The niece of Vladimir Lenin, father of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, died in Moscow on Friday at the age of 89, officials said.
Olga Ulyanova was the daughter of Dmitry Ulyanov, Lenin’s younger brother and a founding member of the Bolshevik party. Lenin never had any children.
Ulyanova was a chemist and a writer who published a number of books about her famous uncle. While she furiously rejected calls for Lenin’s body to be removed from its Red Square mausoleum, she also said in 2008 that it was a “mistake” to turn him into an icon for the Communist Party.
Lenin’s great nephew, Dmitry Ulyanov, is an Orthodox priest in the western Russian city of Ivanovo. Media reports claimed that he at one point tried to force his congregation to worship images of Lenin.
MOSCOW, March 25 (RIA Novosti)