A Lenin lookalike feeds pigeons in Moscow. (Reuters)

Moscow, Jan. 22 (Reuters): Communists fired by rumours that Soviet State founder Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body may be removed from his mausoleum and buried gathered at the site on snow-covered Red Square yesterday vowing resistance.

About 200 activists, many carrying red Soviet flags, trooped across the cobblestones and laid wreaths before filing through the mausoleum on the 80th anniversary of Lenin’s death.

“We must safeguard this place as a sacred site of our fatherland,” Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov said outside the red marble structure, atop which Communist leaders reviewed mass marchpasts until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“No normal thinking person could possibly even speak of such a proposal, let alone examine it,” he said at the foot of the Kremlin walls. “Anyone with a shred of conscience must respect history as it is.”

Alongside Zyuganov stood Nikolai Kharitonov, one of a number of challengers taking on heavily favoured Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin in a March presidential election. Zyuganov, twice a loser of presidential polls, chose not to stand after his party suffered heavy losses in a December parliamentary poll.

Suggestions that Lenin, who died aged 53 virtually paralysed, might be removed have surfaced periodically since the end of communist rule. But post-Soviet leaders have so far decided against a measure which would enrage leftists.

News reports in recent weeks quoted experts as saying that modern embalming techniques ensured that Lenin’s body, lying behind bullet-proof glass, could remain intact for many years.

Others have quoted surveys showing declining numbers of Russians view the Bolshevik leader with any regard, with 36 per cent in a 2002 poll expressing “sympathy” for him compared to 70 per cent in a survey conducted in 1990.