Protesters Want Lenin`s Body Out Of Red Square

The group intended to dress up as mummies and demonstrate outside the mausoleum with a coffin made out of paper, Russian media said.

Police in Russia detained 25 people on Wednesday who had been planning to stage a protest to demand the removal of a mausoleum containing the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin from Moscow's Red Square.

Police closed the Red Square, which lies next to the Kremlin at the heart of the Russian capital ahead of the planned protest on the 85th anniversary of the death of Lenin, who founded the Soviet Union.

The group intended to dress up as mummies and demonstrate outside the mausoleum with a coffin made out of paper, Russian media said.

Reports described the group as Orthodox monarchists who want Lenin buried as an ordinary person.

Lenin's mausoleum stands just outside the Kremlin's walls and is still a major tourist attraction for both foreigners and visiting Russians nearly 20 years after the end of communism.

"They were trying to hold a rally that the authorities had not allowed," a police spokesman said.

Lenin was the head of the Bolshevik party that seized power in 1917 and established the Soviet Union which collapsed in 1991.