Bring out your dead

The New York Times has an article today about a debate that's been going on in Russia for some time, a debate about what to do with Lenin's body, which currently rests in, you guessed it, Lenin's Tomb in Red Square, just outside the Kremlin walls.

[A] senior aide to President Vladimir V. Putin raised the matter last week, saying it was time to bury the man.

"Our country has been shaken by strife, but only a few people were held accountable for that in our lifetime," said the aide, Georgi Poltavchenko. "I do not think it is fair that those who initiated the strife remain in the center of our state near the Kremlin."

In the unending debate about what exactly the new Russia is, the subject of Lenin resembles a Rorschach inkblot test. People project their views of their state onto him and see what they wish. And so as Mr. Poltavchenko's suggestion has ignited fresh public sparring over Lenin's place, both in history and in the grave, the dispute has been implicitly bizarre and a window into the state of civil society here.
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Depending on who is speaking about him now, he is either a hero or a beast, a gifted revolutionary or a syphilitic mass murderer. (By some accounts he died not of strokes, the official cause of death, but of an advanced case of sexually transmitted disease.)

Some still see in him the architect of a grand and daring social experiment. Others describe an opportunist who ushered vicious cronies to power, resulting in a totalitarian police state. "It is time to get rid of this horrible mummy," said Valeriya Novodvorskaya, head of the Democratic Union, a small reform party. "One cannot talk about any kind of democracy or civilization in Russia when Lenin is still in the country's main square."

That is the debate in a nutshell. Should Russia continue to revere, in such a place of honor, a man helped found a nation that made the world tremble, as Ramius said in the movie The Hunt for Red October? Or, is it wrong to give such honor to a man who helped found a brutal state that killed millions?

How a Russian answers that question depends on where he or she thinks the country is going.

When Rhonda and I were stuck in Moscow after 9/11, we had time on our hands and visited Red Square a number of times. On one of those occasions we went inside Lenin's Tomb.

The public is allowed (or was then, anyway) to visit the tomb on Thursday mornings, and during that time all of Red Square is blocked off. Only people visiting the tomb can enter the Square. This is part of that honor I mentioned.

When you go in, it is very quiet and still, and you turn left and go down some rather dark stairs. Russia is not terribly worried about lawsuits, apparently. There are guards at intervals. We were told to keep our hands in view.

Lenin is at the bottom of the stairs, on a glass-enclosed bier. He is wearing a dark suit, his face and hands are the only visible flesh. (If those are indeed his hands.)

Right outside the tomb are buried several Soviet leaders, as the Times says:

Yuri V. Andropov, Leonid I. Brezhnev and Konstantin U. Chernenko, as well as those of Stalin and Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police

Our tour guide said that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaders would no longer be buried there in Red Square.

Also, various heroes and important figures are buried in the Kremlin walls just behind the tomb. (An American, John Reed, is also buried there.)

So, the Russians struggle with the question of whether they should sever these ties to the past. For outsiders like us, we ask what it means that some people want to hang on to that past.