Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
It's January the 23rd, 1924. Early morning. We're in Gorky, a few miles south of the Moscow city limits. Snow carpets the ground. The wind blows with a bitter chill. But that hasn't put off the thousands who've gathered here. They stand, sombre and respectful, lining the route from Vladimir Lenin's Dasha through the woods to the local railway station. Four men hoist a crimson-draped coffin onto their shoulders. Inside it,
The father of the new Russia is dressed in a dark brown suit and a black tie. His hands rest on his chest. One relaxed, the other clenched in a fist, pugnacious even in death. As the train from Gorky arrives in Moscow, onlookers wave red flags and hold aloft banners. Lenin is dead, one of them reads, but his work lives on. On the 27th, the day of the funeral, it's minus 33 degrees centigrade.
In the corners of Red Square, soldiers build great log fires. At 4pm, Lenin's coffin arrives at a wooden mausoleum that has been constructed by the Kremlin's East Wall. The moment is soundtracked by an extraordinary symphony. On cue, machinery in the city's factories drones into life. Alarms and sirens wail. Steam locomotives blow their whistles and weapons are fired in staccato salvos. The industrial and military mood music
of Lenin's Soviet Union. So intense is the public outpouring that the new Soviet bigwigs are inspired to devise a plan. They will embalm and preserve Lenin's corpse. It's not what his family wants, but in the battle for Lenin's soul, the new leadership is already a step ahead. They've set up a commission of immortalization. And so, Lenin remains on public display in Red Square, right through to the present day, in fact.
Over the decades millions have caught a glimpse of the man who created the world's first communist state. For almost a century he's been the specter at the feast of Russian history. A silent witness to the rise of Stalin, to the horrors of another world war, through the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet Union, and everything since. What he would have made of it all is anyone's guess. What is clear is that he shifted the course of history in a way that very few others have.
So let's scroll back from the funeral to 1917 and the aftermath of the October Revolution to discover how exactly he did it. From Neuser, this is the final part of the Lenin story. And this is Real Dictators. In late 1917, Vladimir Lenin has just led a successful communist revolution. The Tsar has been toppled, as has the provisional government that followed him.
The Russian Empire will shortly be divided into four major republics. These will cover Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia . For now, these republics are nominally independent, all undergoing their own internal power struggles. In time, they will be consolidated as the USSR. In the Russian capital Petrograd, Lenin and his Bolsheviks take power. Professor Catherine Merridaele,
The first thing that happened after the revolution was a feeling of euphoria and a belief that now things could possibly get better. Since the storming of the Winter Palace, power has come to reside with the newly instituted Soviet, or Council, of People's Commissars. Popularly known as the Sovnarkom, this is in effect the Bolshevik cabinet. The Sovnarkom meets in a cramped, dingy office on the third floor of the Smolny Institute.
In these inauspicious surrounds, Lenin will start the giant task of reconfiguring the nation. We have to destroy everything, he says, to create the new. It's not as if they're taking a functioning state and then just using it. There is no state in October 1917. There's nothing virtually except a printing press or two. And suddenly they've got to build a state that is defensible at a time of international war. It's incredibly difficult.
Dr. James Ryan: What they soon discovered is that when you take power in a country where power has become very disparate, it's very, very difficult to rule the country. And also Bolsheviks realized that they hadn't given a huge amount of thought to how to rule the country. They know what revolution should look like. They know what they want to achieve. They don't necessarily know how you run a state.
I mean, what do you do? Do you take over the ministries? Do you rename them? Do you create new ministries? What happens to the banks? What happens to the civil servants? What happens if the civil servants say, "We don't want to work for you"? What do you do then? In 1917, they are drunk on revolutionary enthusiasm and they quickly realize we need to sober up and learn how to run a state. The most fundamental question that Lenin faces is how far to embrace democracy.
He talked up the prospect of free and fair elections when the Tsar was in power, but he knows that the Bolsheviks' mandate could be undermined in an instant at the ballot box. The Duma, the Tsar's parliament, had been dissolved by the old provisional government in early October. A new constitutional body, the Russian Constituent Assembly, has taken its place. Elections to this assembly are planned and then delayed. Lenin wants to postpone them indefinitely.
Other senior Bolsheviks persuade him that the people will not stand for that. The promised public vote finally takes place in mid-November 1917. It goes about as badly as Lenin feared. The Bolsheviks come away with less than a quarter of the ballots cast. This is at least more than the Mensheviks' miserly 3%. But another group of leftists, the Socialist Revolutionaries, has taken around 40% of the vote. The Kadett Party.
comprised of centrist liberals has garnered 5%. Together, these factions might pose a real threat to Bolshevik authority. The Assembly is due to sit on November 27th. Instead, Lenin announces a ban on the Kadett party and has several of its leaders arrested. By the time the Assembly eventually convenes on December 5th, Lenin has imposed martial law. Petrograd is awash with soldiers.
In a show of defiance, 40,000 civilians take to the streets to march in support of the assembly. The Red Guards fire on them from the rooftops, killing 10 people and seriously injuring 70 others. At 4pm, with the assembly finally in session, the Bolsheviks enter a motion. It states that the assembly should automatically ratify all Sovnarkom decrees.
In other words, it should rubber stamp their policies, just as the Duma had done for the Tsar. When the motion is voted down, the Bolsheviks walk out in protest. The next morning, drunken Red Guards are deployed to empty the chamber. Fingers on triggers, they usher out all of the delegates. They then turn off the lights and lock the doors.
From Lenin's point of view, sharing power with other parties is fine so long as those other parties are on the same page as the Bolsheviks. The problem becomes when those other parties are not on the same page. And Lenin's page has quite a lot of detail on it. Lenin's new democratic Russia has lasted about 12 hours. There will not be a democratically elected chamber for another 75 years. Instead, Lenin will rule largely by decree,
He will issue dozens of directives on the press, workers' rights, land regulation, women's rights, the nationalization of banks and industry. As a personal enthusiast, there's even a decree on libraries, giving commands on adequate staffing levels and opening hours.
Lenin's mission to remake society is made even harder by the fact that some of his critical assumptions have not come to pass. Revolution is very different in practice than in theory. Who knew?
Everything Lenin did was predicated on the idea there was going to be a world revolution. Everything. He really believed it. He went on saying it and writing it right up until the end of his life. And so what he thought he was doing was holding on to Russia until the world revolution happened.
So as soon as there can be a world revolution, things in Russia will improve because the proletariat of the world will help to rebuild the world economy. And of course, the bourgeoisie will be pushed out. So all the things the bourgeoisie and the nobility have had will be shared on a fair and equal basis amongst the population that inherits the planet.
and things will be fine. Now it's a utopian view, it's a highly utopian view. And of course it is a shock that the world revolution doesn't follow and that what he has to do instead is maintain what is essentially a state under siege, which has very little in the way of state apparatus. With communist Russia somewhat out on a limb, the gains made in the revolution must be closely guarded. Those who attempt to obstruct Lenin are playing a dangerous game. Victor Sebastian.
After the 25th of October, after the revolution, Lenin hadn't slept two or three days at all and he needed some rest. He left Anandalin Kamenev to be in charge. One of the first things Kamenev did was to abolish capital punishment at the front. When Lenin woke up, he went into an absolute storm of rage and said, almost word for word,
What on earth are you doing? Do you not understand that this can only happen at the point of a gun? That you cannot create the revolution without execution. That was day one of the revolution. If the great idealistic revolution depends on this, I think that explains the failure of communism, almost in a nutshell. Once a champion of the underground media, now Lenin introduces harsh censorship. Even allies on the left twitch at this.
Maxim Gorky, the founder of Russia's first Bolshevik newspaper, is among those to pipe up. "I am mistrustful of Russians in power," Gorky says. "Recently slaves themselves. They will become unbridled despots." Lenin may have overthrown the old order, but he still needs government staff in place to enact the change he desires. Soon after the October Revolution, civil servants go on strike. Staff at the National Bank soon join the action.
Lenin demands his government be given an initial 10 million rubles to fund their revolutionary agenda. The chief of the bank refuses, claiming that to do so would be illegal. Lenin threatens to fire all the bank's employees and forcibly conscript them into the army. In early November, he sends a contingent of Red Guards to surround the bank. Two senior Bolshevik officials, both armed, head inside. They order the vaults to be opened, then stuff their sacks with cash.
With the bulging bags slung over their shoulders, they climb into a waiting armored car and are sped off. The money is transferred into red velvet bags and locked in a wardrobe next to Lenin's own office, with a sentry posted outside. By hook or by crook, Lenin has his treasury at last. Lenin's next move in December is to establish a new secret police force, the Cheka, the successor organization to the Tsar's Okhrana. In time,
It will evolve into the dreaded KGB. The Cheka is to be headed up by a 40-year-old Pole called Felix Dzerzhinsky. His loyalty to the Bolsheviks has seen him suffer terrible hardship. His wrists and ankles are scarred from the manacles he wore in prison. He is a zealot, utterly relentless in his new role. A sign proclaiming "Death to the bourgeoisie" hangs on his office wall. An organ of state terror, the Cheka also gains a reputation for corruption.
They looked for counter-revolutionaries, but took the valuables, as the popular saying goes. The Cheka agents specialize in nocturnal arrests. The unexpected knock at the door in the dead of night becomes the stuff of fevered nightmares. This terror is all part of Lenin's strategy to bring down the bourgeoisie. In state propaganda, the rich are described as former people and stripped of their rights. As Leon Trotsky puts it,
We've cleaned up after the rich, now they will pick up the dirt. But not everyone is on board. On New Year's Day 1918, Lenin climbs into a car after a speaking engagement. The convoy snakes through the streets of Petrograd. Suddenly, gunfire cuts through the air. Bullets crunch into the metal doors of the vehicle. Lenin's driver squeaches around a corner and floors it, making it to safety. That was close. Lenin's response is swift.
He establishes the so-called People's Courts. They are to conduct trials by the mob. Unqualified judges will be empowered to adjudicate on criminal cases, not on the basis of evidence, but in accordance with their own revolutionary conscience. Crimes against the state, meanwhile, are to be conducted in private by Communist Party members. The Red Guards are empowered to shoot enemy agents, profiteers, and counterrevolutionaries on sight.
All the organs of repression were created by Lenin. The secretive, ascetic state, the intolerant state was created by Lenin. The casual violence of the killing of opponents began very, very soon. Dr. Helen Rapoport. You're seeing the same people who welcomed the revolution saying, my God, this is worse than before. It's worse than the Tsars. The fear, the dislocation of ordinary life, the terror.
With the communist state under construction at home, Lenin turns to international affairs. He's long advocated for Russia to withdraw from World War I. Now, he makes a formal request for an all-nations conference. Predictably enough, the notion is rejected. So instead, he moves to seek a truce with Germany, in defiance of even some of his closest supporters.
There were left-wing groupings within the party, left Bolsheviks, who thought that it was too humiliating to countenance, to engage with. Lenin saw very clearly that they could not continue the war with the Axis powers. It just wasn't practical. They didn't have an army. They didn't have the ability to do that. They needed time.
time to address the economic crisis at home and they needed time to build up an army that could actually defend themselves. Extending the olive branch to Berlin puts Russia right on a collision course with the Western allies. But Lenin is uncompromising. He gets hold of the pre-war treaties that Russia had drawn up with Britain and France. The documents that detail how the spoils are to be carved up in the event of Germany's defeat. Here is proof, he says.
that the war was always an imperialist adventure. Formal talks between Russia and Germany begin in December 1917 at Brest-Litovsk on the border of modern-day Belarus and Poland. At midnight on February 23, Lenin personally sends the telegram accepting Germany's peace terms. In all, Russia surrenders 62 million people, a third of its agricultural land, over half of its industry, and 90% of its coal mines.
And there was a huge reparations bill. We'll sign anything we've got to get out of this war. That was the Bolshevik policy. And that's what went ahead. And the reason for it was not just we want to get out of the war, but Lenin and his comrades, but Lenin above all, were convinced that this was the beginning of a world revolution.
They could agree to anything. It didn't matter what they signed away to Germany. Because within a very short while, in Lenin's theory and in his understanding, there was going to be a world revolution. And Germany and Russia would no longer be concepts. There would simply be a world proletariat. So in order to precipitate that and in order to stop further bloodshed, they were going to pull out of the war. Back at home, Russia begins to slide into a civil war.
On the one side stand the communist Reds, on the other the so-called Whites, a loose confederation of opposition groups that have been gathering since Lenin took office. The provisional government which has been overthrown begins to amass force to counter what the Bolsheviks have done, what the Soviets have done. Military generals begin to gather an army in the south of Russia. So they very soon there's a civil war.
From abroad, several of Russia's former allies offer financial and practical support to the Whites. Their hope is that by degrading communism in Russia, they might help to re-establish the Eastern Front against Germany. Britain alone gives some 100 million pounds. To add to the picture, there are also the so-called Green Armies. They are opposed to the Reds, the Whites and the Foreign Interventionists.
For a while, the outcome is genuinely up for grabs. It would have been quite realistic to think that white armies of some sort would have taken parts of the old Russian Empire. Poland left the Russian Empire in 1917. It was quite realistic to think that parts of Siberia might be held permanently by anti-Bolshevik forces at various points in the early part of the war.
Ukraine changed hands endlessly during the civil war. Kiev changed hands five times in a year. So you're seeing a war that is not predictable. A firm hand on the Russian military is more important than ever. In 1918, the Red Army is formally established, with Leon Trotsky at its head. It's a force that will acquire an almost mythological status through the Cold War and beyond.
It takes time for this weak and figured army to gain the ascendancy. But in the end, through 1919, red unity begins to triumph. The Bolsheviks had a number of advantages. They held the center, that is, they held Petrograd, and then they held Moscow. And Moscow was right at the heart of the landmass of European Russia.
And the other thing the Bolsheviks had on balance, but it was a very fine balance, they had more support from the population, generally speaking, than the Whites did. Because they were saying to the peasants, you can keep the land you've taken. The threat posed by invading armies, both foreign and domestic, has spooked Lenin. It prompts a major decision. With its preferable strategic location, Moscow shall replace Petrograd as the capital city.
Petrograd, St. Petersburg retained its feeling of being really the best city, the city that has the window on the west, the most beautiful city. But it was also highly exposed to some armies of whites coming from the north. And at that point, the decision was taken to move the government, in particular Lenin, to Moscow, to the Kremlin, which was a defensible objective. You had walls around it and it was a fortress and it was in the middle, physical middle of the nation.
Lenin and Nadia adopt a characteristically humble lifestyle in their new hometown. They arrive carrying the same tatty bags, rolled up bedding and suitcases full of books that they had during their years in exile. Lenin's office is basic. He makes do with an old clock that doesn't keep time properly. When the sheepskin rug under his desk is replaced by a sumptuous polar bear fur, he demands the old one back. "I have no need for such luxury," he says.
His one indulgence is his dacha, his holiday mansion in Gorky. The bolt hole boasts a staff of seven, including a cook called Spiridon Putin. His grandson, another Vladimir, will make his own mark on Russian history. The final years of the Tsar had seen chronic food shortages across the land. With the Communists in power, there is no let up. In the 18 months following the revolution, there was an exodus from the starving cities out into the countryside.
Petrograd loses an astonishing two-thirds of its population. Those left behind take to eating horse flesh. Politically, it's imperative that Lenin finds someone to blame. He alights on the kulaks. They are a class of the peasantry, the wealthier sort. The kulaks have been profiteering, he declares. They are responsible for the country's woes. He demands they sell their grain to the government at reduced prices.
They have a sociology, a way of thinking and understanding society. And they have a hierarchy. At the top of that hierarchy are the industrial proletariat, the workers, skilled workers. And then it sort of goes down from there. Peasants occupy an interesting position.
At one point, Lenin described the peasants as having two souls. On the one hand, peasants were inclined towards the workers and the proletariat because peasants had experience of being exploited and downtrodden. On the other hand, peasants also think about the land as theirs and they think about what is good and useful for them. They don't necessarily think about the collective
in the same way that the workers do, because workers are concentrated in a factory. The peasants, in other words, are somewhere between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. So this becomes a sort of an excuse for the Bolsheviks to say that we're not nakedly acting forcefully against peasantry, we're waging class struggle.
The government creates requisition brigades. These bands of armed men go out to some 20,000 villages to extract grain by force. In just a year, at least 3,700 peasants are killed, with whole villages razed to the ground. The brigades even take the seeds needed for next year's planting. With their methods ineffective as well as cruel, from a potential harvest yield of 50 million tons,
They only managed to secure around 1% for the state. Meanwhile in the cities, the proletariat does not rally against the country folk as Lenin had hoped. As early as June 1918, there is a socialist revolutionary insurrection in Petrograd, swiftly followed by another in Moscow. Trotsky crushes the attempted coups. Some 200 rebels are executed by the Red Army, with another 600 imprisoned. Lenin is punching down at the peasantry,
He also punches up at the Romanov royal family. For a time he's been happy to keep the former Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family alive. They might yet have some value as bargaining chips, what with their blood ties to royal families across Europe. But as Trotsky cracks down on the rebels in Moscow, Lenin's thinking changes. There's always the risk that the Romanovs might become a focal point of opposition. He must deal with them once and for all, but quietly.
He doesn't want to turn them into martyrs. And so, as we witnessed right at the outset of this story, at their supposed safe house in the city of Ekaterinburg, the Romanovs are murdered in the early hours of July 17th, 1918.
The Tsar is really quite a dangerous figurehead in terms of Lenin's grip on power. There is no doubt in my mind that it had to be approved by Lenin. You would not shoot the whole royal family without getting approval. There is no paper trail that proves that he approved it, but he must have done. When the newspapers report that the Tsar is dead, the public's reaction is muted. People have bigger things to worry about, like feeding themselves and their families.
Some folk are becoming extremely desperate. On August 30th, 1918, the head of the Petrograd Cheka is gunned down by anti-revolutionaries. Later that same day, a little after 5.30pm, Lenin finishes giving a speech at a factory in downtown Moscow. As he departs, he stops to speak to some women who are heckling him over food shortages. As they lean in to hear his response, three gunshots ring out.
Lenin lies on the floor, blood seeping through his shirt and jacket. He has a bullet lodged in his left shoulder. Another has gone through his neck, narrowly missing the aorta. He is extremely lucky to be alive. The would-be assassin, 28-year-old Fanny Kaplan, is quickly arrested. She says her actions are in defiance of the revolution and that she's worked alone. A month later, Kaplan is executed before her body is burned in a garage in the Kremlin.
Lenin has got all too used to gunfire in lawless Russia. Three weeks earlier his car was shot at three times in a single day.
He was treated very carefully. He survived and recovered probably almost 100%. But it made the point, of course, that terrorism was a big danger in the new red state. It made the point we can clamp down on opposition now. What we have to do is treat the opposition as implacably and as violently as it has treated our great leader. In the two months after the Kaplan assassination attempt...
at least 6,000 death sentences are passed. With Lenin's blessing, the Cheka operates without limits. He may be tightening his grip on power, but by 1921 Lenin is facing a fresh groundswell of opposition, not only from the right, but also from the left. Even amongst some comrades, there is impatience at the lack of revolutionary progress.
Russia is a place of dreams in 1917. And by the 1920s, these dreams were being discussed and the fact that they hadn't been realised was beginning to trouble people more. After the exodus from the cities out into the countryside, famine is still rife. Lenin tries to bury his head in the sand. For a while he bans the use of the words famine and starvation in the press. He rejects all foreign aid for as long as possible.
When he does reluctantly accept US support to feed 25 million people, he sends the Cheka to spy on his American guests. Out in the country, people are turning to cannibalism. Food requisition brigades are attacked and officials murdered. Lenin responds by using poison gas against his own people. The disenchantment spreads to other parts of society. In February 1921, sailors at the Kronstadt naval base take up arms.
They had been crucial to the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, providing the crew for the battlecruiser Aurora. Now, thousands of them unite to demand reform. Lenin vows to destroy them. In March, he sends Trotsky and 20,000 troops to Kronstadt. The Red Army's final assault on March 16 turns into a brutal massacre, in which thousands die. As if he doesn't have enough enemies,
Lenin also doubles down on his bid to dismantle the Russian Orthodox Church. An arch-atheist, he has already moved to separate church and state. Religion is no longer taught in schools, and his government has seized acres of clerical land. The famine of 1921 gives him a new opportunity to attack. He accuses the clergy of hoarding. But beyond the bravado, even Lenin is starting to think that things cannot carry on as they are.
At the Communist Party Congress of 1921, he announces a startling new policy.
So 1921 was a turning point. The country was starving and Lenin introduced the new economic policy in 1921, which was a step back from the kind of absolute communism people had thought they were going to get. The new economic policy was based on the idea that you could make profits out of trade. It was okay under Lenin's government. If you traded, you would get paid. And this was something completely new and quite scary for a lot of communists, but they did it.
And gradually, in the early 1920s, it began to work. But it was hugely divisive within the party. Lenin suggests the policy will last at least a decade to give the country room to industrialise and modernise. To many, this new economic policy looks like a return to capitalism. He accepts it as the pragmatic cause.
To Lenin, the important thing was to keep political power. This again showed Lenin's remarkable ability to tack and weave and to change policy 180 degrees. 1921 also marks a sea change in Lenin's attitude to revolution overseas. In 1920, spying an opportunity to export revolution beyond Russia's borders, Red Army troops had been ordered to march on the Polish capital Warsaw. It had not gone according to plan.
When Lenin says, let's go for Warsaw, let's go for the Polish capital, the Polish peasants are going to rise up and welcome us. And then maybe we can look towards Berlin. We can look towards Germany. This is our chance to wage revolutionary war, to export revolution.
And it fails. Polish armies hold strong, a peace treaty is signed, and then the Bolsheviks need to sort of think about, much more firmly, about domestic issues, about consolidating what they have done domestically. This gives rise to the whole notion of socialism in one country. Instead of spreading revolution by force, he will look to finance foreign activists and support the production of Marxist propaganda.
This is the way, he believes, to destabilize the capitalist nations of Europe and North America. In fact, Lenin invests more in this scheme than he spends to relieve the suffering of the millions of famine victims in his own country. Even at the time, 1921 feels like a pivotal year. What no one yet knows is that the clock is already ticking on his reign. In September 1920, Lenin's former lover, Inessa Arman, had died of cholera.
She caught the disease while holidaying in the Caucasus. Inessa was granted a spectacular state funeral. Since then, Lenin has been overwhelmed with grief. He and Nadia even adopt Inessa's younger children, a final twist in this strange menage a trois. Lenin's sorrow only contributes to his own failing health, and there is less time than ever for those recuperative sojourners in the countryside. He complains of shortness of breath and pains in his chest and legs.
"My nerves are kaput," he acknowledges to a confidant. He even has the bells removed from his office telephone in a bid to reduce the stresses of daily life. Suffering from repeated blackouts, at the end of 1921 he has no choice but to take an extended sick leave. One theory does the rounds that he is suffering from lead poisoning, courtesy of the bullets lodged in his body. In late May 1922 he collapses as he tries to get out of bed.
His sister Maria calls for a doctor, who diagnoses a stroke. It's an echo of the time his mother Maria found his father, Ilya, in a similar predicament. Lenin struggles to speak. He's been paralyzed on his right side. In time, he'll recover, but it's a warning, if ever there was one. His ill health is kept secret from the public. The Kremlin puts out that he has a stomach ailment. In private, Lenin summons Joseph Stalin.
Should the need arise, Lenin asks the Man of Steel, will he assist him in a suicide bid? Stalin agrees to oblige. What troubles Lenin most is the decline not of his body, but of his mind. Dr. Brandon Gautier says,
He'll time himself doing math problems, and he'll do math every day, convinced that if he could just sharpen his mind, he could maybe reverse the intellectual degradation that was going on. The person who intellectually was always so sure of himself, who would take anybody on in intellectual combat, ultimately in the end struggles with the fact that he's losing those intellectual faculties. Over the next few months, Lenin splits his time between Gorky and Moscow.
Lenin is in the Kremlin after his stroke, keeping warm under a blanket, talking to his comrades, trying to make decisions. It's not as if Lenin himself can't guess that this is very serious. But if you are Lenin, you're not going to believe that it's time to give up.
He had somebody build him a rickety little wooden hut on top of the building where his apartment was so that he could sit out in the fresh air and sniff the Moscow night and see the stars. While the city around him is starving, falling to bits, you know, there's no fuel, people having to saw up their floorboards to keep warm, all that sort of thing. In December 1922, he suffers further strokes that leave him unable to write or even to touch the tip of his nose.
Just before Christmas, he dictates a letter to Stalin, begging his understudy to fetch him poison. It would be a humanitarian gesture, he claims. But Stalin, despite his previous acquiescence, refuses. "I do not have the strength," he says, "to help end Lenin's life." On Christmas Eve, Lenin is withdrawn from public and put into strict isolation.
Only medical professionals, his close family, and a handful of staff are permitted access to him. Stalin will oversee the doctors and the medication they prescribe. While Lenin lies on his sickbed, the government approves an historic declaration, which is duly delivered at Moscow's famous Bolshoi Theatre.
The four socialist republics, Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia and Transcaucasia, have signed a treaty to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. After the downfall of the last Tsar, and all through the years of revolution and civil war in Russia, rival factions have struggled for control of each respective republic. By now, Moscow-backed Bolsheviks have gained the upper hand across the former empire.
On December 30, 1922, the Soviet Union is officially born. In the coming years, it will expand to include 15 different republics. Vladimir Lenin knew it was hard to lose your father young, and he now knew that this new Bolshevik Union, this new socialist utopia, still in its youth would have to go on without its father. What would become of his Bolsheviks when he was no longer around?
He was very disappointed towards the end of his life that the world revolution had not occurred and what he saw happening in Russia demoralized and depressed him. Of course, he was also ill, so it's unlikely that he'd have been feeling 100% chipper about anything. But the failure of the world revolution was the collapse of all his ideas about what should have happened.
And then what was happening in Russia, the peasants are getting richer, the party is splitting, there are factions forming all around, there is an international pressure on his country from people who hate communism. It's not looking good. Added to which, the people who are the most likely to be the comrades in arms that succeed him are very clearly more interested in power than they are in ideas, as far as he can perceive.
With several individuals jockeying to replace him, it seems likely that Lenin's preference is for a collective leadership to take over after his death.
Well, the most obvious person to succeed Lenin, the most talented, the most charismatic, the one with the greatest experience was Trotsky. Trotsky has pure revolutionary sort of stamped through him like a stick of rock, just like Lenin does. The problem with Trotsky, he has two principal problems. One is he's Jewish and in Russia, which is still extremely anti-Semitic, a Jewish leader would have been very difficult.
Then of course, there is Stalin.
Stalin was somebody at the time that most people would have discounted as a potential leader. For one, he was Georgian. And for another, although he'd done stuff in the Civil War, they'd got him down as an administrator. They'd got him down as somebody who couldn't do ideas, but was very good with paperwork. And that was where they misread him, misjudged him completely. From December 1922, Lenin sets about dictating what will become known as his Last Testament.
In it, he offers stinging rebukes of both men. When Lenin saw Stalin actually in power close by, he began to be alarmed by some of the things Stalin was doing. And at the end of his life, in his testimony, Lenin actually said that Stalin was too rude to be somebody who should be a leader of the party. Pretty much right at the end of Lenin's life,
Stalin had an argument with Krupskaya, Lenin's wife. A really significant argument in which Stalin, by all accounts, was pretty horrible, really rude and sort of swearing at her. Lenin found out about this and was utterly furious and basically sent Stalin a note in which he said, you apologize or I'll have nothing more to do with you. I just break relations with you right there, right now.
On January 21st, 1924, at Gorky, it's a crisp morning. Lenin sits outside, propped up on pillows. In the afternoon he returns to his room. He drinks some vegetable broth and he dozes off. Ever loyal, Nadia is by his side. She can hear a gurgling noise emanating from his chest. She notices his eyes are open but unfocused, his hands are hot and damp to the touch.
She then sees that the towel he is resting on has turned red with blood. Doctors attempt to revive him with camphor oil and artificial respiration. At 6.50pm, Lenin is declared dead, just like his father. He succumbed to a stroke in his mid-fifties. But not everyone is convinced that that is the full story.
Dr. Helen Rapoport is among those to suspect that Lenin's demise actually has its roots in his time in exile all those years before.
The only way Lenin could diffuse himself from this high-octane intellectual life, he went to prostitutes. He went to brothels in Paris. I'm convinced of it. And I think he contracted syphilis. And one of the manifestations of that in the early stage was this horrible, irritable rash he developed when they were in Switzerland.
I wonder, too, if the reason Nadia never had children was because Lenin had contracted syphilis. Because I talked to someone during the course of my research who'd worked in East Germany as a doctor at the time when Soviet apparatchiks were being sent there for treatment for cancer. And he said it was an open secret amongst the Soviet doctors who he met that Lenin had died of syphilis, neurosyphilis. And it wasn't a stroke.
but that of course it was all hushed up on pain of death. Whatever the cause, the effect is the same. The founder of the Soviet Union is no more, and it remains to be seen whether his creation will persevere. Following her husband's death, Nadia advocates for the publication of his last testament, but its most damning passages, the ones concerning Stalin and Trotsky, are kept from the public.
It is Stalin, of course, who will consolidate power, with devastating consequences for millions behind the Iron Curtain. Lenin's embalmed body, meanwhile, as we know, is destined to become a macabre feature of Muscovite life. And this came from a very deep-seated strand in Russian revolutionary thinking, which was that eventually even death would be overcome. They would create an immortal race.
And when that moment came, if Lenin had been mummified, embalmed, he would be the first person to reanimate and he could come back and lead the human race in its liberation. So they mummified him. It's after his death that Lenin's personality cult truly takes off. His likeness will be rendered in sculpture across the Eastern Bloc. He will become the very image, the personification of incorruptible communism.
right up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and even beyond. Historians continue to contest the extent to which Lenin himself was technically a dictator, but there is no doubting that he created a dictatorship. Lenin did not have total control over his party and over the revolution. He was enormously influential.
He wasn't a dictator in the sense that his word was final, but he bears responsibility for dictatorship. Most certainly he qualifies as a dictator. He was one of the models of the 20th century dictator. He took power in a very personal way and he kept it. The one thing from the moment of taking power illegitimately was how you keep it. That drove him.
In terms of being the head of state, he already realized he had to compromise. Whereas when Stalin came to power, he did the opposite. I think the dictator was Stalin, but Lenin, he was an intellectual dictator.
The reality is, Vladimir Lenin set the tone during the Russian Civil War that this regime would use heinous violence to seek to achieve its ideological ends. Joseph Stalin, thereafter, is far more radical, but in many respects, he is a natural continuation of Lenin's radicalism taken to a new height. More than a century on from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917,
How might Lenin have viewed his own legacy? Lenin had spent most of his life as a relative obscurity on the fringes of European history. His life would have been probably a footnote in our history had it not been for the First World War that eventually catapulted him into the position that he seized advantage of in 1917. And then when he came to power in 1917, he had less than seven years to live.
He had succeeded in the big story here, which is bringing revolution and crucially, critically holding onto it. But what he had set in stone, what he had set in place was a one party dictatorship. The Soviet Union has had a significant influence on the world, but it certainly has not been successful in the way that Lenin would have wanted. It collapsed in 1991.
his revolution failed. It lasted for quite a long time, but it didn't result in what he wanted it to result in, which was international socialism and eventually communism. Real Dictators will return in the coming weeks with the story of Robert Mugabe.