Kremlin: Vote on fate of Lenin's tomb

The fate of one of Moscow's most famous symbols _ the tomb of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin _ should be put to Russia's voters, a top Kremlin official said in an interview published Wednesday.

The comments by Vladimir Kozhin, who heads of the Kremlin's property department, reflect the on-again, off-again debate among officials in President Vladimir Putin's government about what to do with the mausoleum in Red Square. The statement appears to reflect the Kremlin's reluctance to take up the sensitive issue ahead of December's parliamentary elections and a presidential vote in March 2008.

"Of course, a necropolis in the center of the capital is nonsense. But whether it should be there or not, let other decide," Kozhin was quoted as telling the government-daily Rossiskaya Gazeta.

"We have only just moved away from revolution, from endless political battles, the country has become normal to live in, to work to get rich. But just touch a painful subject and war will come to the entire country, rousing our parents, grandmothers, grandfathers," he told the newspaper.

Kozhin also said the upkeep of the tomb, as well as regular treatments for the embalmed body of Lenin, costs the government hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and "this isn't much at all."

Putin's avowedly anti-Communist predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, repeatedly tried to get the red granite structure that was a stage for Communist leaders removed and bury Lenin _ perhaps according to his wish to interred next to his mother in St. Petersburg.

But Communists, for whom the mausoleum is almost a holy shrine, vowed to hold protests.

Putin, for his part, said in 2001 that he opposed removing Lenin's body because it might disturb civil peace. Meanwhile, he has resurrected several other Soviet symbols _ including the Red Star for the military and the Soviet national anthem _ albeit with different words.

Underscoring the Putin government's ambivalence about the mausoleum was the decision to cover it in staging and bunting during ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2005 so as not to embarrass Western leaders.

Lenin's body has been on display in the mausoleum since 1924.