Billionaire presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov has proposed holding a referendum on whether to move Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin from the mausoleum on Red Square where his carefully preserved remains are currently located.
“I personally believe that Lenin should be buried. But that should be done respectfully toward the people who think differently,” Prokhorov, seen by some as a spoiler in the March 4 election, told RT television.
“I would hold a referendum on the issue.”
Eighty-eight years have passed since the body of Vladimir Ulyanov, known worldwide under his pseudonym Lenin, was placed in a glass sarcophagus and displayed in a specially built granite mausoleum near the Kremlin wall.
Throughout the years of Soviet rule, the Lenin mausoleum was a symbol of the Soviet Union with crowds of Soviet citizens and numerous delegations from foreign countries visiting the tomb.
The issue of removing his body from Red Square and burying him has been a matter of public controversy over the past 20 years, since the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Prokhorov said Lenin was an important part of natural history and culture.
“We should part with our past without forgetting it, for the sake of our country’s future,” he said.
The billionaire is one of five campaign hopefuls. The four other registered candidates are Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, moderate social democratic leader Sergei Mironov, populist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky and communist leader Gennady Zyuganov.
