To bury or not to bury Lenin — that was the question.

Russia has grappled with it for two decades as the leader of the October Revolution languished in Red Square, exposed to proletarian gaze. Actually, the question dates back to Stalin, who had Lenin embalmed against his wishes for a “proletarian” burial. Stalin’s similarly embalmed corpse, however, was buried near the Kremlin walls in 1961, five years after Khrushchev condemned his murderous legacy. But the Russian Federation’s indecision has to do with voter acceptance. The Bolshevik revolutionary remains an icon for elderly Russians, as Vladimir Putin has been arguing all along. Unsurprisingly, given Putin’s resurrection of the Soviet project under a pseudo-czarist theme, he didn’t seem keen on disturbing Lenin’s public sleep. Now Russia’s new Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky has expressed his “private opinion” that Lenin’s body should be “returned to the earth”. Post mortem, the corpses of Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il-sung became testaments to the founding myths that communist regimes had to create in the absence of traditional religion. The North Koreans and the Vietnamese employed the very embalming expertise of the Laboratory of the Mausoleum of V.I. Lenin. The secret messages in Hamlet productions infuriated Stalin enough to execute director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He particularly detested the Prince of Denmark’s indecisiveness. That Lenin lab is now called the Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants. Whether in deference to a god-fearing Russia or the dictates of incontrovertible post-Soviet logic, Russia may find it easier to answer the question — to bury or not to bury. RIP.