Majority opinion needed on whether or not to bury Lenin

08 February 2006, 11:00 Majority opinion needed on whether or not to bury Lenin - Putin

Moscow, February 8, Interfax - Any decision on whether or not to bury the body of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, currently housed in a mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square, should be guided by the sentiments of the majority of Russians, President Vladimir Putin said.

"I will seek decisions that have the support of the overwhelming majority of the citizens of our country and, I would like to emphasize this again, decisions that are conducive to conciliation and to national unification rather than to schism," Putin told the Spanish media.

"I believe that, just as the Spanish suffered during the civil war some time ago, the Russian population suffered in the same way or even more from internal strife and civil confrontation. Today we should do nothing that threatens a split and instead should make every move to achieve unification and conciliation," he said.

Putin, who said he had visited the grave of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco during a trip to Spain, argued it was wrong to equate communism with fascism. "Each ideology had its own notions of justice and its own problems. It seems to me that equating the two is completely incorrect," he said.

"The election will be as fixed as every other election in countries like Russia and Iran.
Final results in:
Keep Lenin in glass coffin on display = 110% of vote"

Not if Putin is at all smart.
This is the PERFECT subject for a punctiliously democratic vote.
Why?
Because it doesn't matter a whit in any material sense whatsoever if some stuffed corpse sits in a glass case or not. It changes nothing important no matter what the outcome.

So, you let the people vote, and you are SCRUPULOUS about the polling. It's easy to be so scrupulous when you don't CARE what the outcome is. If the Russians want to keep the mummy, you keep the mummy. If they want to dump it in Lake Baikal with a stone around its neck, you do it. Let the people have full rein, let them completely decide the subject, and make a flawless, stainless, pure election. Indeed, reveal any efforts by any party to rig the result.

And then you can make Russians proud of just how democratic their country is now (you already know that they'll dump the corpse if they are allowed to vote on it). You'll get kudos for running a clean election. The foreign conservatives will write nice things about you and your democracy. People will say what an encouraging sign this is.

Everyone has a party for a day.

And then you can trot out this beautiful test case of democracy when you get (accurately) accused of skulduggery the next time it counts.

Giving people a clean election over a nothing: a stuffed corpse - is great political theater and great PR. It puts a political chit in the bank account you can spend when you need to break balls on something important that has to do with real money and real power.

This is why the People should be allowed to vote on all controversial and pointless issues, like Lenin's corpse, and smoking in bars, abortion, things like that. Let them get sated with democracy and smug and happy and self-satisfied.

This lets you do what you want on economic and security matters, because the people are content with their political bread and circuses.

It would be STUPID for Putin to have an opinion on a stuffed dog.

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