PRESIDENT Yeltsin dangled a red rag in front of his communist foes in parliament yesterday by suggesting Vladimir Lenin should get a Christian burial.
Mr Yeltsin's government has hinted that he may dissolve parliament if it does not pass reforms and the president was clearly relishing a new battle when he suggested Russians could decide the fate of the Bolshevik leader's corpse.
"I hope we will gradually rid Red Square of its status of a cemetery," he told cultural leaders, saying a referendum could be held in the autumn on whether to move Lenin's mummified body from its polished red marble tomb outside the Kremlin wall.
Mr Yeltsin (66) rarely travels around Russia outside election campaigns and has been busy with foreign policy and a new reform push since he recovered in February from months of illness.
But he was full of fun during his trip to St Petersburg, the start of what he says will be an extensive check on the regions to root out corruption".
"I'm in good, sporting form. That's it. I'm working full strength. The bribetakers' hands are already shaking," he told a small crowd.
Courting the intelligentsia by chairing a session of his Presidential Council of Culture and Art for the first time, he took another dig at the State Duma, which is dominated by opposition communists and nationalists.
"It's a great rarity for us to watch a good play on television," Interfax news agency quoted Mr Yeltsin as saying. "But at the same time they have live coverage of the Duma. It's funny, but it's stupid."
Communist deputies, who are strongly opposed to the reform push, have also passed a law banning changes in the appearance of Red Square in a bid to stop Lenin's corpse being removed.
Mr Yeltsin has not signed the law. Instead he suggested yesterday "removing the funereal bloom from Red Square ... not with bulldozers or excavators but gradually and in a civilised way.
"This is our history. Let us give it a Christian character. A dead man should not be above earth. He should be buried in earth."
Mr Yeltsin did not say what he wanted to do with Stalin and other Soviet luminaries buried along the Kremlin wall behind Lenin's tomb.