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THE EMBALMED remains of the founder of the Soviet Union went back on display yesterday in the Lenin mausoleum outside the Kremlin walls, for Vladimir Lenin's last encore.
For his days are numbered in the squat black mausoleum where his wizened 34kg mummy has been exhibited to the Communist faithful and curious tourists almost continuously since he died in 1924.
Yesterday, he was carried back to the glass case in his underground resting place after a two-month soaking in a vat of embalming fluid. He is taken out every 18 months for a ritual chemical rejuvenation.
But the debate on what to do with the body of the father of the Bolshevik revolution has intensified in his absence. Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, is threatening to make good a promise of his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, and give the Marxist leader a Christian burial in Saint Petersburg beside four members of his family.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a sporadic debate over what to do with the mummy, which remains a shrine for Russia's still powerful Communist Party and an embarassment to the Kremlin's democratic bosses.
The several thousand Russians queuing up in Red Square yesterday, in biting winds and whipping snow, do not view his fate with indifference.
For generations of Russians, the Lenin mausoleum, watched over by a goose- stepping honour guard of elite troops, has been a symbol of Soviet greatness and Russia's place in the vanguard of human progress.
Fauziya Shulyamova, a 66-year-old woman from the Volga region of Tatarstan, said as she emerged from the vault: "I wanted my granddaughter to see the star that shone upon us for all our lives."
A 12-year-old girl by her side looked frozen and distinctly unenthusiastic. Ms Shulyamova said: "They say he will be buried...