Putin compares Lenin’s body to the relics of saints
In journalist Andrei Kondrashov’s documentary film “Valaam”, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared Communist attitudes toward Vladimir Lenin with the veneration of the saints in Christianity, and he compared the communist ideology to Christianity, Novaya Gazeta writes.
"The Communist ideology is very much akin to Christianity, in fact. Freedom, brotherhood, equality, justice—it's all laid down in the Holy Scripture. It's all there. And the code of builders of communism, it's a sublimation, it's a primitive excerpt from the Bible; nothing new there. Lenin was put in a mausoleum. How is this different from the relics of saints for Orthodox Christians, and just for Christians? They say, ‘No, in the Christian world there is no such tradition.’ How can you say there is not? Go to Athos and look. There are holy relics. Here, too, are Sergius and Herman holy relics. In fact, nothing new was invented by those authorities. It simply adopted for its ideology what mankind had long invented," the Russian president said.
Putin added that the people of the country were accompanied by faith all the time. "Faith strengthened when it was especially hard for our country, for the people. There were very tough years of theomachy, when priests were wiped out, churches destroyed. However, at the same time, a new religion was created," the Russian president said.
The first time someone came up with the idea to take Lenin's body out of the Mausoleum and bury it was in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin, at the very beginning of his first term in office in 2001, stated that he considered the discussion of the question of the reburial of Lenin's body premature. He explained that the generation of citizens who lived for a long time during the reign of the CPSU would think that they "worshiped false values and lived their life in vain."
The question of burying Lenin's body began to be actively discussed again in 2017, the centennial anniversary of the October Revolution. In April, a number of deputies submitted to the State Duma a bill on the reburial of Lenin's body. The explanatory note stated that "in and of itself, Lenin's body is neither a symbol of the era, nor a symbol of the unification of the nation."