An issue that would not go away was what to do with the body of Lenin in his shrine on Red Square. Yeltsin’s stance was a reprise of his first-term position. In May 1997 several aides gave him a plan for raising the issue afresh and bringing it to a “revolutionary resolution.” He agreed to the advice and to recast it as an ethical choice, and requested Patriarch Aleksii in a private audience to get the Orthodox hierarchy behind it.58 Aleksii, with some reluctance, spoke out directly and through lesser clergy, pointing out that prisoners had once been executed in Red Square and that it was now being used for rock concerts, and so was unsuitable to be a graveyard. On June 6 Yeltsin poured fat on the fire at a meeting in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. While Lenin and communism were part of the tapestry of Russian history, it was indecent, he said, for any person not to be buried in the ground. That autumn he called for a national referendum to settle the question: “Let the people decide whether to give him a Christian burial or to leave things the way they are.” The president did, though, deviate from the depoliticization line, saying with some relish that the communists would be opposed: “The communists, of course, will fight it. No need to worry, I know all about struggling with them.”59 Polls in 1997 showed Russian popular opinion to be evenly divided, but the numbers fluctuated over the next two years.60 And the intensity of feeling was greater among the enemies of reinterment, who took their cues from the KPRF and from the closest relative of Lenin’s to survive, his niece Olga Ul’yanova.61 Some threatened to use lawsuits, protest, and even violence to prevent the mausoleum from being emptied.
As had happened before 1996, Yeltsin was unwilling to chance it. “There was not enough time” to prepare Russia for the move, he said in an interview in 2002, and the social tension raised by holding the referendum or moving Lenin without a vote would have been intolerably high. He pointed out that those still queuing to view the body were mostly pensioners who were raised in Soviet days to revere the founder—“and it is hard to accuse them of anything.”62
A second entombment issue had more of a connection with Yeltsin’s previous life. This one was settled positively, though not without soul-searching and disagreement. The mortal remains in question were those of Russia’s last monarch and his family, executed by Bolshevik riflemen in Yekaterinburg in 1918. The skulls and bones of Nicholas II, his German-born spouse (Alexandra), three of their five children (Olga, Tatyana, and Anastasia), and four royal attendants (a cook, two servants, and a physician) had been exhumed in 1991 from the unmarked forest grave at the village of Koptyaki, north of Yekaterinburg. Yeltsin knew the story only too well, as he had supervised the demolition of the place of their deaths, Ipat’ev House, while Sverdlovsk CPSU boss in 1977. Remorse at his part in the drama gave it an immediacy that the Lenin-in-Red-Square soap opera did not have.63 DNA analysis at the Yekaterinburg morgue by Russian, American, and British laboratories had verified the identities. Predictably, the KPRF, which no longer excused the killings but considered the Romanovs parasites, came out against the project. What was unexpected was that the communists’ political bedfellow was the Orthodox Church. Aleksii II met with Yeltsin twice, in May and June, to express opposition to the burial and spoke out openly against it. He and the Holy Synod thought the DNA evidence less than ironclad, and the relics were under discussion between them and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, a diaspora organization with which the incountry hierarchy was to reintegrate in 2007.64
