The death of Lenin, a century on: the long afterlife of Russia’s pre-emiment revolutionary

Most of Lenin’s adult life was spent living in Western Europe. There, he fostered ties with fellow revolutionaries and cultivated his interpretation of Marxism. Central to Lenin’s ideology was the need for a ‘vanguard’ of professional revolutionaries to guide the working class towards the destruction of capitalism and the dawn of socialism.

His decisive role in the Russian Revolution came during the febrile months following the collapse of the Romanov monarchy in March 1917. A provisional government of liberal politicians replaced the ousted tsar, Nicholas II.

• Read more | The last days of the Romanovs

Little more than a fortnight earlier, workers and soldiers in the capital, Petrograd (now St Petersburg) established a representative council to advance their demands – a council known as a ‘soviet’.

Lenin’s moment came in April 1917, when he returned to Russia and exclaimed: “All power to the soviets!” to a jubilant crowd that greeted him in the city.

Against the prevailing opinion of his comrades, Lenin persuaded the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Provisional Government and seize power that autumn. The result was the founding of the world’s first ‘socialist state’, Soviet Russia.

A brutal civil war then engulfed the former Russian empire. The Bolshevik regime eventually emerged triumphant, and, in December 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born.

At the same time, however, the health of the Soviet state’s founder was beginning to fail.

Lenin’s death: how did he die?

Lenin died of a stroke aged 53 on 21 January 1924 in the village of Gorki, to the south of Moscow.

His comrade, Nikolai Bukharin, witnessed the death and later wrote that Lenin’s “face fell back and went terribly white. He let out a wheeze, his hands dropped. Ilich … was no more”.

The Soviet leader’s constitution had always been robust. He had made a swift recovery following an assassination attempt in August 1918, and was soon back at the helm of the regime’s political machinations.

He demonstrated that vigour again in spring 1922 when one of the bullets from that attack was finally extracted from his neck.

A month later Lenin suffered his first stroke and was left temporarily unable to speak or write. His comrades in the Politburo – the nerve centre of the Communist Party – ordered him to recuperate at his dacha (a country house) in Gorki.

Furthermore, they instructed his entourage, which included his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, not to agitate him with any talk of politics.

Isolated and conscious of his mortality, Lenin turned his attention to the next generation of Bolshevik cadres and found them wanting. Despite his crackdown on factionalism within the party the year before, he foresaw a gulf beginning to open around the followers of Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin. The latter rapidly became an object of suspicion and annoyance to Lenin during his convalescence.

By autumn, Lenin had recovered enough to participate in plans for the composition of the forthcoming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). However, days before the USSR’s formal inception in December 1922, he suffered another health crisis and was sent back to Gorki.

While gravely unwell, he began dictating a series of texts and letters that later became known as his political ‘testament’ to his secretaries. Later, he urged the party to revoke Stalin’s position as General Secretary, rebuking him as “too coarse” and “capricious”.

Despite Lenin’s demand for confidentiality, one secretary sneaked a copy to Stalin, who was dumbfounded and ordered its destruction. Instead, she made an additional copy and secured it as Lenin had instructed.

After suffering an additional stroke on 10 March 1923, Lenin was left unable to talk and completely paralysed on the right side of his body. The Communist Party of Great Britain shipped out an electric wheelchair, but the right-sided configuration rendered it useless.

Did Lenin beg for death?

That spring, tormented by sleepless nights and headaches, Lenin begged for poison to end his suffering.

With their leader’s ability to directly influence statecraft at an end and his death seemingly imminent, the tensions among the Bolshevik grandees in the Communist Party sharpened.

Lenin dwindled at Gorki for another 10 months. His final stroke caused him to fall into a coma during the afternoon of 21 January 1924. His wife and sister were present when he breathed his last at 6.50pm.

What happened at Lenin’s funeral?

The Soviet government formally broke the news the next day and dignitaries from the Communist Party descended on Gorki to pay their respects.

On 23 January, the coffin was taken from Lenin’s dacha through a crowd of local mourners lining the snowy route to Gorki’s railway station. Once it arrived in Moscow, it was taken to lie in state within the Hall of Columns at the House of the Unions.

Despite below freezing temperatures of –7°C, an estimated 50,000 members of the public from across the Soviet Union, including foreign diplomats, filed past the open coffin over the next three days.

Yet behind the solemnity, Stalin was already manoeuvring to consolidate his power base. On the eve of the funeral, at a special Congress of Soviets held in the Bolshoi theatre, he delivered a eulogy.

Pledging to uphold Lenin’s example, he vowed “that we shall not spare our lives in strengthening the union of the working people of the entire world”, thereby obliquely staking claim to Lenin’s legacy.

On 27 January, Lenin’s coffin was carried the short distance from the House of the Unions to Red Square. One notable absentee among the bearers was Trotsky, who was resting at the Black Sea resort of Sukhumi following the defeat of his bid to redress the growing Soviet bureaucracy earlier that month.

Trotsky would later claim that Stalin had deliberately sent him a false date for the funeral to make his absence look disrespectful.

It was such a cold day that musicians rubbed vodka on their brass instruments to prevent their lips freezing to them.

At 4pm, after they performed the Soviet anthem, the Internationale, a gun salute rumbled, the Kremlin’s bells chimed and factory whistles across the Soviet Union sounded a tribute as Lenin’s coffin was interred within a custom-built shrine bearing his name in bold Russian Cyrillic characters.'.

Why was Lenin embalmed?

Chief among those within the Politburo who advocated for the body’s preservation was Stalin, who saw its potential as a tangible symbol of the October Revolution’s significance to the workers of the world.

Lenin had been the public face of the Soviet state and was by far its most popular figure. His death threatened the regime’s legitimacy and viability.

Shortly after his death, Lenin’s body was subject to an autopsy by Professor Alexei Abrikosov. He also performed a routine embalming procedure to ensure its temporary preservation while it lay in state prior to the funeral.

The vast crowds that queued to pay their respects during the lying-in-state had not gone unnoticed by the Politburo. Amid the ongoing freezing temperatures, it was decided to leave Lenin’s body on display until the onset of spring. In the meantime, vast numbers of people continued to pay their respects long after the funeral.

As winter dragged on, the idea of preserving the body for even longer began to take root.

Some, like Trotsky and Bukharin, rejected it out of hand as anathema to Marxist beliefs, transforming Lenin into an incorruptible saint for pilgrims. Others proposed placing the body in deep freeze or suspending it in embalming fluid.

Professor Vladimir Vorobiev and biochemist Boris Zbarsky were recruited to see if they could preserve Lenin’s mortal remains for as long as possible. Later that summer they informed the Politburo that they had successfully developed a process to do just that.

Their technique meant that Lenin would need to be subjected to regular and ongoing maintenance. This included submerging the body in chemical baths for long periods and replacing fluids and organic matter with artificial substances. Furthermore, mildew and other superficial blemishes could be treated, and the body ‘restored’ to its original appearance.

The Politburo was delighted with the breakthrough and, contrary to sanctifying Lenin’s mortal remains as a holy relic, the Communist Party extoled it as a testament to the prowess of Soviet science. Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, was aghast at the decision but her protestations held little sway.

Lenin’s mausoleum: where is Lenin’s body now?

Lenin’s body was originally entombed inside a simple wooden box-like structure that stood before the Senatskaya Tower, along the Kremlin’s north-eastern wall in Red Square. Its architect, Alexei Shchusev, was given the nail-biting task of crafting this in the days between the death and funeral.

Later that summer, it was replaced by a grander pyramidal structure. Still in the same location and still made of wood, the new mausoleum featured a tribune from which members of the Communist Party could see and be seen by the crowds on Red Square.

A competition for a permanent tomb on the same site was announced the following year. The party received more than a hundred applications but ultimately commissioned Shchusev to construct a third mausoleum out of stone, based on the aesthetic of the second.

Fusing ancient mortuary architecture with the modern dynamism of Constructivism that was popular in early Soviet Russia, Shchusev incorporated marble, labradorite, porphyry and granite into his design. Completed in 1930, the striking black and ruddy sepulchre became one of the Soviet Union’s most iconic and visited monuments.

In 1941, the body was evacuated to Tyumen, east of the Ural Mountains, as the invading armies of Nazi Germany threatened Moscow. Soviet victory over Hitler’s Reich saw Lenin restored to the mausoleum, whereupon Nazi banners were tossed unceremoniously at its base during the USSR’s victory parade on 24 June 1945.

At its heart, inside a dimly lit chamber, Lenin, seemingly glowing under spotlights and wearing a suit and tie, lies as if asleep behind the bullet-proof glass of a sarcophagus adorned with Soviet iconography.

What is Lenin’s legacy?

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Lenin’s legacy has all but receded. Many of the world’s communist parties that adhered to his ideology fell into obscurity. In 2017, the centenary of the February and October Revolutions was met with little fanfare in the Russian Federation, the internationally recognised successor to the Soviet Union.

Yet, for much of the 20th century, the impacts of the October Revolution and the Leninist heritage had a profound effect on global politics.

Even before his death, Lenin had been elevated into an illustrious figure by his comrades in the Soviet government. His ailing health and isolation at Gorki enabled the Kremlin to lay the foundations of the emerging cult.

His demise and corporeal preservation became potent sources of propaganda. In 1924, a line from the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem Vladimir Ilich Lenin encapsulated the new omnipresence of the recently deceased: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!”

That same year, Petrograd, the cradle of the October Revolution, was renamed Leningrad. Lenin’s likeness became a familiar presence in everyday life – appearing in paintings, on buildings, and even adorning the mastheads of Soviet newspapers including Pravda.

The party codified his writings and expounded a new state ideology, ‘Leninism’. His face, tilted confidently towards an unseen future, often appeared alongside that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as he assumed the status of a secular demigod presiding over all aspects of life within the Soviet Union.

Following Lenin’s death, Stalin, in connivance with the Politburo, suppressed his political testament. As Lenin had foreseen, animus between Stalin and Trotsky soon broke out. By 1929, after being stripped of his various roles within the regime, Trotsky was banished from the USSR. In August 1940, a Stalinist henchman murdered him with an ice axe in Mexico City.

Yet despite his burgeoning tyranny, even Stalin was ultimately subject to the Leninist cult he had helped raise. When he died in 1953, he too underwent the same embalming technique and was placed beside Lenin in the mausoleum.

Nikita Khrushchev’s exposure of Lenin’s testament during a secret session of the Communist Party in 1956 stunned those in attendance. With his posthumous reputation in tatters, Stalin’s corpse was removed from the mausoleum in 1961.

Lenin’s influence, however, remained as ubiquitous as the statuary raised across the cities of Soviet Union. The mausoleum became an altar from which the party’s leaders would review the annual cycle of parades marking May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution.

Nevertheless, the tomb’s aura also made it a target for the regime’s detractors, and there were numerous attempts to desecrate it over the decades. The glass sarcophagus was shattered several times by daring assailants, while two explosions in 1967 and 1973 killed and injured bystanders.

By the 1980s, while Lenin's body remained supple, the Soviet system had begun to creak. Ironically, the self-proclaimed Leninist, Mikhail Gorbachev, unveiled a series of sweeping reforms – perestroika and glasnost – which he believed would restore the USSR to Lenin’s original vision. Instead, they hastened its demise and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991.

Although Lenin’s legacy melted away, his embalmed body remains a popular if not macabre tourist attraction. The method used to preserve him – a closely guarded secret to this day – was applied to other Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.

Calls for Lenin to receive a proper burial have often been made. The mausoleum has become something of an awkward relic in post-Soviet Russia and is frequently hidden behind elaborate stage sets during national events in Red Square.

Nevertheless, the process of preserving what is now a 100-year-old corpse is ongoing and remains unique in history.