Lenin's Testament

Lenin's Testament is a document dictated by Vladimir Lenin in late 1922 and early 1923. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies. Sensing his impending death, he also gave criticism of Bolshevik leaders Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin, Pyatakov and Stalin. He warned of the possibility of a split developing in the party leadership between Trotsky and Stalin if proper measures were not taken to prevent it. In a post-script he also suggested Joseph Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party's Central Committee.

Document history

Lenin wanted the testament to be read out at the 12th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to be held in April 1923. The document was originally dictated to Lenin's personal secretary, Lydia Fotiyeva. However, after Lenin's third stroke in March 1923 that left him paralyzed and unable to speak, the testament was kept secret by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in the hope of Lenin's eventual recovery. She possessed four copies while Maria Ulyanova, Lenin's sister, had one. It was only after Lenin's death, on January 21, 1924, that she turned the document over to the Communist Party Central Committee Secretariat and asked for it to be made available to the delegates of the 13th Party Congress in May 1924. Krupskaya wanted the document circulated as widely as possible, in hopes of humiliating Stalin.

An edited version of the testament was printed in December 1927 in a limited edition made available to 15th Party Congress delegates. The case for making the testament more widely available was undermined by the consensus within the party leadership that it could not be printed publicly as it would damage the party as a whole.

The text of the testament and the fact of its concealment soon became known in the West, especially after the circumstances surrounding the controversy were described by Max Eastman in ''Since Lenin Died'' (1925). The full English text of Lenin's testament was published as part of an article by Eastman that appeared in ''The New York Times'' in 1926. In response to Eastman's article, Trotsky described the claim that the Central Committee concealed the testament as "pure slander." Trotsky also rejected the characterization of the document as a "will," describing the document as one of Lenin's letters providing advice on organizational matters.

Historian Stephen Kotkin argued that the evidence for Lenin's authorship of the Testament is weak and suggested that the Testament could have been created by Krupskaya. However, the Testament has been accepted as genuine by other historians, including E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Dmitri Volkogonov, Vadim Rogovin and Oleg Khlevniuk.

Related documents

This term is not to be confused with "Lenin's Political Testament", a term used in Leninism to refer to a set of letters and articles dictated by Lenin during his illness on how to continue the construction of the Soviet state. Traditionally, it includes the following works:
*''A Letter to a Congress'', "Письмо к съезду"
*''About Assigning of Legislative Functions to Gosplan'', "О придании законодательных функций Госплану"
*''To the "Nationalities Issue" or about "Autonomization"'', "К 'вопросу о национальностях' или об 'автономизации' "
*''Pages from the Diary'', "Странички из дневника"
*''About Cooperation'', "О кооперации"
*''About Our Revolution'', "О нашей революции"
*''How shall We Reorganise the Rabkrin'', "Как нам реорганизовать Рабкрин"
*''Better Less but Better'', "Лучше меньше, да лучше"

Contents

The letter is a critique of the Soviet government as it then stood. It warned of dangers that he anticipated and made suggestions for the future. Some of those suggestions included increasing the size of the Party's Central Committee, giving the State Planning Committee legislative powers and changing the nationalities policy, which had been implemented by Stalin.

Stalin and Trotsky were criticised:

Lenin felt that Stalin had more power than he could handle and might be dangerous if he was Lenin's successor. In a postscript written a few weeks later, Lenin recommended Stalin's removal from the position of General Secretary of the Party:

Marxist historian Ludo Martens argues that the postscript's complaints about Stalin's coarseness refers to a rebuke that Stalin had made to Krupskaya twelve days earlier.

By power, Trotsky argued Lenin meant administrative power, rather tha
political influence
within the party. Trotsky pointed out that Lenin had effectively accused Stalin of a lack of loyalty.

In the 30 December 1922 article, ''Nationalities Issue'', Lenin criticized the actions of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze and Stalin in the Georgian Affair by accusing them of " Great Russian Chauvinism".

Lenin also criticised other Politburo members:

Finally, he criticised two younger Bolshevik leaders, Bukharin and Pyatakov:

Isaac Deutscher, a biographer of both Trotsky and Stalin, wrote that "the whole testament breathed uncertainty".

Political impact and repercussions

Short term

Lenin's testament presented the ruling triumvirate or troika (Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev) with an uncomfortable dilemma. On the one hand, they would have preferred to suppress the testament since it was critical of all three of them as well as of their ally Nikolai Bukharin and their opponents, Leon Trotsky and Georgy Pyatakov. Although Lenin's comments were damaging to all of the communist leaders, Joseph Stalin stood to lose the most since the only practical suggestion in the testament was to remove him from the position of the General Secretary of the Party's Central Committee.

On the other hand, the leadership dared not go directly against Lenin's wishes so soon after his death, especially with his widow insisting on having them carried out. The leadership was also in the middle of a factional struggle over the control of the Party, the ruling faction being loosely allied groups that would soon part ways, which would have made a coverup difficult.

The final compromise proposed by the triumvirate at the Council of the Elders of the 13th Congress after Kamenev read out the text of the document was to make Lenin's testament available to the delegates on the following conditions (first made publi
in a pamphlet
by Trotsky published in 1934 and confirmed by documents released during and after glasnost):

* The testament would be read by representatives of the party leadership to each regional delegation separately.
* Taking notes would not be allowed.
* The testament would not be referred to during the plenary meeting of the Congress.

The proposal was adopted by a majority vote, over Krupskaya's objections. As a result, the testament did not have the effect that Lenin had hoped for, and Stalin retained his position as General Secretary, with the notable help of Aleksandr Petrovich Smirnov, then People’s Commissar of Agriculture.

Long term

Failure to make the document more widely available within the party remained a point of contention during the struggle between the Left Opposition and the Stalin-Bukharin faction in 1924 to 1927. Under pressure from the opposition, Stalin had to read the testament again at the July 1926 Central Committee meeting.

Lenin's concerns over Stalin's harsh leadership and over a split between Trotsky and Stalin were later confirmed, with Trotsky being expelled from the Soviet Union by the Politburo in February 1929. He spent the rest of his life in exile, writing prolifically and engaging in open critique of Stalinism. In 1938 Trotsky and his supporters founded the Fourth International in opposition to Stalin's Comintern. After surviving multiple attempts on his life, Trotsky was assassinated in August 1940 in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, an agent of the Soviet NKVD. Written out of Soviet history books under Stalin, Trotsky was one of the few rivals of Stalin to not be rehabilitated by either Nikita Khrushchev or Mikhail Gorbachev. Trotsky's rehabilitation came in June 2001 by the Russian Federation.В. В. Иофе. Осмысление Гулага.
НИЦ «Мемориал»

From the time that Stalin consolidated his position as the unquestioned leader of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, in the late 1920s, all references to Lenin's testament were considered anti-Soviet agitation and punishable as such. The denial of the existence of Lenin's testament remained one of the cornerstones of historiography in the Soviet Union until Stalin's death on March 5, 1953. After Nikita Khrushchev's On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, in 1956, the document was finally published officially by the Soviet government.

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

Journals
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Newspapers
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External links

Lenin's Last Testament (text)
by Leon Trotsky (written in December 1932, published in 1934, sometimes incorrectly dated as 1926)

{{Authority control

1922 documents
1923 documents
Documents of the Soviet Union
Lenin
Works by Vladimir Lenin