Lenin's Testament is the name given to a document written by Vladimir Lenin in
the last weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. In the testament,
Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies. He also commented on the leading members of the Soviet
leadership and suggested that Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central
Committee.
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. It wasn't until after
Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, that 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 (Stalin, Zinoviev and 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 Bukharin and their
opponents Trotsky and Pyatakov. (Although Lenin's
comments were damaging to all Communist leaders, 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 didn't dare to 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 XIIIth
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 should be read by representatives of the Party leadership to each regional delegation separately
- making notes would not be allowed
- the testament must 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 didn't 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 XVth 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 [citation needed] 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 in
1953. After Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin at the
Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, the document was finally officially published by the Soviet government.
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 which instruct 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 "Automomization","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 Reorganize the Rabkrin,"Как нам реорганизовать Рабкрин"
- Better Less but Better, "Лучше меньше, да лучше"
Contents of Lenin's Last Testament
The letter constitutes a critique of the Soviet government as it then stood, warning of dangers he anticipated and making
suggestions for the future. Some of those suggestions include 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.
The criticism of Stalin and Trotsky:
- Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether
he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle
against the C.C. on the question of the People's Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by
outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive
self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.
- These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present C.C. can inadvertently lead to a split, and if our Party
does not take steps to avert this, the split may come unexpectedly.
In a postscript written a few weeks later, Lenin recommended Stalin's removal from the position of General Secretary of the Party:
- Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes
intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post
and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage,
namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This
circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from
the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a
detail which can assume decisive importance.
In the December 30, 1922 article "Nationalities Issue" or about "Autonomization" Lenin criticized the actions of
Dzerzhinsky, Ordzhonikidze, and Stalin in the "Georgian Affair", accusing them of "Great Russian chauvinism".
- I think that a fatal role was played here by hurry and the administrative impetuousness of Stalin and also his infatuation
with the renowned "social-nationalism". Infatuation in politics generally and usually plays the worst role.
Lenin also criticized other Politburo members. He wrote that
- the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev [their
opposition to seizing power in October 1917] was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them
personally, any more than non-Bolshevism can upon Trotsky.
He also criticized other Bolshevik leaders by name in addition to his general political suggestions.
External links
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