Lenin's duty secretary, recorder of his final dictations
In 1963, at age 72, Volodicheva told Yuri Karyakin: "Comrade Lenin was very hard to decipher, and Comrade Stalin — so easy..."
Lenin's duty secretary (1918–1924), she took dictation of his last works, including 'The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation' on 30–31 December 1922. On 5 March 1923 she recorded and delivered Lenin's note asking Trotsky to defend the Georgian cause at the congress. She later burned an early typed copy of the Testament on Stalin's orders.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1917Worked in the secretariat of the VII (April) All-Russian Party Conference; stenographer at the VI Party Congress
- 1917.11–1918.07Secretary of the Press Bureau of the Council of People's Commissars
- 1918–1924Typist and stenographer at Sovnarkom; assistant secretary of the C.P.C. and C.L.D.
- 1922.12–1923.03Took dictation of Lenin's last articles and letters, including the 'Letter to the Congress' and 'On the Nationalities Question'
- 1924–1928Researcher at the V.I. Lenin Institute (later Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute)
Related historical events
- 1922.12Formation of the USSRSecretary who took Lenin's last dictationOver 30-31 December 1922 she took down Lenin's dictation 'The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation', and on 5 March 1923 she relayed Lenin's note to Trotsky.
- 1923–1927The Succession Struggle and the Left OppositionLenin's duty secretary who took down the TestamentTook shorthand of Lenin's Testament (Dec 23-25, 1922) and postscript (Jan 4, 1923). Later burned the originals on Stalin's orders; five copies survived in a safe.
Recording Lenin's final dictations
Volodicheva was one of the chief recorders of Lenin's final dictations. Her source value rests on the first-person diary entries she made in the 'Journal of the Duty Secretaries' (published in Lenin's Collected Works, vol. 45), a day-to-day log of Lenin's activity kept from 21 November 1922 to 6 March 1923. The journal is a nearly hour-by-hour testimony to Lenin's work from his sickbed, and its precision rests on stenographers like Volodicheva who set down his words one by one.
The most famous passage is dated 23 December 1922. She recorded: 'Towards nine o'clock Vladimir Ilyich called me to the flat. He dictated for four minutes. He felt poorly; the doctors were there. Before beginning to dictate he said: "I want to dictate to you a letter to the Congress. Write it down!"' That dictation became the 'Letter to the Congress', the document known as the Testament, with its assessments of Stalin and the other leaders. The next day, 24 December, Lenin repeatedly stressed that everything dictated on the 23rd and 24th was 'absolutely secret' and demanded it be kept in a special place under special responsibility.
The journal then follows the remaining works she took down. In an entry of 17 January 1923, while dictating 'Our Revolution', Lenin stopped at the phrase 'our Sukhanovs' and 'not even dreamt', and, while thinking out the next clause, joked: 'What a memory! I've completely forgotten what I wanted to say! Damn it! What surprising forgetfulness!' In an entry of 6 February he told her, with his 'infectious laugh', how he preferred to write rather than dictate, and how in 1918 he had burned a dictated manuscript and written 'The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky' by hand instead.
The final entries fall on 5–6 March 1923. She took down Lenin's letter to Trotsky asking him to take on the defence of the Georgian cause, and a note to Stalin; when Krupskaya asked that the Stalin letter not be sent, Volodicheva insisted on 7 March that she must carry out Lenin's instructions, and the letter was delivered to Stalin and Kamenev. In this way Volodicheva was both the first transcriber of the documents containing Lenin's last political will and the witness who saw them through to their destination.