The only luxury Lenin enjoyed while in power was a country house in Gorky, a small town near Moscow. The revolutionary government made her available to him to recover from the attack that almost cost him his life in 1918. Since then, he alternated the modest apartment he occupied in the Kremlin with that comfortable garden villa.
Lenin lived his last months there, after a stroke left him bedridden and deprived him of speech. The photographs show him frail, in a wheelchair. In his countenance there is no longer a hint of the intellectual vigor of the theoretician of the revolution, nor of the determination and audacity that he used to conquer power. It is hard to believe that, shortly before, that sick man would have had the strength and courage to fight against Stalin.
During 1921, Lenin’s health had begun to show signs of deterioration. Fatigue, insomnia and headaches were reducing his ability to work. Some doctors attributed these symptoms to a bullet that was still lodged in his neck as a result of an attack suffered years ago. The bullet was removed in April 1922, but at the end of May Lenin suffered his first stroke, which paralyzed the right half of his body and forced him to hand over the helm for the next four months to the rest of his politburo comrades.
It was a very delicate moment for the Soviet regime. Although he seemed consolidated after almost five years in power, the catastrophic economic situation threatened his continuity. With the hope that the revolution would triumph in Europe gone, and faced with the failure of war communism, Lenin opted for a risky solution to reactivate the economy: recover free trade and private initiative.
His proposal sparked an intense debate. Lenin worked hard to persuade his companions of the need for that retreat, baptized as the New Economic Policy and launched in 1921. Without a doubt, it was a pact with the devil, but the Bolsheviks had resources to prevent their capitalist inertia from devoured them. One of them was the agreement, proposed by Lenin, to maintain the monopoly of foreign trade in the hands of the State.
When Lenin rejoined the activity in October 1922, he discovered with alarm that part of that monopoly had been repealed. He considered it a betrayal plotted behind his back. And the only person with the power to engineer it was the party’s general secretary, Joseph Stalin.
Stalin barely had a role in the October Revolution. However, he was a tireless worker and a competent organizer. Lenin therefore included him in his first government. Shortly after, he was entrusted with the Worker and Peasant Inspection, and in April 1922 he rose to the General Secretariat.
After his first attack, Lenin had to abandon command, so that Stalin was soon free to use the levers of the General Secretariat as he pleased. There he surrounded himself with a clique of loyalists who shored up his growing power.
At the same time, with the struggle for succession on the horizon, he formed with Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, Lenin’s closest comrades in exile, a triumvirate to counteract the prestige and influence of Trotsky, whom everyone saw as the number two of the regime and, consequently, its natural heir.
From October, when he resumed work, until mid-December 1922, when he suffered his second stroke, Lenin accumulated evidence of two other serious problems that surfaced during his absence.
The first revolved around the dubious management of the Workers and Peasants Inspection. After Stalin’s two years at the head of that body before his rise to the General Secretariat, the balance of his management was regrettable. The commissariat, which was supposed to combat bureaucracy, had become a nest of bureaucrats at the service of Stalin himself.
The second problem had to do with nationalities. Stalin planned the integration of the new republics that emerged after the revolution as autonomies within the Russian Federation, which was equivalent to subordinating them to the dictates of the Kremlin and annulling their newly won independence. When the Republic of Georgia refused to accept the plan, Stalin threatened his representatives and even sent one of his men to Tiflis, who behaved like a common thug.
Before learning all the details, Lenin disavowed Stalin, scandalized by his despotic and chauvinist attitude, which was reminiscent of the tsarist treatment of non-Russian nationalities, and which he so detested.
It is reasonable to think that the tension over those problems precipitated the second stroke, which removed Lenin definitively from the front line, in mid-December 1922. The doctors agreed on the need to remove him completely from political affairs. Following this advice, the Bolshevik leadership established strict instructions that limited visits to the sick person and his activity.
Although those instructions seemed to reflect a sincere concern for the leader’s health, the fact that Stalin was in charge of ensuring their compliance also raised the suspicion that there was an interest in controlling and isolating him politically.
In those December days, Lenin was not so much tormented by illness taking power from him as by death overtaking him before he could prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. In just three months, between mid-December 1922 and early March 1923, while his abilities permitted, he fought his last battle. An unequal fight to banish the bureaucratic and chauvinist tendencies that had taken over the State and the party, embodied in the figure of his general secretary.
In his first offensive he recovered the lost ground on the issue of foreign trade monopoly. Before his relapse he had reached an agreement with Trotsky, with whom he agreed on that issue, so that he would defend the need to maintain the monopoly before the Central Committee. The victory was resounding.
Despite the isolation, Lenin learned of the success through his wife. A few days later, she was the emissary of a note to Trotsky in which Lenin encouraged him to maintain the tandem. Stalin found out about the letter, probably through one of Lenin’s secretaries, and was furious.
Krupskaya was quick to pay the price. Stalin scolded her with bad words for having broken the instructions of the politburo and threatened to take her before the party’s disciplinary body. Krupskaya did not say anything to her husband, fearful of the consequences this could have on her health.
Around the same time, a small note dictated by Lenin reached Stalin in which he proposed supporting an old Trotsky initiative that he had always opposed: granting legislative character to the decisions of the State Planning Committee. For Stalin, the most worrying thing about the note was its recipient: the party congress. It was evident that Lenin was plotting something very serious against him.
Lenin hoped to recover to speak at the next party congress, which would be held in the spring of the following year. His intention was to propose a series of profound changes, which he outlined in notes dictated to his secretaries between December 23 and January 4. The note that fell into Stalin’s hands was the first of that series, a set of texts known in its day as the “letter to the congress,” or more popularly, as Lenin’s “testament.”
One of the central themes of those notes was the stability and unity of the party. Lenin feared that rivalries among the leadership could lead to a split, ending the Soviet regime. He proposed increasing the composition of the Central Committee, trusting that a greater number of members would reduce the weight of personalisms in decision-making.
On January 4, Lenin added an explosive postscript in which he proposed removing Stalin from the General Secretariat, arguing that his character was incompatible with the position. It is unknown what happened in those days for him to add that postscript. In any case, he left his political break with Stalin in writing.
A slight improvement allowed Lenin more time to dictate and read. He transferred his fight to the party press, and until March he published five articles that, in essence, addressed the issues outlined in his notes for the congress. In the last one, dedicated to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, it was obvious that his criticism was directed at Stalin.
For weeks, the article was held up in Pravda’s editorial office, waiting for the politburo to decide on it. One part, with Stalin at the head, opposed its seeing the light. The stratagem of printing, just for Lenin, a single copy of the diary with his article was proposed, but Trotsky’s refusal to support that ruse made the majority lean towards its publication.
The article appeared on March 4. The next day, Lenin dictated his last two letters. The first, for Stalin, where she informed him that she would break all relations with him if she did not apologize to her wife, who, finally, would have explained to her husband about her incident with the general secretary.
Trotsky was the recipient of the second. Lenin had evidence of the repression unleashed by Stalin against the Georgian comrades and asked Trotsky to make a common front to denounce what happened before the Central Committee. But Trotsky understood that he was asking for a duel with Stalin and his clique and refused the confrontation.
Lenin was left alone. A few days later, a third stroke left his brain dying, and he could no longer read Stalin’s apology, who could not afford to break with the Bolshevik leader if he wanted to be his heir.
The notes in which Lenin asked to remove Stalin from office were read only to a select few at the 1924 party congress, a few months after their author died. By then, the power of the general secretary was such that no one dared to ask that Lenin’s will be fulfilled.
In mid-May 1923, the sick man was transferred from his small room in the Kremlin to Gorky. There he improved slightly. In October he wanted to return to the Kremlin to visit his office, probably to say goodbye to him. Blinded by a naive hope, some wanted to believe that Lenin would recover, but on January 21, 1924, he died without fulfilling his wish to remove Stalin from the path to absolute power.
This text is part of an article published in number 670 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
