Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  On 13 December he suffered two strokes, and from then onwards his life ‘became a patchwork record of fluctuating illness and recovery’, as one of his team of doctors said. Two days later he had another major stroke; ‘his condition is much worse’, recorded Professor Kramer. ‘He can write only with difficulty, but what he writes is illegible, the letters overlapping with each other. He could not touch the top of his nose with the tip of his finger.’ He would never write with his own hand again.

  On 22 December Lenin dictated a frantic letter to Stalin begging him to keep his word and give him poison ‘as a humanitarian gesture’. Stalin said no and told his senior comrades of his refusal. ‘I do not have the strength to fulfil the request of Vladimir Ilyich,’ he said.5

  Two days later his doctors,*4 along with Stalin, Kamenev, Bukharin and Zinoviev, imposed a set of rules on Lenin to keep him isolated from everyone except his family, the staff at Gorki and themselves as, now, the rulers of Russia. They passed a resolution kept secret until the 1950s that ‘Vladimir Ilyich may dictate every day for five to ten minutes, but this cannot have the character of correspondence and…[he] may not expect to receive any answers. It is forbidden for him to have any political visitors…nobody around him is allowed to tell Vladimir Ilyich any political news.’ Stalin was placed directly in charge of Lenin’s health regime. In his way Lenin was a political prisoner of the Bolsheviks, and his chief jailer was Stalin. But he had no grounds for complaint that the Bolshevik leadership were interfering with his health regime. He had said many times that a revolutionary’s health was a Party concern and ‘public property’.

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  One of Lenin’s biggest mistakes was that he made no provisions for his succession. Like so many dominant, powerful leaders, he thought no one capable of taking over from him. Nobody knows exactly what he had in mind for the Soviet leadership after his death. It is clear he didn’t think about it seriously until it was far too late. It is probable that Lenin wanted some form of collective leadership, but he laid down no procedure for successors to emerge.

  Little in Soviet history remains so obscure as the truth behind Lenin’s so-called Last Testament – a few fragments of wishes for the post-Lenin era which he dictated, as secretly as he could, in the last months of his life. If it was supposed to settle the rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin, which he realised could split the Party, he was deluded. It reads more like a document by a sick, and somewhat confused, angry man.

  Lenin didn’t want either of the two likely candidates to assume supreme power. He had continued to play Trotsky and Stalin against each other, thinking both in their different ways were highly talented. In the last eighteen months or so, since the Civil War was won, he had promoted Stalin to the top position in the Party, creating the post of General Secretary specifically for him. Stalin had been prepared to perform the mundane, unexciting tasks which were necessary.

  Trotsky remained a chief government fixer, and Lenin relied on him. He admired his intelligence and organising ability. But he wasn’t a ‘comradely’ figure. Often he couldn’t be bothered to turn up at either government or Party meetings. He had no post within the Communist Party and had made enemies of most of the magnates at one time or another because of his arrogance.

  Stalin’s new position gave him an enormous power base within the Party, from which he could dispense patronage and buy loyalty – and he remained Commissar for Nationalities, which gave him power in the CPs throughout the empire.

  After Lenin became bedridden and isolated from politics he dictated the Testament, mostly to one of the duty secretaries, Maria Volodicheva, between 22 December 1922 and 4 January 1923. He returned to his conspiratorial past to make sure that the document would remain secret until he died.*5 ‘At his request there were five copies typed,’ she said. ‘One…he kept himself, three copies [were] to be given to Nadezhda Konstantinovna and one to the secretariat marked “strictly secret”. His copy was retyped fair with all his final corrections and was passed on to Maria Ilyinichna. The three copies that NK had received were also corrected. The rough copies were burned by me. He asked that the sealed envelopes in which the copies…were kept should be marked to the effect that they could only be opened by V. I. Lenin, or after his death by Nadezhda Konstantinovna.’

  The first segment was dictated on 24 December: ‘Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated immeasurable power in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. On the other hand Comrade Trotsky…is distinguished not only by his exceptional abilities – personally, to be sure, he is perhaps the most able man of the present Central Committee [of the Party] – but also by his excessive self-assurance and excessive enthusiasm for the purely administrative aspect of his work. These two qualities of the two most eminent leaders of the present CC might, quite innocently, lead to a split, and if our Party does not take steps to prevent it, a split might arise unexpectedly.

  ‘I will not further characterise the other members of the CC as to their personal qualities. I will only remind you that the October episode of Zinoviev and Kamenev was not, of course, accidental but neither can it be used against them any more than the non-Bolshevism of Trotsky.’ He continued over the next few days to look at some of the lesser-known leadership figures – dismissing all of them – and made general points about Party management.

  Then, on 4 January, he summoned Fotieva to add an explosive postscript to the Testament: ‘Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among we Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from the post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to other comrades, less capricious.’6

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  The final row between Lenin and Stalin was personal, not political. Lenin did not suddenly discover, as he was dying, Stalin’s true nature. He knew all along, and had not been too bothered by ‘the wonderful’ Georgian’s ruthless immorality. Lenin created the monster, and it was his greatest crime that he was now leaving Stalin with good prospects of becoming the Soviet dictator.

  At the beginning of March 1923 the Party Secretariat limited the amount of official papers they were sending to Gorki – which must have been on orders from Stalin, though no record exists. However incapacitated, Lenin still tried desperately to cling on to remnants of power and influence. He wanted to resolve the ‘national question’: what kind of state would the Soviet Union be? Towards the end of his life Lenin wanted a federal union, with some autonomy for each of the nationalities. Stalin wanted a highly centralised state with all power in Moscow. The battleground between them would be Stalin’s home region, Georgia.

  Lenin had heard that Ordzhonikidze, now leader of the Georgian Communist Party and one of Stalin’s henchmen, had mounted a campaign to crack down on Georgian nationalism and had sent in troops to crush any dissent. It had led to fisticuffs among top officials at a Party meeting in Tbilisi. Lenin chose to back Stalin’s opponents, and in mid-January 1923 he dictated a note via Nadya – not one of his secretaries – asking Trotsky to intervene in ‘this Georgian affair’. Trotsky refused, but Stalin heard about the letter. He rang Nadya on 25 January and swore down the phone at her, accusing her of breaking doctors’ orders by allowing Lenin to write a ‘political letter’ and warning her there would be severe disciplinary consequences within the Party. ‘She burst into tears…totally hysterical,’ said Maria, who overheard some of the conversation. But Nadya didn’t tell Lenin about the incident until six weeks later.

  She wrote to Kamenev instead: ‘Lev Borisovich! Stalin subjected me to a storm of the coarsest abuse yesterday. About a brief note that Lenin dictated to me, with the permission of the doctors. I didn’t join the Party yesterday. In the whole of the last thirty years I have
never heard a single coarse word from a comrade. The interests of the Party and of Ilyich are no less dear to me than to Stalin…I know better than all the doctors what can and what cannot be said to Ilyich, for I know what disturbs him and what doesn’t, and in any case I know this better than Stalin does.’

  When Nadya eventually told Lenin about Stalin’s behaviour her husband reacted more like an aristocratic hero from a Pushkin tale than a radical Bolshevik. On 5 March he summoned Volodicheva and dictated a ‘Top Secret and Personal’ note to Stalin, with copies to Zinoviev and Kamenev. ‘You have been so rude as to summon my wife to the telephone and use bad language to her,’ it began. ‘Although she told you that she was prepared to forget this…I have no intention of forgetting so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that what has been done against my wife I consider having been done against me as well. I ask you, therefore, to think it over whether you are prepared to withdraw what you have said and to make your apologies, or whether you prefer that relations between us should be broken off.’ In an earlier age, and if he had not been bedridden, Lenin might have been in a mood to challenge Stalin to a duel.

  By this stage Stalin was openly telling the other magnates ‘Lenin – kaput’, and was frequently rude about him to others. But he kept his cool and apologised, if in a mealy-mouthed way. Two days later he sent a note to Lenin saying, ‘there is nothing here, other than a trivial misunderstanding. Still, if you consider that in order to maintain “relations” I must take back the words I said…I can take them back, but I refuse to understand what it was about, where my “guilt” lies and what is really wanted of me.’

  Early in the morning of 10 March, three days after receiving Stalin’s note, Lenin suffered another massive stroke. His right arm and leg were paralysed, he could not speak and doctors reported ‘a cloudy consciousness…He kept trying to say something but only disjointed sounds emerged,’ Professor Kramer said.7

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  Lenin’s last ten months were agonising – for him and for those around him. Nadya patiently tried to teach him to speak again, but after the stroke in March he never managed to say more than a handful of words. With the help of special orthopaedic shoes he was able – just – to walk again, on good days. On the others he was in a wheelchair. Occasionally he would show some signs of improvement; on 19 June Nadya wrote to Clara Zetkin, saying that ‘there are days when I begin to hope that recovery is not impossible’.

  Her mood changed each day depending on Lenin’s condition, as her letters to Inessa Armand’s daughters – especially the eldest, Inna – reveal more clearly than in the sanitised memoir she wrote about the last months of his life. She told Inna on 23 May 1923: ‘I’m kept alive only by the fact that Volodya is glad to see me in the mornings; he takes my hand, and sometimes we talk without words about different things which anyway have no names.’ On 2 September: ‘I spend whole days now with Volodya, who is improving rapidly, then in the evenings I go mad and am quite unable to write letters.’ Ten days later she tells Inna that Lenin’s ‘improvement grows, but it’s all going devilishly slowly’. On 28 October she sounds exhausted and defeated: ‘Every day he makes a conquest but they’re all microscopic, and we are still hanging between life and death. The doctors say that all the facts indicate that he’s recovering, but I now know for sure that they don’t know a damned thing, they can’t possibly.’

  Sometimes he showed some interest in newspapers. But on bad days he seemed in a vegetative state. His nephew Gora was desperately upset after a visit in July. ‘I found him sitting in a wheelchair in a white summer shirt with an open collar…a rather old cap covered his head and his right arm lay somewhat unnaturally on his lap. He hardly noticed me even though I stood quite plainly in the middle of the clearing.’

  The artist Yuri Annenkov had painted a portrait of Lenin in 1921. He saw him again in December 1923. ‘Kamenev took me to Gorki to do a portrait, or rather a sketch, of the sick Lenin. Nadezhda Konstantinovna greeted us. She said there was no question of a portrait. And, indeed, reclining on a chaise-longue, wrapped in a blanket and looking past us with the helpless, twisted, babyish smile of a man in his second infancy, Lenin was not to model for a portrait.’8

  In the new year doctors were giving favourable prognoses,*6 but Nadya knew better than to believe them. ‘Starting on Thursday 17 January I began to feel something…[very bad] was coming,’ she wrote. ‘He looked horribly tired and tormented. He was closing his eyes frequently and went pale, but the main thing was that somehow the expression on his face changed, his gaze became somehow blind.’

  She continued reading to him every day and he was usually attentive. Early in the evening of 19 January 1924 she read a Jack London story written in 1905, “Love of Life,” about a gold prospector in the Canadian wilderness who fights to stay alive, which he does by strangling a wolf and feeding on the animal’s blood. Nadya said he liked the story.

  While she was at his bedside that evening reading, a few miles away in Moscow the Soviet leaders were appearing at a Central Committee meeting and reporting optimistically about Lenin’s health, suggesting he would be back in harness, leading the nation soon. The official Soviet head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, declared that Lenin was winning a ‘grave battle with disease’. The delegates rose and applauded. ‘Long live the leader of the world proletariat, Comrade Lenin.’

  Two days later it was crisp, sunny and bright, if freezing cold. His doctors thought Lenin would benefit from some air. Bukharin, who was visiting, described how Lenin ‘was propped up on pillows in a sleigh and watched while a group of workers on the estate went out hunting. He was in good spirits, clearly enjoying himself. There were few things he enjoyed more than a hunt. When a retriever brought back a bird to one of the workers near the sleigh Lenin raised his good hand and managed to say, “Vot sobaka” [Good dog].’

  He returned to his room mid-afternoon, evidently tired, but he drank some vegetable bouillon. ‘He drank thirstily and he felt slightly better, but then…[I heard] gurgling in his chest,’ Nadya wrote. ‘His eyes looked less and less conscious…he occasionally moaned quietly and then a tremor ran through his body. At first I held his hot, damp hand, but then just watched as the towel…[underneath him] turned red with blood and the stamp of death settled on his face. Professor Foerster and Doctor Yelistratov sprayed camphor and tried to give him artificial respiration, but in vain, it was not possible to save him.’ He was pronounced dead at 6.50 p.m. on 21 January 1924.9

  *1 According to the neuropathologist Professor Viktor Kramer, in a report to the Kremlin kept secret until 1935, it was only now that doctors diagnosed what was really wrong with him. Lenin’s terminal illness lasted all in all about two and a half years, and its general characteristics ‘harboured signs that all the neurologists, whether Russian or foreign, dwelled on as something that did not conform to general disease of the central nervous system’. He said that ‘the basis of his illness is not the overstrain of his brain…but severe disorder of the blood vessels in his brain’.

  *2 There remain historians who are convinced that Lenin’s last illness was caused by syphilis he may have contracted from a prostitute, perhaps in Paris, and that a series of eminent doctors, along with the Soviet apparat for obvious reasons, tried to hide it. Why else, they argue, would he have been tested at this point? The answer is that some on his medical team believed he might have a degenerative brain disease caused by syphilis. But the test results were clear. As were the results of his post-mortem, and there is no alternative evidence that the autopsy was faked. Syphilis over a long period would have caused changes in the smaller vessels at the base of his brain. It was his larger blood vessels that were badly damaged, which almost certainly caused the series of strokes he suffered. Another clear sign of his arteriosclerosis was the narrowing of the blood vessels in his heart and aorta. It is nowhere near as interesting as the conspiracy theories, but it seems most likely that he had an inherited predisposition to arteriosclerosis, which
was the main cause of his relatively early death. His father died from the same cause at roughly the same age, and his sisters and brother suffered from the same problem.

  *3 In February 1922, as a public relations initiative the Cheka had changed its name to the GPU, State Political Administration, in the faint hope that Russians would be fooled into imagining the terror was over. It still reported directly to Lenin, however, and later his successors. The only real difference was that the Chekists’ trademark leather uniforms were replaced by bright-blue ones.

  *4 A team of doctors, twenty-six in all, were involved in treating Lenin over the last two and a half years of his life, including at least fifteen professors and a host of distinguished physicians from abroad. Obviously, the foreigners had to be paid – and in hard currency. The cost was vast, as a highly secret report, not revealed until after the Soviet Union collapsed, showed. They charged enormous fees, all of which the Soviets paid promptly: £11,900 in British money (a huge sum in those days) to Professor Otfrid Foerster, £4,400 to Oskar Minkowski, 220,000 German marks to Borchardt, US$29,000 to Professor Oswald Bumke, $9,500 to Klemperer and £4,500 to Adolph Strümpfel, demanded up front, which the comrades paid without complaint.

  *5 Though it is likely that Stalin knew all about the Testament. Technically he was in charge of Lenin’s care, and all the secretaries ended up working for him later. It is clear the secretaries were reporting directly to him.