Should Lenin be buried?

On June 4, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev emerged from well-deserved obscurity to demand that the embalmed body of the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin should be moved from its mausoleum in Red Square and given a standard burial.

Lenin's body has been on public display in a glass case since his death in 1924 and this issue has always been a source of controversy. The original decision to embalm Lenin's body was taken by Stalin and the leading clique against the wishes of Lenin's widow, Krupskaya, who protested: "Vladimir Ilyich was against icons all his life and now they have turned him into an icon."

The real reason for this step was to boost the authority and prestige of Stalin and his faction, who, while trampling the genuine ideas of Lenin underfoot, assiduously cultivated the slogan: "Stalin is Lenin today."

The genuine Bolshevik-Leninists ("Trotskyists") were opposed to this practice. However, today the situation is rather different. Trotsky pointed out that what is important is not just what is said, but who says it and for what purpose.

Lenin led the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to found the first workers' state in the world. Stalin destroyed Lenin's regime of workers' democracy and installed a monstrous bureaucratic totalitarian edifice on the bones of the Bolshevik Party. However, the nationalized property relations established by October survived and enabled the USSR to achieve remarkable results.

In the end the Stalinist bureaucracy destroyed the last remnants of the Soviet workers' state, turning themselves into private capitalists. It was Gorbachev himself who presided over the break-up of the USSR. Now Gorbachev, 77, says: "My view is [that] we should not be occupied right now with grave-digging. But we will necessarily come to a time when the mausoleum will have lost its meaning and we will bury [Lenin], give him up to the earth as his family had wanted. I think the time will come."

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there have been many attempts to have the tomb removed from Red Square.

The first post-Soviet leader, Boris Yeltsin, spoke in favour of removing the mausoleum and the Orthodox Church has called for the former leader to be buried. But the reason for this has nothing to de with religion. The bourgeois counterrevolutionaries are afraid that one day the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky will come back to haunt them. That is why they are always demanding the removal of Lenin's tomb from Red Square.

However, all these attempts met were unpopular and met with resistance. In the end, Yeltsin avoided taking a decision. Vladimir Putin also fudged the issue, saying it was emotive and hard to tackle. His successor, President Dmitry Medvedev, has not yet made his position clear.

Despite everything, the Communists are the second-biggest political party. The working class looks back with nostalgia to the days of the nationalized planned economy when there was full employment, good education and health services. Lenin's tomb is still a reminder of the Russian Revolution, a symbol and a rallying point.

That is why we cannot lend our voice to the chorus of reactionaries demanding its removal. Lenin's tomb should stay where it is. More importantly, Lenin's ideas and programme must be revived and will be revived as the only way forward for the workers of Russia.