Word: poltavchenko
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...since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lenin's body retains its place of honor in Red Square, where it has lain since 1924. Now Russia's ruling élite is exhuming an old debate: whether to move Lenin's body out of the mausoleum and bury it. Georgi Poltavchenko, an aide to President Vladimir Putin, recently called for Lenin--the cause, he said, of all of Russia's troubles in the 20th century--to be removed. That was echoed by Nikita Mikhalkov, a Soviet-era film star who bemoaned the fact that "a corpse" had been turned into...
...perhaps not surprising that the two figures leading the push to move Lenin's corpse want to distance themselves from their pasts. Poltavchenko spent his career in the KGB but now maintains he was always secretly religious--once a crime that would have landed him in a labor camp. Mikhalkov's father Sergei established the family fortune by writing chilling verse about enemies of the people at the height of the Stalinist purges. And he composed the words to his country's national anthem--three times. In 1944 he hailed the "Great Lenin" and Stalin. In 1977 he wrote...
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