So much has been said and written about the last days of the life of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in the 1920s-1930s that it can take years to simply process this information. However, in the circumstances of the death of the founder of the Soviet state, much is still unclear.
Vladimir Ilyich complained of rapid fatigue at the end of 1921. However, he did not always adequately assess what was happening. Companions noted that sometimes at meetings he was seized by a fit of excitement, and Lenin began to carry outright nonsense, waving his arms.
The last trip
On May 25, 1922, Ilyich had the first blow, leading to a weakening of the movement of his right arm and right leg, as well as some speech disorder.
These days, Leon Trotsky also lay in bed in a sanatorium near Moscow: he tore the tendons in his leg when he was fishing with a net (he did not exchange for a fishing rod). I learned about Lenin's illness only on the third day from Nikolai Bukharin, who had come to visit. He collapsed on the bed of the "demon of revolution" and, wrapping his arms around him, cried out: "Do not get sick, I beg you, do not get sick … there are two people whose death I always think with horror … this is Ilyich and you."
In fact, the prospect of the death of the leader did not so much grieve his comrades-in-arms as inspired them to different plans. Bukharin will soon argue that when Lenin dies, it would be good to embalm him and present him to the peasants as the relics of a new saint. Trotsky, who was already the second most famous leader of the party, tried on the role of a successor.
Later he wrote about a conversation with Lenin, which took place in November 1922, when the leader's condition improved somewhat. Lenin expressed his concern about the strengthening of the party bureaucracy, and Trotsky pointed out that the "headquarters" of this bureaucracy is controlled by Stalin as the general secretary of the organizing bureau of the party's Central Committee. Lenin perked up: "Well, I propose to you a bloc: against bureaucracy in general, against the organizing bureau in particular." “It is flattering to conclude a good bloc with a good man,” Trotsky replied.
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They decided to fight by creating … a commission to combat bureaucracy. Yes, a terrible weapon.
In fact, Trotsky was hiding an important point. Lenin was irritated not only by the party apparatchiks, but also by many Bolsheviks who labored in economic work - Rykov, Krasin, Sokolnikov and others.
These technocrats were affiliated with the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev that had developed in the Politburo, whose members were not going to allow Trotsky to come to power. So, not only bureaucrats, but also technocrats stood behind Stalin. And Lenin was irritated by this.
He insisted on maintaining the monopoly of foreign trade. Then there was a loud incident when Ordzhonikidze hit on the face of one of the Georgian comrades who opposed Stalin's plan of "autonomization". In fact, it was about building a unitary state with the provision of scanty autonomy to national regions. The Georgian leadership insisted on the right of free withdrawal of the national republics from the Union. Then we got personal. Dzerzhinsky went to investigate the conflict in Tiflis, who sided with Ordzhonikidze.
Lenin, on the other hand, supported the Georgian Central Committee, calling Ordzhonikidze (also a Georgian) and Dzerzhinsky (a Pole) "Great Russian Derzhimords." As a result, Lenin and Trotsky buried the plan of "autonomization" by laying a time bomb under the Soviet Union.
The leader needs peace
The loser Stalin broke into Krupskaya, who acted as a liaison between Lenin and Trotsky and sent the instructions of his sick spouse to members of the Central Committee.
Stalin, of course, referred to the need to protect Ilyich's health, to which Krupskaya said that she knew better the needs of her husband. “We'll see what kind of Lenin’s wife you are,” Stalin threw on the phone and seemed to add some rudeness.
Krupskaya did not talk to her husband about this, but sent a complaint through the party line to Kamenev. The latter put the complaint on the carpet, perhaps because in the light of the sharp deterioration in Lenin's health, it turned out that his wife really did not follow his regime very well.
On the night of December 22-23, as a result of a new blow, Lenin completely paralyzed his right leg and right arm. The treaty on the creation of the USSR, which did not suit Stalin, was signed a week later.
The next vivid episode concerning the leader's illness, Trotsky described as follows: “During the second illness of Lenin, apparently in February 1923, Stalin at a meeting of members of the Politburo (Zinoviev, Kamenev and the author of these lines), after removing the secretary, said that Ilyich had summoned him unexpectedly to himself and demanded to deliver him poison. He again lost the ability to speak, considered his position hopeless, foresaw the imminence of a new blow, did not trust the doctors, whom he easily caught on contradictions, retained complete clarity of thought and was unbearably tormented …"
Of course, they decided not to give poison. Formally - because of the great love for Ilyich and the hope that he will get out. In fact, the participants in the meeting understood: if he offered to grant the request, and three other partners would receive powerful incriminating evidence against him that he was going to poison Lenin.
At the same time, Trotsky deliberately confused the dating "apparently in February 1923". Most likely, the conversation took place in March, when truly Shakespearean passions flared up around Lenin's treatment.
It all started when Krupskaya told her husband about the conflict with Stalin three months ago. On March 5, Lenin demanded an apology from him.
Stalin, of course, apologized, but the personal in the conflict was already intertwined with the public. On the same day, Lenin dictated a letter to Trotsky, in which he asked him to take under the tutelage of his Georgian comrades.
Ilyich, as it were, reminded him of their conversation about the campaign against the party apparatus headed by Stalin. On March 10, Lenin suffered a third blow, which led to an almost complete loss of speech and paralysis of the right side of the body. It turns out that it was not in vain that Stalin said that Lenin needed peace.
Further more interesting. On March 21, Stalin wrote a letter to the Politburo, in which he informed that Krupskaya had conveyed to him Lenin's request "that I, Stalin, take upon myself the responsibility to get and give V. Ilyich a portion of potassium cyanide." Of course, he indignantly rejected the request. But on the 23rd, Krupskaya again approached Stalin, reported that she had already gotten the poison, but she could not give it to Ilyich and required "Stalin's support."
Either after the recent scandal, Ilyich and Krupskaya saw in Stalin the most trusted and dear person, or, on the contrary, they wanted to set him up and write him down as a poisoner, putting an end to at least his political career. Of course, Iosif Vissarionovich took the position of a shocked Leninist student - how can you, sir ?!
Death after the "hunt"
Presumably, Stalin came to the conclusion that he was being driven into a trap, and began to implement his own plan, the essence of which was that Lenin was sent to a sanatorium near Moscow in Gorki, where he was surrounded by the best Soviet and German doctors.
The security of the first persons was provided by the Chekists, and their boss Felix Dzerzhinsky, offended by Lenin for the Georgian incident, did everything to prevent Ilyich from showing political activity.
This situation suited almost all party leaders who were tired of Ilyich, except for Trotsky.
Sometimes it seemed that Lenin, not old yet, has a chance to get out. In September, he began to get up and walk around the room with a stick. I learned to write with my left hand, since my right hand was
paralyzed. Disavowing the accusations of isolating Ilyich, Stalin in October allowed two distinguished comrades to visit him - an employee of the Comintern, Osip Pyatnitsky, and a member of the Moscow Soviet, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov. Lenin listened to them attentively, but reacted with a single word, which he pronounced tolerably: "That's it."
And a completely unexpected thing: on October 19, Lenin insisted that he be taken to Moscow. He visited his Kremlin apartment, looked into the meeting room of the Council of People's Commissars, rode around an agricultural exhibition. Some historians believe that he wanted to pick up some incriminating documents, but most likely it was a farewell visit. The security guards did not interfere with Ilyich's trip: half-paralyzed, he was not dangerous to Stalin.
On January 7, 1924, Lenin and Krupskaya organized a Christmas tree for peasant children in Gorki, although Christmas is not a Bolshevik holiday. On January 19 Ilyich even went to see what the memoirists call "hunting." In fact, the huntsmen were hunting, and he sat in the sleigh as a spectator.
According to Krupskaya's recollections, after this trip Lenin “was apparently tired, and when we were sitting with him on the balcony, wearily closed his eyes, was very pale, and kept falling asleep, sitting in an armchair. In recent months, he has not slept completely during the day and even tried to sit not on an armchair, but on a chair. In general, starting from Thursday it began to feel that something was coming: Vl. Ilyich is terrible, tired, worn out. He often closed his eyes, somehow turned pale, and, most importantly, his expression somehow changed, there was a different look, as if blind."
A sharp deterioration occurred in the afternoon of the 21st. From the memoirs of Professor Viktor Osipov: “The convulsive state began to weaken, and we already began to harbor some hope that the seizure would end safely, but at exactly 6 o'clock. 50 minutes suddenly there was a sharp rush of blood to the face, the face turned red to a crimson color, then followed by a deep sigh and instant death. Artificial respiration was applied, which lasted 25 minutes, but it did not lead to any positive results. Death came from respiratory and heart paralysis, the centers of which are located in the medulla oblongata.
Krupskaya, as you can understand, was not in the room at the time of death and appeared a few minutes later. A little later Bukharin came, who was also being treated in a sanatorium. Soon he received a call from the Kremlin, ordered to return to Moscow and come to Gorki, already with everyone, so that he would not look like the only successor.
Doomed
The story of Lenin's own handwritten note to Gavrilushka, in which the leader reports that he was poisoned, first appeared in the memoirs of Elizaveta Lermolo, who emigrated to the West, who was in the camps in the mid-1930s, where she allegedly met the chef of a canteen in Gorki Gavrila Volkov. They kept him isolated from other prisoners, but Lermolo somehow freely was able to talk to him and happily sat through to the end of her term.
However, no traces of the chef Gavrila Volkov have yet been found among the employees of the canteen in Gorki. There is another oddity as well. Lenin never learned to write legibly with his left hand. In the memoirs of Krupskaya it is noted that on the morning of the day of his death, he “even” managed to tear off a sheet of the calendar himself. And suddenly, being poisoned, he manages to write such an expressive and rather long note. Doubtful …
It is significant that the careers of all the doctors who treated Lenin were quite successful, although if they deliberately tried to "heal" Lenin, Stalin should have tried to get rid of them as accomplices.
With a stretch, only the personal physician of the Ulyanov family, Fyodor Getye, can be considered an exception. His son was shot in 1938, and the shocked old man died two months later. But even this tragedy bears little resemblance to the elimination of the witness.
There is another intriguing moment connected with Guetier. He was the only one of the 11 doctors who participated in the autopsy did not sign the act, which stated that "the cause of the deceased's illness was atherosclerosis of the vessels due to their premature wear …". However, on the same day, he signed another document with the following key paragraph: "Found abrupt changes in the blood vessels of the brain, fresh hemorrhage, which caused death …"
These contradictions are clarified by comparison with other medical documents. They show that Lenin was being treated for syphilis, which was a common disease at the time and ultimately led to a fatal hemorrhage. However, it was considered wrong to publicize the leader's real illness, therefore, “officially” he suffered from “atherosclerosis of blood vessels,” which, as it were, implied intense and selfless mental activity. The causes of syphilis, as you know, lie in a slightly different plane.
As for Stalin, having complete information about the leader's illness, he understood the main thing - Lenin had no chance to recover. You just have to wait for his death, thwarting anyone's attempts to intervene in the complex political game for the successor position.
And let the doctors honestly do their job and treat, treat, treat …
Dmitry MITYURIN