Lenin's Testament

Background

By December 1922, Lenin's health had deteriorated sharply. He had suffered his first stroke in May, temporarily losing speech and experiencing right-side paralysis, and a second stroke in December confined him to his Gorki estate. During this period, Lenin dictated the "Letter to the Congress" (Письмо к съезду) along with several other texts: "On Granting Legislative Functions to Gosplan," "The Question of Nationalities or 'Autonomisation,'" "On Cooperation," which together are often grouped as his "political testament."

Content

The "Letter to the Congress" was dictated from December 23, 1922, to January 4, 1923. Lenin demanded that the dictated material be kept in the strictest secrecy until the next party congress, though contrary to his wishes, most of the notes were immediately sent to the Central Committee.

Lenin proposed expanding the Central Committee to 50–100 members, arguing this would strengthen the party's stability and prevent conflicts among a small leadership circle from determining the party's entire fate. He then identified the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky as the central issue of party stability:

"Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use this power with sufficient caution."

Of Trotsky, he wrote that he was "perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee" but noted his "excessive self-assurance" and "excessive enthusiasm for the purely administrative side of affairs." Zinoviev and Kamenev's October 1917 episode was "of course, no accident." Bukharin was "the most valuable and greatest theoretician of the party" but his theoretical views "can only with the greatest doubt be regarded as fully Marxist."

The January 4, 1923 Postscript

After Stalin's abusive phone call to Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya in December 1922, Lenin added the famous postscript:

"Stalin is too rude, and this defect, fully tolerable in our midst and in relations among us Communists, becomes intolerable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades that they consider a way of removing Stalin from this post and appointing someone else who differs from Comrade Stalin in only one respect: more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate toward comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may seem a trifle. But I think that from the standpoint of preventing a split, and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky, it is not a trifle, or it is a trifle that can acquire decisive significance."

Historical Trajectory

After Lenin's death, Krupskaya handed the document to the Central Committee on the eve of the 13th Party Congress in May 1924. Delegates read it in closed sessions of individual delegations, but it was excluded from the congress materials. Stalin offered his resignation; Kamenev proposed a vote. The majority voted to retain Stalin, with only Trotsky's supporters dissenting. A delegate reportedly said, "We are not frightened by rudeness: our whole party is rude and proletarian."

The testament was printed in 1927 in a discussion supplement to Pravda and in Bulletin No. 30 of the 15th Party Congress, but with the onset of mass repressions in the 1930s, it was declared a forgery and its circulation was banned.

At the 20th Party Congress in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev distributed the testament to delegates ahead of his speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" and quoted it at length as the decisive authority for de-Stalinization. The speech itself was never officially made public in the USSR until 1989 but caused shock throughout the Soviet bloc.

Authenticity Debate

Some modern Russian historians (Valentin Sakharov, Yuri Zhukov, Vladimir Ermakov) and Stephen Kotkin have questioned Lenin's authorship, suggesting Krupskaya or Trotsky as possible authors. However, the majority of historians, including E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Dmitri Volkogonov, Vadim Rogovin, and Oleg Khlevniuk, accept the document as genuine Lenin. Ronald Suny noted that "few other scholars doubt the authorship of the document, which accurately reflected Lenin's views, nor was it questioned at the time it was written and debated in high party circles."