ADVISERS TO Kremlin chief Dmitry Medvedev have called for the removal of the remains of revolutionary Vladimir Lenin from his Red Square mausoleum as part of major plans to erase remnants of Soviet life from modern Russia.
The project was revealed as the Russian president seeks to portray himself as the progressive face of politics in the country, in contrast to his conservative mentor, prime minister Vladimir Putin, who has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union and restored huge power to the security services.
It is not clear which of the men will run in next year’s presidential election, though they have pledged not to go head-to-head. Competition between them and their respective cliques is intensifying, with speculation about growing tension in their relationship.
As well as calling for the “long overdue” burial of Lenin 87 years after his death, Mr Medvedev’s human rights advisers urged him to rename streets that honour people guilty of Soviet-era oppression, and to bar officials from publicly praising them.
They backed the building of major museums to commemorate victims of repression in a country where dictator Josef Stalin is still regularly hailed for making the Soviet Union powerful, without referring to his prison camps and forced collectivisation schemes that claimed millions of lives.
“It is just as impossible to condone the actions of the Nazis as those that Stalin and the NKVD directed against their own people,” said one of the authors of the proposals, Yan Rachinsky. The NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, later became the KGB.
“If a person can condone these things, he is professionally unfit to be a state official. He may do similar things himself if he condones them,” insisted Mr Rachinsky, co-chairman of Russia’s Memorial human rights groups.
The report, published on Memorial’s website, suggested Russia should forge a new set of shared values based on the output of its great writers, rather than its dictators. “We are not the country of Lenin and Stalin, but the country and people of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Pasternak,” it said.
The proposals were made by members of Mr Medvedev’s Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, whose chairman, Mikhail Fedotov, said their aim was “national reconciliation”. “It’s time we let go of past grievances and laid all ghosts to rest,” he said.
Leading members of Russia’s Communist party condemned the proposals, calling them an attempt to “distract people’s attention from real problems” and saying any bid to bury Lenin “carries colossal potential for conflict”.
The United Russia party that backs Mr Medvedev and Mr Putin is running a website poll to gauge support for Lenin’s burial. So far, some 67 per cent of votes favour removing him from Red Square.
Mr Putin has been ambivalent on the issue. “History is something that you don’t need to rush,” he said last September. “Things must be done in their proper time. There will come a time when the Russian people make up their minds what to do about this.”
Critics accuse Mr Putin of failing to unambiguously condemn Soviet atrocities, and of giving undue power to the security services that he once led. He is still Russia’s most popular politician, however, and many of his compatriots praise him for returning stability, patriotism and pride to their country after the chaotic 1990s.
In a move that could stoke tension between the two leaders, Mr Medvedev this week ordered government ministers – including close allies of Mr Putin – to leave the boards of major state-controlled companies.