STAVROPOL, January 25. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has explained why he believes that Vladimir Lenin was the one who had planted a powerful bomb under the basement of the country’s statehood.

Speaking at an inter-regional forum of the All-Russia People’s Front Putin recalled that Lenin had a fundamental discussion with Stalin over the principles a future state should rest upon. Stalin’s ideas were rejected and the country was built on ideas implying the possibility of secession of constituent territories. "That right [to secession] was the delayed action mine planted under our statehood. This is what caused the country’s eventual breakup," Putin said.

Earlier, Putin at a meeting of the presidential council on science and education dropped a rather caustic remark addressed to Lenin. He said Lenin had "planted an atom bomb under the building called Russia and that bomb went off a while later."

Putin said that he himself had been a member of the Communist Party and an officer of the Soviet security service, the KGB, which some propagandists used to refer to as an armed outpost of the Communist Party. He said he had joined the Communist party not because it was a must.

"I cannot say that I was a hardline advocate of the Communist ideology," he said. "Yet my attitude to all this was very delicate," Putin recalled, adding he had never been a career party functionary, but just a rank-and-file member. "In contrast to many functionaries I did not throw my membership card away or burn it in public. I still keep it at home."

Putin acknowledged that he liked Communist and Socialist ideas "very much" and that he still liked them. What senior citizens still remember as the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism (a set of codified moral rules every Communist Party member in the Soviet Union was supposed to follow) looked very much like the Bible in terms of ideological content, but "the practical embodiment of these wonderful ideas in our country was very far from what the Utopian socialists had proclaimed."

Putin recalled the murder of the royal family, priests and even servants of the royal family.

"Why did they kill Dr. Botkin, why did they kill the servants, people of proletarian origin by and large? What for? Just for the sake of concealing a crime," Putin said.

He also recalled the role of the Communist Party in World War I, when Russia as a result of power struggle "lost to the loser country."

Putin was critical of the Soviet Union’s economic policies. At the same time he recognized that the planned economy managed to mobilize resources and address problems in the health service, in education and in the defense industry.

He called for studying history without painting it white or black.

"It should be studied carefully and analyzed objectively so as to avoid mistakes that were made in the past," he said.