“Has Lenin died?” On January 22, 1924, El Progreso reported that the Soviet delegation in Barcelona had received a telegram from Russia late in the afternoon announcing the death of the Bolshevik leader. “The veracity is unknown.” of this news,” added the evening edition of the newspaper of the province of Lugo. It was not known what to believe. Vladimir Ilích Ulyanov had already been presumed dead as a result of other attacks.
None as serious as that of August 1918 in Moscow. Then, one of the radical anti-Bolshevik activist Fanni Kaplan’s shots had pierced her lung and lodged in her neck, and another of hers had wounded her left shoulder. The episode marked the beginning of the cult of Lenin. The first leader of the USSR, however, from then on suffered breathing difficulties and ended up confined to a wheelchair without almost speaking a word. The communist leadership did everything possible to prevent his health from becoming known.
But this time it was true. At the age of 53, Lenin had died around half past six on the night of Monday the 21st from a cerebral stroke resulting from arteriosclerosis in his dacha in Gorky, about twenty kilometers from Moscow. In Spain, La Veu de Catalunya, the newspaper of the Lliga Regionalista, was among the first to break the news, in the evening edition of the 22nd with a portrait and the information received from the French agency Havas.
It was not until Wednesday the 23rd when around thirty newspapers, many provincial, made the news public throughout the State. All through agency information that went from Moscow to Helsinki and from there to Paris, Berlin and London. The Spanish press did not have correspondents in the country of the Soviets and the union delegates, such as the anarcho-syndicalist Ángel Pestaña, who had gone to learn about the Marxist experiment, had returned. Andreu Nin was in Rome.
“In Spain we are not usually concerned about international issues; However, 24 hours have passed and there is only talk of the death of the director of Russia,” stated La Voz de Castilla. Yes, but the bulk of the news about Lenin was anonymous. Four months ago, in September 1923, the Captain General of Catalonia, Miguel Primo de Rivera, had begun his dictatorship. The censorship prevented certain articles from being signed. The press was unanimous in defining the Bolshevik as “a dictator”, but also as the most relevant historical figure of the beginning of the 20th century. The demise coincided with the formation of the first Labor Party government in the British parliament. The bulk of the Spanish press took the opportunity to oppose him. The prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, was the face, the access to the government of a left-wing option through democratic means. Lenin, the cross, the assault on power with a bloody revolution. This was stated by the republican pedagogue Luis de Zulueta in the Madrid worker newspaper La Libertad.
Dressed in a dark brown jacket and black tie, Lenin’s body arrived in Moscow by train at noon on January 23. At 20 degrees below zero, an endless line of soldiers delimited the six kilometers from the station to the House of Unions. For four days perhaps a million people filed past the coffin. It is not clear whether spontaneous or orchestrated. During the week of mourning, only bakeries and Lenin portrait shops were open. On the 24th the first in-depth evaluations appeared. La Publicitat, Acció Catalana’s center-left newspaper, reproduced a profile of H.G. Wells after visiting him in 1920. For the science fiction writer, an avowed socialist, Lenin was a pragmatic visionary.
On the other hand, in the republican and anticlerical Barcelona newspaper El Diluvi, the lawyer and journalist Enric Guardiola Cardellach defined him as an idealist and anti-imperialist who embodied “the true protest of the proletarian masses of the world against war.” Solidaridad Obrera, of the CNT, described him as “the purest and most honest man of Russian socialism,” but criticized his animosity toward anarchists.
In contrast, the editorial secretary of El Correo Catalán, Joan Baptista Roca Caball, with the pseudonym Daniel Castells, assured in the traditionalist newspaper that Lenin would go down in history with no more halo than “the blood of his countless sacrificed victims.” In La Vanguardia, the Madrid literary critic Eduardo Gómez Baquero, with the pseudonym Andrenio, saw him as a “Cromwell of the Russian revolution.”
The press considered the repercussions of that death. The Liberal was optimistic. The Madrid Republican saw it likely that everything in the USSR would collapse, making way for “the crystallization of a democracy.” The Catholic-oriented weekly Catalunya Social wondered who the country would support. For the Madrid Catholic El Debate, Lenin’s succession opened a serious crisis in communism due to the division of his followers. Indeed, in Moscow even before the handover there was a struggle for positions in the politburo of the Communist Party between Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin, and all of them against Lev Trotsky. Sinuous movements, difficult to follow. From a distance, it was all speculation.
The organ of Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical Party, El Progreso, assumed that Trotsky would succeed Lenin. The conservative newspaper El Pueblo Cántabro also believed it. For the moderate Valencian reformist Las Provincias, the candidate was Zinoviev. For others, Bukharin or Kamenev. La Publicitat was one of the few state newspapers that included Stalin in the pools.
Attention, above all, was focused on the other great name of the Russian revolution, the father of the Red Army, Trotsky. Given the strategic divergences with the deceased, his attendance at his funeral raised a sea of ??speculation. La Campana de Gràcia claimed that Lenin had ordered him to be arrested before he died. The Oviedo Region newspaper added that the Checa, the political police, was holding him.
It wasn’t like that. Trotsky had left in the middle of the month for the Georgian region of Abkhazia, in the south of the Caucasus, to rest as prescribed by a doctor. At the Tblisi station he received Stalin’s message with the news, but he did not want to back down. Victor Sebestyen in his biography of Lenin (2020) and Robert Service in Trotsky’s (2010) do not conclude whether Stalin misled Lev with the dates, nor whether his absence in Moscow harmed him in the succession race.
In any case, the funeral, organized by Stalin and Zinoviev, had been scheduled for Saturday, but was postponed to Sunday the 27th. In the morning, at 33 degrees below zero, thousands of people said goodbye to Lenin in Red Square. After endless speeches, in the early afternoon the coffin, with the embalmed body, was placed in the improvised wooden mausoleum on the east wall of the Kremlin. All over the country cannons fired salvos, trains stopped, and locomotive and factory sirens whistled. La Prensa, from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, was the only Spanish newspaper that gave an image of the funeral, and on the front page.
On January 30, La Publicitat published a profile of its correspondent in Berlin. For Josep Pla, the Russian revolution was “the work of journalists” and Lenin was “the work of a third-rate magazine.” The director of La Vanguardia, Agustí Calvet, assumed that the Bolshevik “has imprinted a transcendental change on his country and on the brand of the world,” but he could not admire him because of the bleeding halo that surrounded him. Soviet telegraphs announced: “Lenin no longer exists, but his work will be eternal.” A century later, we know they were wrong.
