Well on one hand, Lenin did want to be buried in St. Petersburg near his family, keeping him in that mausoleum is a denial of his final wishes, OTOH, he was a communist not a christian so he is not entitled to christian burial. That being said, irregardless of what he was and what he did, final wishes largely trump identity in this case. he should be buried. As far as what he was and what he/they did, Russia certainly would not be where it is today, and likely still the backward agrarian sick old man of Europe if not for him, and he did establish the NEP before Stalin dismantled it, the roots for the eventual unraveling of the Soviet system. Frankly their history required him... Not saying it’s right, nobody is more anti-communist than me, but it simply is what it is...
IMNSVHO, You are falling into a bit of an ideologically prepared faux-history. Russia was NOT just some brutal rustic serfdom prior to WWI. Russia was rich and was rapidly industrializing at a phenomenal pace. There was a very substantial middle class living in large and often beautiful cities fully the equal of anything else in Europe at the time, and a lot of them. However, its government infrastructure under the Czar proved incapable of managing or planning this on the vast scale required by the sheer size of Russia and its riches. Throw in the war against Japan and then WWI, into which the Czar foolishly and quite unnecessarily led his nation, and the fragile system collapsed of its own weight. The Bolsheviks were kicking a system that was already down because of war. It was not the rural population that joined them, it was the war-time industrial workers in the cities, crushed by government inefficiencies.
To this day, NO Russian government has matched the agricultural output reached under the Czars after the land reforms of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries created a wealthy class of independent farmers. Who the hell knows what would have happened without the Communists. It's just that we ought not to fall for the largely bullshit bolshevik version of Russian history.
The Czars were "Dunces Sitting on a Volcano," for sure. But it was the war(s) that set off the eruption of which the Communists took advantage. They saved nobody.