Dead but Not Buried, Lenin Stirs Up Trouble

If Boris Yeltsin can’t be remembered as a great democrat, he’s determined to go down in Russian history as the Great Undertaker. Last July, he buried the remains of the last Czar and his family; now he wants to do the same for Vladimir Illich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin. A Yeltsin aide confirmed Tuesday that the cadaver of the leader of the 1917 revolution will be taken from its mausoleum in Red Square and buried, although he wouldn’t say when. "Burying Lenin will be a politically charged action, and Yeltsin will time it to maximum advantage," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. "Ideally, he’d like to bury the Communists along with Lenin, but that will be hard to do."

Yeltsin knows that the die-hard Communists, who are already mounting round-the-clock vigils at both the mausoleum and the Ulyanov family plot in St. Petersburg, will be enraged by the removal of their shriveled icon from Red Square. "He’s hoping that the Communists will mount street protests that will give Yeltsin an excuse to ban them ahead of December’s parliamentary election," says Meier. "But the Communist leaders aren’t likely to be provoked -- any eventual plan to bury him is likely to involve the secret consent of the Communists." Not that Mr. Ulyanov would mind. It was Stalin’s decision in 1924 to enshrine Lenin’s embalmed corpse as a macabre tourist attraction – Lenin’s final wish had been to be buried alongside his mother.