The recent 71st anniversary of Lenin's death may have passed most people by but it's been a major headache for Petersburg's mayor Anatoly Sobchak.
After all this was to be the date when Mr Sobchak had planned to inter Lenin's corpse in the city's Volkovskoe Cemetery, to join his mother, sisters and brother-in-law.
Unfortunately the plan backfired and Lenin's embalmed body still remains remain firmly ensconced in its Mausoleum on Red Square.
However, Lenin pilgrims need not fret as the city is still littered with various memorials to the founding father of Russian Communism.
After the Soviet Union's collapse and the process of dismantling Communism began, Mayor Sobchak declared that all Lenin statues were to be spared.
While the city may have changed its name from Leningrad back to Tsarist St Petersburg, the city is still haunted by the steely gaze of its erstwhile leader.
"And great Lenin showed us the way", or so boasts the strains of the Soviet National Anthem. Most sculptures of Lenin in their traditional taxi-hailing pose seem to be showing us the way to the nearest tram stop, or in the case of the statue at the Finland Station, Vladimir's revolutionary digit points ominously in the direction of the Bolshoy Dom, former headquarters of the KGB.
The Finland Station Lenin is the original statue and perhaps the best. The granite sculpture was unveiled in 1926, two years after Lenin's death and depicts him in heroic pose in his armoured car. For diehard enthusiasts the original model from which it was taken can be found in the city's Artillery Museum.
This sculpture spawned an entire genre of totalitarian sculpture, several more examples of which can be found all over the city. Most railway stations have their Lenin, the only notable exception being the Moscow Station, where two years ago a bust of Lenin was unceremoniously replaced by one of Peter the Great.
Despite the efforts of the Leningrad Communist Party to save the statue by keeping a two month vigil on the station's concourse, Lenin lost his place on the pedestal and now an enormous Peter I with hideous bulging eyes stares down at commuters. Thankfully an identical bust to the one that was replaced can be found at the other end of the line at Moscow's Leningrad Station.
The largest and most impressive of the city's statues is located in the city's southern suburbs on (Moscow Square) Moskovskaya Ploshchad. The monument was erected in 1970 to mark the 100th anniversary of Lenin"s birth.
An old didactic Soviet guidebook remarks that the bronze sculpture "embodies mighty energy and a bold, revolutionary mind striving towards the glorious goal."
Local residents prefer to joke that the statue's thoughts are far from revolutionary. Viewed from certain angles Lenin seems to have a suspiciously large bulge in his trousers!
Lenin's legacy isn't merely celebrated in statues. In the years before Perestroika there were ten Lenin memorial flat museums in the city. Now only two remain, both of them affiliated to the Russian Museum. The first can be found, appropriately enough, at number 52, Ulitsa Lenina not far from Petrogradskaya metro station.
It is in fact the flat museum of Lenin's brother-in-law, (I jest not) but Lenin did stay here for six months after his return from exile. For those who speak Russian, the museum's curator, Leonid Nalivkin, is an authority on Lenin and with his little moustache and thinning silver hair it could be the revolutionary leader himself showing you round his former residence.
Mr Nalivkin is also curator of the Alleluyevikh flat museum on 10th Sovetskaya Ulitsa, where Lenin stayed for less than a week. Here preparations are under way for a new exhibition exploring the development of the cult of Lenin under Stalin which is due to open mid-February.
Mr Nalivkin explained that the Lenin Museums were now faced with the problem of storage as the closure of eight Lenin Memorial Flats has led to a surplus of Lenin Memorabilia, meaning that most of it now resides on Nalivkin's cellar.
One of the most original monuments to Lenin can be found at the Ksheninskaya Palace, formerly the Museum of the Great October Revolution. A blood-red stained glass window in the foyer depicts Lenin surrounded by the regular throng of peasants and workers.
The palace now houses the Museum of Wax Figures, a kind of budget Madame Tussaud's, but there is a likeness of Lenin for those who haven't time to see the waxier version at the mausoleum in Moscow. Returning to the Finland Station, the entrance to Ploshchad Lenina metro station boasts a spectacular twenty foot high mosaic, once again portraying the traditional troika of workers, peasants and their great leader.
As Peter's Burg struggles to forget the remnants of its Communist past, time is running out for Lenin's Grad. Mr Sobchak may have reprieved the Lenin statues but for how long?
Each day Leonid Nalivkin fears that the city's last surviving Lenin Museums might suffer the same fate as the ones that were closed down in 1991. Can we really pass up the opportunity to take a closer look at the city's Communist heritage before it disappears as quickly as the ideology it represented?