The Death of Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution and later head of the Soviet Union after its creation in 1922, had suffered a series of strokes and died at age 53 in 1924. Lenin overthrew the short lived Russian Republic in October 1917, which itself had overthrown the old Russian Royal Family and the Russian Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, in February 1917. Both Alexander Kerensky, leader of the republican movement, and Lenin agreed that the Empire was not a way to govern Russia effectively.

Through uneven industrialisation that lagged behind Western Europe and the immense strain of a disorganised defence against Germany and Austria-Hungary, many Russians came to see the Tsar as ineffective at best and dangerously out of touch at worst. Although unpaid labour, referred to as serfdom, had been abolished decades earlier, millions of peasants still lived in conditions little better than feudal poverty, while the aristocracy retained immense wealth and privilege. The First World War exposed that the Tsarist system could not handle modern war, modern economics, or modern politics.

However, Kerensky and Lenin disagreed on what should replace it. Whilst Kerensky believed that a republican democracy should replace the Tsar, Lenin believed that it should be replaced with an idea called communism, which came from a pair of German philosophers known as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It argues that capitalism, where wealth and industry are controlled by private individuals and profit is the primary motive of work, should be replaced by a system in which workers collectively own and control production. In theory, this would abolish economic classes and reorganise society around human need rather than profit, eventually removing the need for private property, money and even the state itself. Lenin truly believed that communism was the way forward.

However, the economic devastation of the First World War, the harsh peace imposed by Germany, a multi-sided civil war against anti-Bolshevik forces and repeated assassination attempts all pushed the new regime toward emergency measures. Specifically, Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly due to losing the January 1918 election, suppressed rival parties through a secret police known as the Cheka, and placed much of the economy under direct state control during the civil war. In practice, power shifted away from the Workers’ Councils, called Soviets, and into the hands of the Party leadership, contradicting the revolution’s original promise of popular control. This also led to great stress, leading to his strokes and his eventual death.

One person was widely seen by many revolutionaries as Lenin’s most prominent potential successor, that being Leon Trotsky. Having met Lenin during his time in exile, Trotsky was elected as the chair of the Petrograd Soviet, and was one of the key leaders in the October Revolution before being appointed the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, a position in which he negotiated peace with Germany. He also served as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, where he led victories in the Russian Civil War, and became a close ally of Lenin through a party bloc created to stop the growing bureaucracy of the Soviet Union.

In this bloc, he advocated for greater industrialisation efforts, voluntary collective farming and party democratisation along with the New Economic Policy, which would combine elements of a free market and a single market economy but still remain under state control. Trotsky appeared to many as Lenin’s natural successor due to his role in the revolution and the civil war, but he faced strong rivals within the party leadership, the most notable of which was Joseph Stalin.

Prior to the revolution, Stalin was a minor figure within the Bolshevik movement. He was not an important theorist or a particularly good public speaker, but rather a dependable organiser. He edited party newspapers, maintained underground networks, and helped finance the movement through “expropriations,” including notorious bank robberies carried out by Bolshevik militants. After the revolution, he was appointed General Secretary of the party’s Politburo Central Committee, the highest executive committee within the party and the de facto ruling body of the country. What many saw as a simple, somewhat boring job, Stalin used his position as General Secretary to amass loyalists and centralise power under him. When Lenin died, Stalin had the power to simply erase the fact that Lenin had warned against making him leader, and seized power.

Stalin expelled Trotsky from the party by 1927 due to their opposition to one another and began a mass economic revitalisation plan known as the Five Year Plan. Whilst his plan did increase industrialisation efforts, it also caused a mass famine, including a catastrophic famine in Ukraine known as the Holodomor, caused by forced collectivisation and grain requisitioning policies. Many have characterised the Holodomor as a genocide of ethnic Ukrainians.

He also enforced a mass forced labour system through camps known as Gulags and murdered over 700,000 people who he perceived as political opponents, in an event known as the Great Purge. During his time in power, he transformed the country and the reputation of communism into an authoritarian, brutal police state, which later became the model for other communist leaders throughout the 20th Century. It is estimated that, during his regime, anywhere between 6 million and 9 million Soviet citizens were killed.