The New Nation - Internet Edition

Reuters , Moscow

The embalmed body of revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin should be moved from Red Square and buried as his family had wished, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said on Wednesday.

Lenin led the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to found the first Communist state, which lasted 74 years until Gorbachev presided over the break-up of the Soviet Union.

He died on January 21, 1924 and despite the pleas of relatives, his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum on Red Square in the shadow of the Kremlin walls. Lenin's body is still on public display.

Opponents say the ghosts of the Soviet Union should be put to rest and that Lenin, an atheist known by his patronymic, Ilych, be given a proper burial.

"My view is as follows-we should not be occupied right now with grave digging. But we will necessarily come to a time when the mausoleum will have lost its meaning and we will bury Ilych, give him up to the earth as his family had wanted," Gorbachev told reporters. "I think the time will come t it will happen."

The fate of Lenin is an emotional question in modern Russia, where the Communists are the second biggest political party.

The Russian Orthodox Church has called for Lenin to be buried, but the Communist Party says the father of the Soviet Union should stay put.

Russia's first post-Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin more than once spoke in favor of removing the mausoleum from Red square. But strong pro-Communist sentiment in the country prevented him from doing so. In the end, Yeltsin avoided taking a decision.

Vladimir Putin also fudged the issue, saying the question was emotive and hard to tackle, and his successor, President Dmitry Medvedev, has not yet made his position clear.

In Soviet times, revering the memory of Lenin was a Communist obligation. Communists still mark his April birthday.

After his death, Lenin's brain was removed and studied by Soviet scientists, who tried to prove his revolutionary genius under a microscope.