The body of Vladimir Lenin will sooner or later be taken out of the mausoleum on Red Square. This was stated by the head of the department for external church relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, on the air of the Church and the World program on the Russia 24 TV channel.
During the program, the presenter pointed out that young people began to discuss the issue of Lenin’s burial more often than previous generations. She asked the Metropolitan to evaluate the point of view according to which “it is at least uncivilized to have the body of an unburied leader in the very center of the capital” of a modern state.
“I do not even doubt that sooner or later Lenin will be taken out of the mausoleum, because this is really a relic of the past, that the embalmed body lies in the very center of the capital. <…> I hope that some kind of consensus will nevertheless be found and that the body will be buried, ”the Metropolitan emphasized.
The Metropolitan called the idea that only representatives of the older generation belong to Lenin’s supporters, not entirely correct. According to him, young people are not always opposed to the Soviet leader. Both in Soviet times and in modern years, there are many of the elders among the elders who do not support the fact that Lenin was in the mausoleum, the clergyman said. In turn, this is approved by some representatives of the youth, so we are talking about a “worldview dispute” he concluded.
Metropolitan Hilarion proposed to bury Lenin’s body last year, and to open a museum of repression in the mausoleum.
In September 2020, the Union of Architects of Russia announced a competition for a project to use the mausoleum after this event. In response, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady Zyuganov, said that proposals to use the mausoleum in another way arouse contempt in him.
Photo: Sergey Savostyanov / TASS
