Russia: 100 Years on from Revolution - BBC News

in a park outside Moscow these are the ghosts of communism past like a freakshow of fallen idols and the red star of this show is Vladimir Lenin who led the Russian Revolution you know there are an estimated 14,000 statues of this man in the Soviet Union that means that wherever you went in the USSR there was probably at least one Lenin thinking about you taking care of you or just watching you but communism did more than make statues of him it preserved his body that put it on display Lenin is more alive than the living declared one Soviet slogan a whole scientific Institute was set up to maintain the corpse over time it's had to replace some skin and flesh with plastics and other material Lenin's Red Square mausoleum was a site of pilgrimage with the USSR the late revolutionary quite literally cults viewing it's one of the ironies of the Russian Revolution that the man who led it the Bolshevik coup waged war on the church and once declared there could be nothing more abominable than religion that this man Vladimir Lenin ended up the closest thing communism had to a god his body put on display here in the mausoleum and deified like a Soviet saint but 100 years after Lenin's Revolution might it now be time to consign the mausoleum to history and commit his body to the ground I believe that he should be buried this symbol of the revolution should find its proper place not on the Red Square over our dead body says the Communist Party no one is going to lay a finger on him party leader Gennady Zyuganov says and if anyone dares to try will chase them away Stanislav swiss turnoff has a connection to the burial business his company decorates funeral accessories there's a Lenin connection too he's Vladimir Lenin's greats greats grandnephew one idea stanislav says is to bury Lenin in the mausoleum to satisfy those who think he should lie in the ground and those who believe he should stay put whether or not his body remains on Red Square Vladimir Lenin is little more than a museum piece now to most Russians a curiosity a relic of a lost world Steve Rosenberg BBC news Moscow you

Channel: BBC News

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Keywords: bbc, bbc news, news, russia, russia revolution, The Russian Revolution, Russian Revolution, Russia, moscow, moscow today, russia today, moscow news, lenin, lenin body

Id: MPmlX4kWgjs

Length: 3min 6sec (186 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2017