LENIN'S REMAINS TO GO TO ROME?
Yesterday the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Oliveiro Diliberto, arrived in Moscow to ‘celebrate’ the ninetieth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power of 1917 today, 7 November. That event, then passing almost unnoticed amid the anarchy of the time, is known to Communist propaganda as ‘the October Revolution’. It is still feted by the few ageing members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, a Communist Party less popular than those of Italy and France.
In Moscow, Diliberto suggested that the chemically preserved remains of the Bolshevik mass murderer, V. I. Ulyanov, known as Lenin, be transferred to Rome. This is in view of the constant talk in Russia of burying those remains, given their embarrassment to the present Russian government. The latter is striving to restore the Christian values of Imperial Russia, whose greatness and nobility the still unburied Lenin buried beneath the massacres of his Red Terror. At a time when the Body of Christ is visibly rising from the tomb in Russia, surely it is time to send away the remains of the demon that sent it to the tomb, as did Christ the Gadarene swine?
Diliberto’s proposal was met without seriousness by several public figures in Italy. Thus, a representative of the right-of-centre National Alliance Party stated that such a transfer would be possible, but only if Russia would agree to take Diliberto in exchange. Commenting on the elderly composition of the Italian Senate, which like second chambers elsewhere in the Western world is full of cosily retired politicians, an Italian Senator called Ettore Pirovano said that a dead body in the Senate would find itself in excellent company.
However, there is surely a more serious aspect to this question. Unlike the German government, which faces no embarrassment with Hitler’s vanished remains, the fact is that Ulyanov’s remains are an embarrassment. If we note that Ulyanov himself was of mixed German, Swedish, Jewish, Kalmyk and Russian descent; that he took his pseudonym from the German town of Lehnin; that he spent much of his life in Western countries, notably in England, Switzerland and Finland; that he was financed by the wealthy German Manchester factory-owner, Friedrich Engels; that he was dispatched by the Kaiser to Russia in a sealed train to destroy Russia; and finally, that his Bolshevik usurpers negotiated with the Vatican, which rejoiced at the downfall of Orthodox Russia and tried through the Bolsheviks to set up proselytising missions in the post-Russian Soviet Union. Then, surely, the transfer of Lenin’s remains to Rome, where the Western schism was consecrated nearly a thousand years ago in 1014, under another Pope Benedict, the VIII and not the XVI, does have sense. Why should a product of the West not return there? Why should a Russia now returning to its Orthodox destiny and historic path not unburden itself from that which was imposed on her from outside? Surely, such a transfer would express historic justice.
