Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  *6 Some doctors who read the notes of Lenin’s post-mortem and examined his brain after his death were surprised he had lived as long as he had. Health Commissar Semashko reported: ‘the sclerosis of the blood vessels of Vladimir Ilyich’s brain had gone so far that…[they] were calcified. When struck with a tweezer they sounded like stone. The walls of many blood vessels were so thickened and the blood vessels so overgrown that not even a hair could be inserted into the openings. Thus, whole sections of the brain were deprived of fresh blood.’

  53

  ‘An Explosion of Noise’

  We are burying

  the most earthy

  Of all the men

  Who ever walked

  the earth

  He was like you

  And like me

  The tears of snow

  are falling

  From the eyelids of flags red with weeping

  Vladimir Mayakovsky, ‘Poem on Lenin’s Funeral’, January 1924

  At rest, Lenin’s body, in a dark-brown jacket and black tie, bore a calm expression, a man at peace – not a face contorted by pain and illness as Nadya had feared. His hands rested on his chest, one clenched tight, the other relaxed, fingers slightly bent. He was lying in a crimson coffin.

  On the morning of 23 January, during one of the coldest Russian winters on record, he was taken to Moscow. For four kilometres men carried the bier on their shoulders from the dacha in Gorki through the snow-covered woods to the nearest railway station. At train stops all along the way thousands of people gathered to pay their respects.

  At about 1 p.m. the train arrived at Paveletsky Station in a southern suburb of Moscow. Lenin’s body was placed on a catafalque and a long procession of dignitaries, headed by Lenin’s family, marched the six and a half kilometres through the city to the House of Trade Unions, where he would lie in state, as Inessa had three years ago. Throughout the long walk Nadya looked exhausted and grief-stricken, but dignified.

  Soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder along the entire length of the procession – along snowbound streets at temperatures of 20 degrees below zero Celsius. ‘Moscow became an armed camp,’ recalled the American correspondent William Reswick. ‘I sleighed to the railway station through streets lined on both sides with solid ranks of infantry.’ Red flags waved and black-trimmed sashes hung from windows. Banners proclaimed ‘Lenin is dead…his work lives on’. As the procession crossed the River Moskva a formation of airplanes flew overhead scattering leaflets proclaiming ‘Lenin’s grave is a cradle for the freedom of humanity’.

  There was genuine grief at Lenin’s death, though how spontaneous it was and how much was hijacked by the regime remains a matter of argument. Hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps as many as a million – waited in the freezing cold and driving snow to catch a glimpse of his body. For the entire four days he lay in state there was an honour guard attending him. At first there were eight soldiers, replaced every ten minutes. But so many people wanted to serve – Party workers, GPU officers as well as troops – that the guard was doubled to sixteen and later trebled to twenty-four and was changed every five minutes.

  The death of Tsars was traditionally attended by large-scale public displays of mourning. But none were as large as this. The Soviet magnates did all they could to encourage it: Lenin’s leadership, his personality, had legitimised their regime. But without a doubt Lenin inspired real respect. Nikolai Valentinov, who fell out with him, went to ‘bid farewell to him’, as so many of his compatriots did. ‘There was a frost that was unbearable. People…caught colds, yet they somehow waited for hours for their turn to see the coffin…[perhaps] the Russian people have a far greater mystical curiosity than some others, some kind of pull to look upon a corpse, especially if the deceased person is above the common rank. In the pilgrimage to Lenin’s coffin there was this curiosity, but undoubtedly there was another impulse as well; an enormous proportion of the population reacted to Lenin’s death with unmistakable grief.’1

  —

  There was a week of national mourning. All theatres and other places of amusement were closed, as were the shops, except bakeries or those selling portraits of Lenin and black and red mourning cloth. For six days the newspapers carried almost nothing except stories about Lenin.

  On Sunday 27 January the temperature in Moscow had fallen to minus 33 degrees – ‘beards, collars and eyebrows were white with the snow’. Hundreds of thousands of people had clogged Red Square, ‘their congealed breath forming a fog in the icy air’, as one mourner recalled. In the surrounding streets there were tens of thousands more, lined up under mourning banners. At the corners of the square, soldiers built log fires, around which each squad, relieved hourly, stamped and beat their arms against their bodies in an attempt to keep warm.

  The funeral arrangements had been made by Stalin and Zinoviev, who had given their eulogies the night before at a special Congress of Soviets session to pay tribute to the departed leader. The only notable absentee was Trotsky, in the Caucasus convalescing from an illness when Lenin had died.*1

  At 10 a.m. Lenin’s body was carried from the Hall of Columns at the House of Trade Unions to Red Square, a kilometre away. Teams of soldiers, Party workers, Soviet representatives and peasant delegates had volunteered for the honour of bearing the coffin part of the way. The procession was again led by Nadya and Lenin’s sisters and brother. It took almost an hour and a half to reach the East Wall of the Kremlin, where a wooden mausoleum had hastily been erected: Lenin’s last place of rest. Bands played the ‘Internationale’, Chopin’s Funeral March and martial music throughout. The speeches were interminable, but the multitude remained in Red Square.

  At precisely 4 p.m. the pallbearers – Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin, Molotov, Bukharin, (Mikhail) Tomsky, Dzerzhinsky and Lenin’s hunting companion Jan Rudzutak – carried the coffin down four steps to the shallow vault. Above ground, eerily moving, an extraordinary sound reverberated around Red Square, Moscow and other major cities in Russia. Every machine and apparatus that could be located was turned on – the sirens in thousands of factories, steam whistles of locomotives, foghorns, alarms and salvo after salvo of guns erupted into an explosion of noise.2

  *1 Trotsky always maintained that he had been deliberately misinformed – by Stalin – about the date of the funeral. But he had time to get back if he had genuinely wanted to. He wrote a powerful eulogy in a newspaper, though. His absence was carefully noted, and was a major miscalculation on his part. Without a doubt it counted against his succession claims.

  54

  Lenin Lives

  ‘Do not let your grief for Ilyich spend itself in an outward veneration of his person. Do not build monuments and memorials to him, palaces in his name. Do not organise splendid celebrations in his memory. In his life he attached little importance to these things.’

  Nadezhda Krupskaya, 29 January 1924

  ‘For Russians, their worst misfortune was Lenin’s birth; their next worst, his death.’

  Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume Two, 1929

  Lenin had wished to be buried next to his mother and sister Olga at the Volkovo Cemetery in Petrograd. Nadya and the rest of his family assumed that is what would happen, in a private ceremony, soon after the state funeral. They wanted a plain and simple headstone at his grave.

  But behind the scenes, in the Kremlin, an argument began about Lenin’s remains. It is not exactly clear who first suggested the extraordinary idea of preserving Lenin’s body and displaying him like the relics of a saint. Several of the magnates subsequently claimed credit, but Stalin and Dzerzhinsky steamrollered the plan through – against the wishes of Nadya, Lenin’s sisters and brother Dmitry.

  Originally Dr Alexei Abrikosov, the pathologist who carried out the autopsy the day after Lenin died, embalmed the body to preserve it for six days, until the funeral. On 24 January, though, the Funeral Commission co-chaired by Stalin ordered the pathologist to embalm it for forty days – not such an unusual wish in Or
thodox Russia, where tradition was that prayers for the dead were said, often by the body, for forty days. At first Nadya flatly refused to allow it but relented when Zinoviev told her that if she agreed they could discuss the idea again in a month.

  But by this time the magnates had decided that if possible they would keep the body, preserved in the Red Square mausoleum, ‘indefinitely…for ever if we can’. Dzerzhinsky, who had briefly trained for the Catholic priesthood before converting to Marxism, said: ‘If science can preserve a human body for a long time then why not do it? The tsars were embalmed just because they were tsars. We will do it because Lenin was a great person, unlike any other.’ Stalin, once an Orthodox seminarian, muttered at one Cabinet meeting, ‘We must show that Lenin lives.’

  Many of the old comrades were appalled, including Kamenev and Bukharin. Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, the man probably closest to Lenin in his later years, said he knew that Lenin himself would have been horrified by the idea. Trotsky remarked that embalming Lenin’s body was similar to the medieval religious cults: ‘Earlier there were the relics of Sergius of Radonezh and Seraphim of Sarov; now they want to replace these with the relics of Vladimir Ilyich.’ But the decision was made: the Bolsheviks needed a shrine for the cult of Lenin, and his embalmed body, immune from corruption, resting by the Kremlin, would be the place of pilgrimage.

  Nadya did not know until the day after the funeral that the comrades were to take the decisions about Lenin’s remains, and not his widow. On the morning of 28 January she wrote to Inna Armand: ‘My beloved daughter…Right now they have not closed up his grave yet, so it is still possible to look upon Volodya,’ so at that point she clearly thought that he would be properly buried. She heard later in the day about the discussions in the Kremlin, and the steps already taken by senior officials.

  She tried to protest. On the following day Pravda published a prominent ‘Message from Nadezhda Krupskaya. Comrades, workers and peasants, men and women…I have a great request to make. Do not let your grief for Ilyich spend itself in an outward veneration of his person. Do not build monuments and memorials to him, palaces in his name. Do not organise splendid celebrations in his memory. In his life he attached little importance to these things. Such things oppressed him. He found them trying. Remember how much poverty and disorder we still have in our country. If you want to honour the name of Vladimir Ilyich, build day-care centres, kindergartens, homes, schools, and – most importantly – fulfil his legacy.’

  She failed to carry her point. On 26 February 1924, four weeks after Lenin’s funeral, the Marxist atheists in charge of Soviet Russia established, with no irony intended, the grandiloquently named Commission of Immortalisation.*1, 1

  —

  The ‘Troika’ of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, now in charge of Russia, made sure that one of Lenin’s legacies ‘would never be immortalised’, as one of the old Bolsheviks remarked wistfully. They conspired to bury the Testament about the succession which Lenin had dictated in the last few months of his life. Nadya possessed four copies and Maria Ulyanova had one, but most of the Party chieftains knew its potentially explosive contents. Nadya wanted the document circulated as widely as possible, within the Communist Party and throughout the country, in the hope of humiliating Stalin. She campaigned to ensure that Lenin’s will would be implemented. But she lacked the power.

  In fact all the leadership contenders had something to lose if the Testament became public, though Stalin obviously had the most. It showed that Lenin had no real faith in any of the comrades around him. The Politburo and newly formed Council of Elders – senior Party men – fixed things to ensure the least damage to the leadership. The Troika had been formed as a cabal against Trotsky, but it wasn’t in his interests to see the Testament published either, as it was not exactly a wholehearted endorsement of his leadership qualities. Between them they stitched up the vote to prevent, as far as they could, the details of Lenin’s will leaking out.

  When the Party Congress met two weeks after Lenin’s funeral, excerpts of the Testament – but not Lenin’s postscript urging the removal of Stalin as General Secretary – were read out by Kamenev. Nobody was allowed to take notes. Nobody was allowed to tell anyone outside the hall what was in the document. There was a vote – carried unanimously – to ‘approve’ its contents.

  Later at the Central Committee the rules were the same, though this time the whole of the Testament was read out. There was silence for a few moments and then Zinoviev rose. ‘Every word of Ilyich is law to us. We have sworn to fulfil anything the dying Lenin ordered us to do. You know we shall keep that vow. But we are happy to say that on one point Lenin’s fears have proved baseless. I have in mind the point about our General Secretary. You have all witnessed our harmonious co-operation in the last few months.’ Kamenev proposed that Stalin stay in the post, unanimously agreed. Trotsky voted in favour.*2

  It would be another seven or so years before Stalin possessed the power of a dictator, though this was the beginning of the end of Trotsky’s role in front-line politics. Nobody knows who Lenin wanted to lead the Soviet Union after he was gone. But this was certainly not the outcome he had in mind.2

  —

  Of all the nonsense and hyperbole written in the hero-worship of Lenin little can match Anatoly Lunacharsky’s claim that his genius can be explained by the shape of his head: ‘The structure of…[Lenin’s] skull is truly striking. One has to study him for a little while to appreciate its physical power, the contours of the colossal dome of the forehead, and to sense something that I can only describe as a physical emanation of light from its surface.’

  Painstaking science over the following decades proved that there was nothing abnormal about his cranium – or what was inside it. Two years after Lenin died the Soviets established the Institute of the Brain, to unlock through reason and research the secrets of the master’s brilliance. The pioneering German neurologist Dr Oskar Vogt was put in charge, and he began the process of comparing Lenin’s brain with those of ‘ordinary people’, as one of his assistants explained, as well as the brains of other high achievers like Mayakovsky, Lenin’s former sparring partner, the one-time ‘God-builder’ and rival Alexander Bogdanov, the novelist Andrei Bely and the French writer Henri Barbusse.*3

  Lenin’s brain was preserved in a solution of formaldehyde and alcohol. One side was chopped into four parts, each sliced into 7,500 tiny slivers, which were microscopically analysed on the basis of Vogt’s theory (discredited in the 1930s) that the structure of the brain contributed to intelligence. It took ten years of study before Stalin was sent a ‘top-secret’ report of 153 pages with more than 700 illustrations by Vogt’s successor, Dr Semyon Sassikov, stating that Lenin’s brain ‘is vastly superior to others because it had an exceptionally high degree of organisation’, which supposedly explained his genius.*4

  Why the report was kept secret until the collapse of the Soviet Union is a mystery; it was always unlikely that at the time of Stalin’s purges a doctor would come up with any other finding than ‘Lenin’s brain was extraordinary’. The reason might have been because tucked away inside the report was the fact that Lenin’s brain was fairly ordinary. An average male brain weighs between 1,300 and 1,400 grams; Lenin’s was 1,340 grams. Size doesn’t matter in the context of intelligence. But it would not have done at all for the Soviets to admit that Lenin’s brain was of only average dimensions. Lenin himself might have liked to know that his brain was much smaller than that of his great literary hero, whom he enjoyed reading all his life: Turgenev’s brain weighed a mighty two kilos. Lenin’s was just a normal brain.3

  —

  At first the Immortalisation Commission was told by Dr Abrikosov that Lenin’s body could be preserved ‘for many, many years’ by refrigeration, if it was kept in the crypt, in a specially designed sarcophagus, at a carefully controlled temperature. But despite the most expensive and sophisticated freezing equipment bought from Germany, within two months there were already dark spots on Lenin’s f
ace and torso and his eye sockets were deformed. The magnates were worried their plan would not work out, particularly as the weather was becoming warmer.

  Towards the end of March 1924 two prominent chemists, Vladimir Vorobyov and Boris Zbarsky, suggested re-embalming the body with a chemical mixture that they said ‘could last hundreds of years’. They had studied the ancient Egyptian techniques of mummification but they could do a lot better ‘and keep Vladimir Ilyich’s body looking natural’. They worked day and night whitening Lenin’s skin and devising the correct embalming fluid, under intense pressure, reporting directly to Stalin and Zinoviev. They experimented on several cadavers of fifty-ish-year-old men brought to them from morgues and scientific institutes in Moscow. After four months they found the correct formula of glycerin, alcohol, potassium acetate, quinine chlorate and another ingredient still strictly secret at the time of writing.

  On 1 August the mausoleum opened for visitors. ‘The body is in a perfect state of preservation,’ one of the first people to see it said. The scientists boasted that they had managed to do what the Egyptians couldn’t for Tutankhamen: ‘the embalmers have even contrived to impart a smile’.*5, 4

  —

  Nadya had always worshipped her own Lenin cult, but hated the public display everywhere around her. She particularly loathed the idea of Lenin’s embalmed body resting half a kilometre from her home. She went once to view the mausoleum a few months before she died in 1939 and she was visibly upset. She looked at the body for a short while and told Ilya Zbarsky, the first curator of the mummy, who was showing her around, ‘He’s just the same…but look how I have aged.’ She said she felt no wish to go again. She disapproved strongly when, five days after her husband died, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. She continued to call the city ‘Peter’ as she always had.