A Moscow court is considering the case of declassification of documents on Lenin's death.
On March 30, the Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow began to consider the claim of the director of the Scientific Medical Gerontological Center, geriatrician and neurologist Valery Novoselov against Rosarkhiv. The physician complained about the illegal, in his opinion, extension of the time limit for restricting access to the diaries of the doctors on duty and orderlies of Vladimir Lenin. The documents were classified after the death of the leader for 75 years: until 1999. However, in 1999, the leader's niece Olga Ulyanova (daughter of Lenin's brother Dmitry Ulyanov, who died in 2011) turned to Rosarkhiv. She asked to extend the secrecy period for another 25 years, and the department went to meet her. Novoselov wants to find out if the prolongation of the secrecy stamp is legal for this reason. In addition, the researcher wants to open access to the entire array of data on the death of the leader.
An echo of an assassination attempt or a "shameful" disease?
As you know, Ilyich died at his dacha in Gorki on January 27, 1924. The disease of the leader of the world proletariat began in May 1922. The newspapers wrote that it was caused by severe congestion and the consequences of the assassination attempt by Fanny Kaplan on August 30, 1918. In October 1922, Lenin returned to work, but a new deterioration followed in December. Ilyich complained of headaches and rapid fatigability; he experienced numbness of the extremities up to complete paralysis. In January 1924, Lenin's health condition deteriorated sharply, and he soon died.
The best Soviet and world specialists were involved in the treatment of an important patient. German doctors Klemperer, Nonne, Minkowski, as well as one of the founders of German and world neurosurgery, Otfried Foerster, who was the chief physician of the leader from December 1922 until his death, were discharged from Germany for a lot of money. From Russian specialists, neuropathologists professors Vasily Kramer and Viktor Osipov were involved.
It is interesting that although the official diagnosis given to Lenin was a stroke, among the attending doctors there was not one of the major specialists who then dealt with this disease: neither Lazar Minor, nor Liveriy Darkshevich, nor Grigory Rossolimo. But the team included the largest specialists in neurosyphilis: German Max Nonne and Russian Alexey Kozhevnikov.
Later, the scientific community was divided over the reasons for the death of the leader. Some believe that he died due to atherosclerosis of the vessels of the brain (the official version indicated in the documents after the autopsy). Others believe that the cause of death was brain syphilis, which Lenin could have picked up in exile in Paris. According to the supporters of this version, the USSR simply could not allow the bright image of Ilyich to be blackened by a "shameful" disease. In favor of the version of syphilis, a list of drugs that were prescribed to the leader is given. At that time, it was they who made up the course of treatment for this disease: mercury, bismuth, arsenic, large doses of iodine every day.
Promotional video:
It's time to study this case in detail
Valery Novoselov began studying the causes of Lenin's death back in the nineties. In 1992, he requested access to the diaries from Rosarkhiv, but then he was denied. In 2017, the Russian State Archives of Socio-Political History provided the scientist with access to the diaries of three Lenin's doctors: assistant professor and neurosyphilis specialist Alexei Kozhevnikov, as well as neuropathology professors Vasily Kramer and Viktor Osipov (assistant to academician Vladimir Bekhterev). The scientist used information from their diaries for a scientific report at a meeting of the scientific society of medical historians. Several scientific articles are being prepared for publication in the journal "History of Medicine". The representatives of the archive told Novoselov that they do not object to the use of the information he received for scientific purposes.
However, most of the medical documents were never given to the scientist, citing the "secret" stamp. “I was allowed to work only with the personal diaries of doctors,” Valery Novoselov himself told AiF.ru. - There is a huge archive of information about Lenin's death, about which the clinical community of Russia knows nothing. These are 410 sheets of medical records, observations of the course of the disease, records of orderlies. This array is valuable because now the Russian scientific community puts forward versions about the death of the leader only from the words of other doctors, without having access to the facts."
According to Novoselov, now there are three sources of information about the causes of Lenin's death: his body (forensic medical examination was not carried out), classified medical documentation, to which the scientist is trying to gain access, and the pathological report of Professor Alexei Abrikosov, who performed the autopsy of Lenin's body in Gorki (this is the only publicly available source). It was in this act that it was said that the cause of the death of the leader was atherosclerosis of the vessels of the brain. However, this document has a number of questions, as Novoselov says. “It uses a term that doesn't exist (Abnutzungssclerose). It is also unclear why Lenin's body was opened at a dacha in Gorki, and not in a specialized institution by the leading Moscow pathologist Ippolit Davydovsky."
“Now in court I want to find out on what basis it was decided to extend the period of secrecy of documents, as well as get access to the main body of data: medical records, records of orderlies, etc.,” says Novoselov. At the same time, according to him, the purpose of his scientific work is to find out what his attending doctors thought about Ilyich's illness, and not to make a diagnosis on their own. "I believe that enough time has passed for the scientific community to receive all the information about Lenin's death, so that it can be studied in detail and calmly put this case on a shelf."