Lenin's Testament - Document History

Document History

Lenin wanted the testament to be read out at the XII Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to be held in April 1923. However, after Lenin's third stroke in March 1923 left him paralyzed and unable to speak, the testament was kept secret by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in hopes of Lenin's eventual recovery. Only after Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, she turned the document over to the Communist Party Central Committee Secretariat and asked that it be made available to the delegates of the XIII Party Congress in May 1924.

Lenin's testament presented the ruling triumvirate or troika (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 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 itself consisting of 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 public 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.
• Making 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.

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 1924-1927. Under pressure from the opposition, Stalin had to read the testament again at the July 1926 Central Committee meeting.

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 have damaged 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 Soviet leadership denounced Eastman's account and used Party discipline to force Trotsky, then still a member of the Politburo, to write an article (see the quote from Bolshevik) denying Eastman's version of the events.

The full English language text of Lenin's testament was published in the New York Times in 1926.

From the time Stalin consolidated his position as the unquestioned leader of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union in the late 1920s on, 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 Soviet historiography until Stalin's death on March 5, 1953. After Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, the document was finally published officially by the Soviet government.