MOSCOW, December 27. /TASS/. Removing Vladimir Lenin’s body from Red Square’s mausoleum is not on the agenda, and there are no plans to do so, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS.
"No, there are no such plans," the Kremlin press secretary said in response to a question as to whether the decision to take Lenin’s body out of the mausoleum is possible in the near future, for example, for the 100th anniversary of his death in 2024.
"This issue is not on the table, currently, there is a different agenda filled with other issues and problems," Putin’s spokesman stressed.
Lenin passed away on January 21, 1924, at his residence in Gorki outside Moscow at the age of 53. He did not leave any written instructions on the arrangement or place of his burial. On January 22, 1924, his body was embalmed for a short period, back then, as a way of offering a final tribute to the deceased leader. Later, a decision was made to preserve his body for a longer period. The construction of the current mausoleum was completed in 1930. From 1953-1961, Joseph Stalin’s body was also placed in the tomb but was subsequently interred at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. In 1990, Lenin’s mausoleum was included in the UNESCO World Heritage list along with Moscow’s Kremlin and Red Square as "the Soviet Union’s prime example of symbolic monumental architecture."