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Lenin's health had already been severely damaged due to the intolerable strains of revolution and war. The assassination attempt earlier in his life also added to his health problems. In May 1922, Lenin had his first stroke. He was left partially paralyzed (on his right side) and his role in government declined. After the second stroke in December, he resigned from active politics. In March 1923 he suffered the third stroke and was left bedridden and no longer able to speak.
Lenin died of complications of the fourth stroke on January 21, 1924. The official cause given for Lenin's death was cerebral arteriosclerosis , or a stroke, but out of the 27 physicians who treated him only 8 signed onto that conclusion in his autopsy report. Therefore, several other theories regarding his death have been put forward. For example, a posthumous diagnosis by two psychiatrists and a neurologist recently published in the European Journal of Neurology claimed to show that Lenin died from syphilis.
The city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor; this remained the name of the city until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when it reverted to its original name, St Petersburg.
After his first stroke, Lenin published a number of papers indicating future directions for the government. Most famous of these is Lenin's Testament, which criticised Joseph Stalin, who had been the Communist Party's general secretary since April 1922, claiming that he had "unlimited authority concentrated in his hands" and suggesting that "comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post". Many of these papers were suppressed for decades as Stalin and his supporters gained control (following a brief power struggle with Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition after Lenin's death).
During the early 1920s the Russian movement of cosmism was quite popular and there was an intent to cryogenically preserve Lenin's body in order to revive him in the future. Necessary equipment was purchased abroad, but for a variety of reasons the plan was not realised. Instead his body was embalmed and placed on permanent exhibition in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow.
Despite Lenin's expressed wish shortly before death that no memorials be created for him, various politicians sought to better their own position vicariously by association with Lenin after his death, and his character was elevated to almost mythical status, with statue after monument after memorial springing up in his honor.
Lenin's brain was removed before his body was embalmed. The Soviet government commissioned the well-known German neuroscientist Oskar Vogt to study Lenin's brain and to locate the precise location of the brain cells that are responsible for genius. The Institute of Brain was created in Moscow for this purpose. Vogt published a paper on the brain in 1929 where he reported that some pyramidal neurons in the third layer of Lenin's cerebral cortex were very large. However the conclusion of its relevance to genius was contested. Vogt's work was considered unsatisfactory by the Soviets. Further research was continued by Soviet team, but the work on Lenin's brain was no longer advertised.
Modern anatomy no longer thinks that morphology alone cannot be decisive in the functioning of the brain.
| Lenin statue in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia |
Lenin statue in Vijayawada, India |
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