The proposal of ‘United Russia’ to bury Lenin’s body in St. Petersburg caused an ambiguous reaction in the Ossetian community. Communists of North and South Ossetia condemned this idea as offending the country’s historical heritage.
According to the President of the International Alan Congress, Kazbek Hetagurov, Lenin contributed greatly to the prosperity of the Ossetian people. For example, he helped 40,000 Ossetian refugees to escape from the Menshevik government of Georgia in the 1920s, allocating 100 million rubles to the task.
According to the United Russia representatives, it is obvious that sooner or later the remains of the ‘Leader of the world’s proletariat’ will have to be carried out of the Red Square mausoleum. Public organizations and human rights activists launch protests against Lenin’s ‘physical’ presence in the center of the Russian capital every year. As time passes, Soviet symbols and ideology become more and more obsolete and irrelevant to Russian citizens’ everyday lives and should be left for historians to explore. And the historians agreed three years ago that today the state should not waste enormous funds supporting the mausoleum. 45% of Russian citizens concur with this declaration.
However, some public activists sympathizing with communist ideology emphasize that these declarations are just a PR move by United Russia and that the collapse of the Soviet Union started with similar provocational suggestions.
Some historians suggest that organizing a nationwide referendum is the best way to resolve this ambiguous question. As for the mausoleum itself, they propose organizing a museum there, like the Tomb of Napoleon in Les Invalides.
Tengiz Doguzov, Tskhinvali, exclusively to VK
