When the writer and former dissident Yuri Khariyakin told the Soviet parliament in 1989 that Vladimir Lenin had expressed a wish to be buried alongside his mother in St Petersburg and that his embalmed body should be removed from the Red Square mausoleum, he encountered incredulity and anger.

Lenin's niece, Olga Ulyanova, even made a public statement to the effect that it was a bare-faced lie that her uncle had wanted to be interred with his mother.

Displayed body of Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, who died in 1924, should be buried, says Vladimir Medinsky. Credit:Sergei Karpukhin/AP

Ever since the Soviet Union began to break apart there have been repeated attempts to put the founding father of Russian communism six feet under. But no political leader has yet dared to take the step many Russians regard as sacrilege.

So, Lenin lies to this day, looking more waxy with each passing year, in the constructivist red marble mausoleum in Moscow beneath the Kremlin's walls, an object of curiosity for tourists whom humourless guards forbid from speaking above a whisper or putting their hands in their pockets.