MOSCOW, April 7: Historians in Russia are proposing to close Lenin’s mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square, where the preserved body of the head of the Bolshevik revolution is still held, daily Kommersant reported on Friday.

“The state must not spend taxpayers’ money to maintain the mummy of the head of the Communist Party,” the History Institute of the Academy of Sciences said in a text signed by its director Vladimir Lavrov, according to the report.

“Lenin’s activity led the country to a socio-economic and spiritual stalemate ... and isolated the country from the civilised world,” the text said, responding to a request by a Russian non-governmental organisation seeking recognition for victims of repression during the Soviet era.

“Lenin and his successor, Stalin, are responsible for the repression of millions of innocent people, for the politics of social genocide, the creation of gulags and of resorting to torture,” the historians quoted by Kommersant said.

Russian communists criticised the recommendations, calling them “a provocation against the Communist Party, against a whole generation,” according to Vladimir Ulas, president of the Moscow branch of the party.

Debate has revived recently in Russia over whether to bury the body of the Bolshevik leader with several public figures arguing that burial would represent a much-needed break with the Soviet past and Lenin’s personality cult.—AFP