The death of Lenin

At 6.50 p.m. on Monday 21 January 1924, at the Gorki estate outside Moscow, Vladimir Lenin died – founder of the Bolshevik party and of the Soviet state, and chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union. He was 53. He had been gravely ill for almost two years, and since March 1923, after his third stroke, he had been unable to speak and had taken no part in government. His death was therefore no surprise to the party leadership, but to millions of people in the country and around the world it came as a shock. The Bolsheviks gave him a funeral such as Russia had not seen since the days of the tsars and, against his widow’s wishes, embalmed his body and put it on display in a mausoleum on Red Square. They turned the party leader into an object of worship, through which they legitimised their rule for decades to come. At the same time the struggle for his inheritance began, which within five years was won by Joseph Stalin.

Illness

Lenin had been ill since 1921. He complained of headaches, insomnia and exhaustion, and his doctors, including German specialists brought in at great expense, could not make a firm diagnosis. Some suspected lead poisoning from the bullets that had remained in his body since the assassination attempt of August 1918. In April 1922 one of them was removed, but this changed nothing. On 25 May 1922 he suffered his first stroke, temporarily losing the power of speech and the use of his right hand. He returned to work in the autumn, but in December further strokes followed. On 18 December 1922 the Central Committee entrusted Stalin, General Secretary of the party since April, with supervising the patient’s treatment and deciding who could visit him.

In the last weeks in which he was still able to work, Lenin dictated notes and articles to his secretaries. The most famous of these texts, the “Letter to the Congress”, later known as Lenin’s Testament, assessed the party’s leading figures. Of Stalin he wrote that he had concentrated “immense power” in his hands and that it was not certain whether he would always be able to use it with sufficient caution. He called Leon Trotsky the most able member of the Central Committee but reproached him for excessive self-confidence. He recalled that Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev had opposed the insurrection in October 1917. In a postscript of 4 January 1923, after Stalin had quarrelled with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, he went further: Stalin was “too rude”, and thought should be given to removing him from the post of General Secretary. In March 1923 Lenin threatened to break off relations with Stalin. A few days later a third stroke robbed him of speech.

From May 1923 Lenin lived at Gorki. In the summer his condition improved somewhat. He learnt to speak again and to write with his left hand, went out for drives, and in October visited Moscow and his Kremlin office for the last time. In January 1924 his condition suddenly deteriorated. On the afternoon of 21 January he suffered an attack, lost consciousness and died that evening. Of the party leaders, only Nikolai Bukharin was at his bedside. The post-mortem revealed advanced atherosclerosis of the cerebral arteries, and a cerebral haemorrhage was given as the immediate cause of death. Rumours that Lenin had suffered from syphilis were already circulating in the 1920s. Some researchers consider it possible, but most of the doctors who have analysed the surviving records accept the official diagnosis.

The funeral

News of Lenin’s death was announced to the delegates of the Congress of Soviets then sitting in Moscow by the chairman of the Central Executive Committee, Mikhail Kalinin. National mourning was declared, and the funeral arrangements were entrusted to a commission headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky. On 23 January the coffin was taken by train from Gorki to Moscow and laid in state in the Hall of Columns of the House of the Unions. For four days and nights, in bitter frost, hundreds of thousands of people filed past it. The American historian Nina Tumarkin estimated that there may have been as many as half a million.

On 26 January the Second Congress of Soviets of the USSR, sitting in Moscow, resolved to rename Petrograd, the cradle of the revolution, Leningrad. At the same session Stalin delivered a speech that came to be remembered as “the oath”. In a style reminiscent of the Orthodox litany he knew from the seminary, he repeated: “In leaving us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us…”, and after each of the commandments, from the unity of the party to loyalty to the Communist International, he made a vow: “We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, that we will fulfil with honour this thy commandment, too.” Many listeners were taken aback by the tone, but on that day it was Stalin, not his more brilliant rivals, who cast himself as the faithful disciple and guardian of the legacy.

On 27 January the coffin was carried to Red Square. Party and state leaders made speeches, and at 4 p.m., as it was placed in the tomb beneath the Kremlin wall, trains and factories throughout the country stopped for several minutes, while sirens and locomotive whistles paid tribute to the dead man. Trotsky was absent from the funeral. He was ill and travelling to the Black Sea, to Sukhumi, for treatment. He learnt of Lenin’s death in Tiflis from a telegram from Stalin which, by his account, gave him a date for the funeral that meant he could not get back in time anyway – and the funeral was then postponed. Some historians accept this version; others believe that Trotsky simply misjudged the significance of the moment. Either way, in the days when the party was bidding farewell to Lenin, his best-known comrade-in-arms was absent, and people asked why.

The mausoleum

The tomb that received the coffin on 27 January was a temporary wooden structure, built in three days to a design by the architect Alexey Shchusev. Originally the body was to be preserved only for the period of farewells. The party leadership, however, decided – against the objections of Krupskaya, Lenin’s siblings and some Bolsheviks – to preserve it for ever. In a letter published in Pravda, Krupskaya asked that no monuments be raised to Lenin and no honours paid to him, but that his ideas be put into practice instead. In the spring of 1924 the anatomist Vladimir Vorobiev and the biochemist Boris Zbarsky developed a method of long-term embalming, and on 1 August a larger, though still wooden, mausoleum was opened. The stone Lenin Mausoleum, of granite and porphyry, was completed in 1930. Lenin’s brain was removed and handed over to a special institute, which was to search it for material traces of genius.

A cult quickly grew up around the dead man on a scale hitherto unknown in the socialist world. His busts and portraits appeared in every office and school, and his works became the sacred texts of “Leninism”. In February 1924 the party announced the so-called Lenin Enrolment: within three months more than 200,000 workers were admitted, and in 1924–1925 more than 600,000 new members in all. The campaign had been prepared before Lenin’s death, but his name gave it momentum. The new members, poorly educated and with no experience of ideological disputes, were obedient to the party apparatus – and the apparatus was run by the General Secretary.

The struggle for the inheritance

Lenin had not named a successor, and formally the party had no single leader. His post as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars was taken over in February 1924 by Alexei Rykov, but real power lay in the Politburo. Since 1923 Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin had been acting together there as a “troika” against Trotsky, who in October 1923 had attacked the bureaucratisation of the party. A few days before Lenin’s death, at a party conference in mid-January 1924, the views of Trotsky and his supporters were condemned as a “petty-bourgeois deviation”. Earlier, in the autumn of 1923, the leadership had been discredited by the failed “German October”, whose only armed episode was the Hamburg uprising.

Lenin’s Testament could have ended Stalin’s career. Krupskaya handed it to the Central Committee before the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924. It was not, however, read out in the congress hall, but only to individual delegations, with the caveat that Lenin had been ill. Zinoviev and Kamenev persuaded the delegates that Lenin’s fears had not been borne out, and Stalin kept his post. Trotsky remained silent – a mistake that later cost him everything. In the autumn of 1924, in his essay “Lessons of October”, Trotsky recalled how Zinoviev and Kamenev had opposed the insurrection in 1917, and the “troika” responded with a campaign against “Trotskyism”. In January 1925 he lost the War Commissariat. It was then that Stalin proclaimed the slogan of building socialism in one country, without waiting for revolution in Europe.

Stalin then dealt with his allies. At the end of 1925, in alliance with Bukharin and Rykov, he defeated Zinoviev and Kamenev, and when they joined forces with Trotsky in 1926, he crushed their joint opposition as well. In November 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party; in 1928 Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata, and in 1929 deported from the country. That same year Stalin sidelined Bukharin, and in December 1929 his 50th birthday was already celebrated as the festival of a sole ruler.

Lenin’s death and the “purges”

It is often said that after Lenin’s death Stalin “began purging his rivals”. This is a simplification. In 1924–1929 Stalin defeated his opponents by political means: majorities in votes, control over personnel and the selection of delegates, and accusations of breaching the ban on factions adopted in 1921 on Lenin’s own initiative. The defeated lost their posts and were expelled from the party and exiled – in Trotsky’s case deported from the country – but they were not killed. The purges in the proper sense, with show trials, executions and mass arrests, began only after the murder of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, and reached their height in the Great Purge of 1936–1938. It was then that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov and thousands of other Bolsheviks were shot, and in 1940 a Soviet intelligence agent killed Trotsky in Mexico. Lenin’s death opened the road to Stalin’s dictatorship, but that road took more than ten years.

Significance

Lenin left his successors ready-made tools: the dictatorship of a single party, a political police, a ban on factions that allowed any criticism to be portrayed as wrecking unity, and an International that subordinated communist parties all over the world to Moscow. His death meant that who would use these tools, and how, was decided by a struggle within the apparatus – a struggle in which the man who ran the apparatus was best placed. The Lenin cult created in January 1924 also became the foundation of the cult of Stalin, who presented himself as Lenin’s only faithful disciple.

For the road to the Second World War this was of fundamental importance. Under Stalin the Soviet Union staked everything on forced industrialisation and rearmament, and its foreign policy was subordinated to the interests of the state, not of revolution. Stalin’s Comintern ordered the German communists to fight the Social Democrats as “social fascists”, which eased Hitler’s path to power. The purges of 1937–1938 decimated the Red Army’s officer corps, and in August 1939 Stalin concluded a pact with Hitler and in September partitioned Poland together with him. Lenin’s body survived it all. In the summer of 1941, as the Germans advanced on Moscow, it was secretly taken to Tyumen in Siberia; after the war it returned to the mausoleum, where from 1953 to 1961 it lay beside the body of Stalin.