred by relatives.
Yeltsin, Luzhkov and others say Lenin wanted to be buried in St. Petersburg near his mother, but some scholars say there is no such evidence.
by CNB