(AP)”Berlin authorities are mulling whether to rescue the 3.5-tonne head from a statue of the late Soviet leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from a public dump and grant it a prominent spot in a local museum.

A spokesman for the cultural authority in the city-state confirmed a report in Monday’s Bild newspaper that Berlin officials now aimed to preserve the giant head, 14 years after it was consigned to history’s dustheap.

A 19-meter-tall (62-foot-tall) statue of the Russian revolutionary was sawed from its pedestal in the Friedrichshain district of east Berlin in 1991, one year after German reunification, and buried near the Mueggelsee lake in nearby Koepenick.

But souvenir-hunters have repeatedly plundered the site, leading Koepenick authorities to call for the thorough destruction of the defunct monument.

City authorities rejected the request and said they now aimed to integrate at least the head of the statue in an exhibition on east Germany’s communist past.

“The city government will now take up the issue and decide whom or which museum to turn to,” the spokesman said.

“Then they, together with museum experts, can decide how to deal with these parts of the memorial and where they can be stored or presented.”

The enormous statue — immortalized in the hit German film “Good Bye Lenin” — was erected in 1970, shortly before the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth.

———————————
Would Berlin’s authorities allow a statue of Hitler to be put on display in one of their musems to appease those who were merely “interested in exhibition of Berlin’s Nazi past”? Lenin may have murdered less people, but he was still a dictator and and the father of the arch dictatorial and repressive Soviet Union.