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Many Russians want Lenin moved

Eighty-one years after his fatal stroke in 1924 (although speculation that he really died from syphilis has refused to go away), the wish of Vladimir Lenin to be buried alongside his mother in St Petersburg`s Volkovskoye Cemetery, resting place of writers, intellectuals and academics, remains controversially unfulfilled. His body was stripped of its internal organs before being embalmed and his brain removed and sliced into more than 30,000 colour-coded parts in a Soviet attempt to discover the secret of his genius. Results were inconclusive. His grey matter still resides in a Moscow institute.

Instead, his painstakingly embalmed corpse, replete in its three-piece suit, continues to lie in what is purportedly a bullet-proof, blast-proof glass case in a mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow, 400 miles to the south. It is exactly where the tyrant who succeeded him (against Lenin`s will), Joseph Stalin, decreed that he should be deposited. The body of Joseph Stalin was also embalmed and between 1953 and 1961 lay next to Lenin`s in the mausoleum until Nikita Khrushchev ordered it removed and buried by the Kremlin Wall as part of his de-Stalinisation campaign.

Those who back Lenin`s relocation include Nikita Mikhailkov, arguably Russia`s most famous living film director, the ultra-nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Patriarch Alexey II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Valentina Matvienko, powerful governor of St Petersburg, Lyuba Sliska, Putin ally and senior MP, and at least one government minister. The influential mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, is also on record as saying that he wants Lenin`s body to be moved.