Capitalizing on nostalgia

How Russian authorities have used the debate over what to do with Lenin’s body to further their own agendas

On January 21, 2024, Russia marked the centennial of Vladimir Lenin’s death. In some respects, he’s remained a significant political figure in Russia, even in modern times. Since shortly after his passing, Lenin’s preserved body has (with a few brief exceptions) rested in the Mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square. Not too long ago, Russia’s political elites were debating whether or not he should finally be buried. However, against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and the ideological course of Russian politics, the Kremlin has increasingly embraced Soviet-era practices, and these discussions have died down. Meduza’s special correspondent Andrey Pertsev explains how the Russian authorities have leveraged the question of what to do with Lenin’s body over the past two decades for their own political purposes and gains.

In December 2000, the State Duma faction for the Union of Right Forces (SPS) party turned to Vladimir Putin with a proposal: bury Lenin. The lawmakers suggested making the Mausoleum into a museum in memory of “the victims of political upheavals of the 20th century.”

One of the main initiators of this proposal (which ultimately did not garner enough votes) was deputy Boris Nadezhdin, who now opposes Putin (and the war) and hopes to run in the 2024 presidential elections. At the time, one of the SPS leaders was Sergey Kiriyenko, who has since become the Kremlin’s domestic policy czar. Two decades later, it would be his subordinates who came up with a new ideology, largely based on the Soviet experience, for the Russian state. However, Kiriyenko’s acquaintances say that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he sincerely supported the idea of burying Lenin: “All market democrats of that time wanted it, this symbolic gesture: burying the Soviet era and destroying its main symbol.”

According to Boris Nemtsov (who, like Kiriyenko, was part of the SPS leadership), Boris Yeltsin held the same position. Nemtsov recalled that in 1998, the then-president even tasked him with preparing a decree for Lenin’s burial. However, it turned out that Russian law required the consent of the then-mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. In the early 1990s, Luzhkov himself had suggested “demolishing the Mausoleum,” but by the end of the decade, his opinion had changed. “Luzhkov didn’t hide his presidential ambitions; he was trying to win over the communists, and burying Lenin was no longer in his interest,” Nemtsov explained in an interview shortly before his death.

Later, the Kremlin’s political bloc, led at the time by Vladislav Surkov (who served as first deputy chief of the presidential administration from 1999 to 2011), also called for Lenin’s burial. According to a source who worked with the administration at the time, Surkov was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the idea. Another source close to Surkov says that “the USSR’s aesthetics were not his aesthetics.”

Surkov had many allies in this endeavor, including some unexpected ones, from “old-school” democrats, who were still influential at the time, to conservatives and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). By the mid-2000s, the Kremlin decided to take the matter seriously and unofficially allowed various political players, from a few governors to parliamentary parties, to “use the topic of Lenin’s burial.” In 2005, Sergey Morozov, the then-governor of Russia’s Ulyanovsk region (where Lenin was born), publicly proposed burying Lenin beside his father. A source who worked in local politics at the time says Morozov tried to use Lenin as a kind of “local brand” for the region.

Around the same time, Georgy Poltavchenko, the presidential plenipotentiary envoy to Russia’s Central Federal District (and future St. Petersburg governor), also advocated for Lenin’s burial. He said: “Our country has been shaken by unrest many times, and rarely has anyone been held accountable for these upheavals during their lifetime. I don’t think it’s entirely fair that those who started these upheavals are at the center of the Kremlin. These are also people, they could make mistakes, and we may not share their beliefs and may condemn them, but they deserve to be buried like human beings.” Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov went even further, calling the Mausoleum a “pagan spectacle,” and Lenin’s presence on Red Square a “direct violation of the deceased’s will, in which he requested to be buried with his mother.” (There is no evidence of such a will.)

Still, Putin’s administration never dared take any practical steps toward burying Lenin — mostly to avoid angering a smaller, but significant part of Russian society. In 2005, according to a Levada Center poll, 51 percent of Russians supported Lenin’s burial, while 40 percent were against it. Putin himself explained the Kremlin’s position, saying: “Many people associate their own lives with Lenin’s name. For them, Lenin’s burial would mean that they worshiped false values, set false goals for themselves, and that their lives were lived in vain.”

In the following years, the issue of burying Lenin was mostly brought up before elections. For example, before the 2007 State Duma campaign, United Russia member Andrey Isayev proposed finally burying him, and in the leadup to the next elections, Isayev’s party colleagues Vladimir Medinsky and Robert Schlegel (who now opposes Putin) also suggested it.

On the official United Russia website, Medinsky wrote:

Lenin is an extremely controversial political figure, and having him as a central figure in a necropolis at the heart of our country is extremely absurd. It’s some kind of ridiculous, pagan-necrophilic mission we have on Red Square. There’s no body of Lenin there; experts know that only about 10 percent of his body remains, everything else has long been gutted and replaced.

However, everything changed after the 2011 State Duma elections. Allegations of election fraud led to unprecedented protests in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities. In response, the authorities began a “conservative turn,” says a source close to the Kremlin. Part of this “turn” involved capitalizing on nostalgia for Soviet times. “Lenin’s burial didn’t fit well with this. It fit even worse after the annexation of Crimea and the emergence of the ‘Crimean consensus,’ which the communists were also a part of. They certainly tried not to irritate them,” explains a political strategist who worked with Putin’s administration in the mid-2010s.

Sources told Meduza that after this, the Kremlin only tolerated comments about Lenin’s burial from “niche characters”: members of Russia’s ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), monarchists, leaders of Caucasian republics, and a few “systemic liberals.” For example, Chechen Governor Ramzan Kadyrov continued to call for Lenin to be removed from Red Square.

One Kremlin insider notes that not everyone immediately “grasped the new rules.” For example, in 2017, several State Duma deputies from United Russia signed an LDPR initiative to bury Lenin, but then quickly withdrew their signatures. The bill itself wasn’t passed, as neither the government nor parliament supported it. That same year, Ulyanovsk Governor Sergey Morozov brought the topic up again. “But he got a call from Putin’s administration almost immediately — like, what are you doing? Times are different now; don’t go there anymore,” explains a former member of the local United Russia party.

Even the Russian Orthodox Church began to speak more cautiously about the topic. “I have no doubt that sooner or later Lenin will be taken out of the Mausoleum because it is indeed a relic of the past that a mummified body lies in the very center of the capital. I hope that some consensus will be found, and the body will be buried,” Metropolitan Hilarion said in 2021. After that, ROC leaders dropped the topic.

After the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine, Putin’s administration finally took the question of Lenin’s burial off its agenda, say two Kremlin insiders. (Even though, according to surveys, fewer and fewer Russians are opposed to the idea.) “[According to Kremlin ideology], Russia is now a civilization-state with a thousand-year history. The USSR is a part of this history, which means Lenin is a part of it, and the Mausoleum is [one of its monuments],” notes a current administration employee.

A political strategist working with the Kremlin puts it more directly: “Those who supported Lenin’s burial in the 1990s were building a new Russia, in which there was no place for Lenin’s Mausoleum. But this fire has burned out — now [the authorities] aren’t building something new, they’re restoring the past, part of which is Lenin.”

Reporting by Andrey Pertsev