At 6:50 p.m. on January 21, exactly a century ago, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known worldwide as Lenin, died after suffering a stroke.
He was 53 years old
– he had been born on April 22, 1870 in Simbirsk – but he spent his last days in a wheelchair, due to his deteriorating health.
The autopsy, carried out by three neurologists (Vasili Kramer, Alexei Kozhevnikov and Viktor Osipov), lasted for more than three hours, an unusual procedure, until they signed the death certificate, detailing the “arterosclerosis” that Lenin suffered.
The news only spread the following morning, while the report published by the
New York Times
on the 23rd indicated:
“At 11:20 in the morning, President Kalinin briefly opened the session of the All-Russian Soviet Congress and asked everyone to stand.
He hadn't slept all night and tears were streaming down his haggard face.
A sudden wave of emotion ran through the audience, no one knew what had happened.
The Soviet funeral march began to play, but was instantly silenced when Kalinin murmured brokenly: 'I bring you terrible news about our dear comrade Vladimir Ilyich.'
At the top of the gallery, a woman let out a low, howling scream, followed by a burst of sobs.
'Yesterday,' stammered Kalinin, 'he suffered another attack of paralysis and...' There was a long pause, as if the speaker were unable to pronounce the fatal word; then, with an effort that shook his entire body, he came... . "died".
But Kalinin was a figurehead.
Power was resolved among the high command of the Communist Party.
Stalin, who had Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev as lieutenants (whom he would also later liquidate), confronted Trotsky: he kept him at a distance and then took care of expelling, persecuting and assassinating him.
A few months later, when
Lenin's corpse had already become an object of worship
- from that day until today, it can be seen in the Mausoleum on Red Square - Stalin consolidated himself in the position of General Secretary and since There, for three decades, he established his own empire of terror.
One of the points of debate, even shared by Soviet historiography itself, is that
Lenin would have warned about Stalin's absolutist ambitions and that he tried to prevent him from being his successor,
but without the strength to prevent it.
The prominent British historian Ian Kershaw, whose most recent work (“Personality and Power”) begins precisely with a profile of Lenin, refers to Lenin's warnings in his final stage: “The friction with Stalin worsened.
And although he criticized all those who aspired to take over from him in power, he reserved his most withering censures for Stalin.
He warned that Stalin would soon abuse the power that he was concentrating in his hands.
Lenin's body was embalmed and lies in a mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square.
Lenin's corpse
was mummified
by the chemist Boris Sbarski and in the early 90s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and statues of Lenin were torn down in almost every city, that symbol was never touched.
Nowadays, under the Putin regime, much less so.
In the midst of
internal purges
– apparently Nadezha Kruptskaia, Lenin's widow, refused any “sacralization” of the dead man's image – the Soviet leaders of the time placed him on an altar.
“Lenin's writings,” said Robert Service, author of one of the most important and recent biographies, “at the same time acquired the status of sacred writing;
His collected works, the publication of which had been underway since 1920, were given greater political and cultural significance than any other publication.
A brain institute was created in his honor: 30,000 samples of his brain tissue were collected so that research could begin into the secrets of his great talent.
Some cite the
attack of August 30, 1918
, carried out by the anarchist Fanny Kaplán, as the starting point for the deterioration of Lenin's health: one of the three shots, at the exit of a meeting at the Michelson factory, It hit the Soviet leader in the neck and kept him between life and death for several weeks.
The attacker was executed.
However,
Lenin continued to pull the strings
that strengthened the Bolshevik revolution, in the midst of the civil war and, soon after, the harsh economic crisis.
From mid-1921 he had to reduce his activity as his ailments worsened and he moved to a farm in the town of Gorky from where, in a Rolls-Royce, equipped to cross the snow, he periodically went to his office in Kremlin.
But on May 25, 1922, he suffered his first stroke, which left him speechless for several weeks.
In December, a second attack paralyzed the right half of his body.
Just days before, in front of the Moscow Soviet, he had given what would be his last speech, referring to foreign policy.
Since then Lenin was confined in Gorki, the first town in the former USSR for which he managed the electrical installation.
The estate where he spent his last years had belonged to the textile magnate Sava Morozov who, quarreling with his family, allocated his wealth to the cause of “the dispossessed.”
The Soviet leader's third stroke occurred in March 1923 and from that moment on, his activity became extinct.
Conspiracy theories
Like so many mysteries surrounding the Soviet regime, conspiracy theories about Lenin were always the order of the day, but there is no document that refers to a direct intervention by Stalin who - in any case - was the beneficiary of his death.
Between panegyrics and detractors, there are hundreds of biographies of Lenin and the most modern ones are the most rigorous.
But they cannot delve too deeply into the causes of his death;
yes about his environment and the political consequences of him.
A decade ago, speaking in Baltimore, the American expert Harry Vinters and the Russian historian Lev Lurie once again discouraged conspiratorial possibilities (“the autopsy did not reveal any traces of poison”).
The specialists, both at the time and much later, were struck by the series of strokes and cerebral atherosclerosis that affected Lenin, since - until then - he appeared to be a healthy and active character: he did not suffer from hypertension or diabetes, did not smoke or drink, exercised regularly.
Kershaw disagrees on this point, noting that “all his life, Lenin was in poor health.
He suffered from devastating headaches, in addition to insomnia and nervous tension that sometimes put him on the verge of mental collapse.
He also suffered from upset stomach and extreme fatigue, which is not surprising given his grueling work schedule.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin speaks to soldiers of the new Soviet army in Moscow's Red Square, May 25, 1919. Photo: AP
"The clues are found in Lenin's family history," said Dr. Vinters. "The three brothers who survived beyond the age of 20 suffered from cardiovascular problems, and Lenin's father died of an illness that was described as very similar to that of Lenin. Soviet leader.
He added that “Lenin could have inherited a tendency to develop extremely high cholesterol, which led to severe blockage of his blood vessels and subsequent stroke.”
Likewise,
his death caused a worldwide commotion
and half a million people braved the snow and the freezing Moscow winter: they paraded between January 23 and 26 to say goodbye, in a ritual that was to be repeated and multiplied decades later with the Stalin's corpse.
When he died, and shortly after,
his crimes were revealed at the famous Congress of the CPSU,
the Soviet apparatus tried to recover the figure of Lenin once again.
From that moment on, orthodox communism placed Lenin – philosopher, politician, statesman – on mythical levels, pointing out that “Stalin had gone astray” and was trapped by “the cult of personality.”
But most historians reveal that
the fanatical, ruthless and inhuman gene was inherent in both Lenin and Stalin
.
The work of Richard Pipes ("The Russian Revolution"), and spread over more than a thousand pages, details Lenin's responsibility in the arming of the secret services - the sinister Czech, under the charge of Felix Dzerzhinski - in the persecution and in the denunciation, in the operations and in the establishment of an economic regime that condemned millions of people to hunger and death.
In that sense, Stalin was his faithful disciple.
A monument to Lenin in Moscow.
Photo: AFP
Lenin and the Revolution of 1917
But Pipes points to the decisive role that Lenin had as the driving force behind the Revolution of 17: “It is not necessary to believe that history is made by “great men” to recognize the immense importance that Lenin had for the Russian Revolution and the regime that emerged. her.
The truth is not only that the power he accumulated allowed him to exert a decisive influence on the course of events, but also that the regime he established in October 1917 was, so to speak, an institutionalization of his personality.
The Bolshevik Party was a creation of Lenin
: as its founder, he conceived it in his own image and, overcoming all opposition from within and without, he kept it on the course he had planned.
That same party, upon taking power in October 1917, soon eliminated all rival formations and organizations to become the sole source of political authority in Russia.
Thus, communist Russia was from the beginning, and in an unusual way, a reflection of the mind and spirit of a man: the biography of this one and the history of that one are exceptionally linked.
Pipes also paints him as
fanatical in his convictions
: “Lenin inevitably
treated politics like war
.
He did not need Marx's sociology to militarize politics.
He considered that discrepancies were resolved in only one way: through the physical annihilation of the dissident.
Lenin was the son of a school inspector, a position with status in tsarist times, although he had “liberal ideals.”
His mother, whose maiden name was Blank, was of German descent and the family followed the rites of the Orthodox church.
Alexander, Lenin's older brother, was arrested in 1887 in St. Petersburg and accused of attempting the assassination of the tsar.
Many believe that Alexander's execution turned the young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov toward extremist ideals, but that theory has recently been discarded.
His conversion to Marxism came later, when he was studying Law at the University of Kazan.
“In contrast to typical Russian revolutionaries, like his late brother, driven by idealism, Lenin's dominant political impulse would never cease to be hatred.
“Seated on this emotional foundation, his socialism was from the beginning fundamentally a doctrine of destruction,” Pipes maintains.
Lenin and Stalin, in an image from 1922. Photo: AFP
But, certainly and as another notable historian – of Marxist training – such as Eric Hobsbawn defined it, “the 17th of Russia gave rise to the most far-reaching revolutionary movement that modern history has ever known, even in relation to the French Revolution.”
Hobsbawn also noted that “The great mass revolutions that break out from below – and Russia in 1917 was probably the most impressive phenomenon in all of history – are in some ways natural phenomena (…) largely uncontrollable.
Although Lenin's objectives (...) were not relevant.
He could have no strategy or perspective beyond choosing, from day to day, between decisions necessary for immediate survival and those that represented the risk of immediate disaster.”
Both for his theoretical framework – his influence on socialist/communist thought is the most decisive since the time of Karl Marx – and for his action at the head of the regime – even if he was not so decisive in the previous years, which he spent mostly in exile or hidden- Lenin can be considered
one of the most relevant men of the last century
.
On an almost religious level, orthodox communists around the world defined him from that moment on as “leader and educator of the world proletariat, who will live eternally in the heart of humanity.”
The dark secret services
But, on the other hand, he was also the man who created the dark secret services (the Czech, later converted into the NKVD) and the first concentration camps, the Gulags that consumed the lives of millions of people.
It was a Russian historian, Dmitri Volkogonov, in his 1996 biography “The Real Lenin” who detailed Lenin's orders for terror: “Not only did he inspire revolutionary terror, but he was the first to establish it as an institution of the State.”
Exactly 100 years ago,
as soon as Lenin's death was known, Stalin did not delay even a moment to advance.
Already that chronicle that we cited in
The New York Times
noted that "the newspaper Pravda publishes a furious attack against Trotsky and other 'insurgents' (...) Apparently ill, Trotsky left...".
The legacy
Despite having only held power for a very brief period, from the Revolution until his physical decline, Lenin left a profound legacy, both in Russia and in the rest of the world.
And communism became a political force of decisive importance in many countries.
“In the Soviet Union,” says Ian Kershaw, “the essential elements of the system of government that Lenin established remained intact until the collapse of the USSR, more than seven decades later.”
The same historian concludes that “The Russian Revolution was a momentous event of the 20th century.
And at that crucial historical juncture, the role that Lenin personally played was decisive.
He was swept up in the revolutionary currents of his time.
Without Lenin's leadership it is impossible to imagine that the changes generated by the revolution, both in Russia and in Europe, occurred as they finally did.
Lenin knew how to take advantage of the opportunity of his time, but he never lost sight of the clear ideological objectives of a revolutionary transformation (...) Lenin had a much greater impact on history than any other individual of his time, he was one of the most relevant architects of 20th century Europe.