Leningrad's reformist mayor Thursday proposed moving the body of state founder Vladimir Lenin from his shrine-like mausoleum on Red Square to the humbler surroundings of a cemetery in Russia's second largest city.

"I propose we fulfill the last wish of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and bury him according to religious and national customs at the Volkovo cemetery in Leningrad with all due honors," mayor Anatoly Sobchak told the Congress of People's Deputies.Just minutes before, the Congress had voted to disband the rigid centrally controlled state structures Lenin inspired after the 1917 Communist revolution.

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who quit as party chief after last month's coup attempt, did not reject the surprise proposal on burying Lenin.

But he said it should be sent from the Congress, the highest legislature, to the parliament, the Supreme Soviet. The next parliamentary session begins Oct. 2.

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"We are not rejecting or throwing out Anatoly Sobchak's proposal," Gorbachev said. "But let's transfer it."

Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov has said Lenin, who died in 1924, wanted to be buried next to his mother in Ulyanovsk.

Moving Lenin from the marble mausoleum would have great symbolic value, given its role through the decades as a magnet for millions of communist pilgrims from around the world.

Taking his body to Leningrad might sound like a homecoming, but the city has already voted to adopt its pre-revolutionary name St. Petersburg.

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