Civil war Although he had read
Carl von Clausewitz's
On War, Lenin was inexperienced in military matters. His views on
civil war were based squarely on a Marxist understanding of
class war, and he was particularly influenced by the example of the
Paris Commune. Although expecting there to be opposition from Russia's aristocracy and bourgeoisie, he believed that the sheer numerical superiority of the lower classes, coupled with the Bolsheviks' ability to effectively organise them, guaranteed a swift victory in any conflict. As such, he failed to anticipate the intensity of the violent opposition to Bolshevik rule in Russia. Russia's Civil War pitted the pro-Bolshevik Reds against the anti-Bolshevik Whites, but also encompassed ethnic conflicts on Russia's borderlands and conflict between both Red and White armies and local peasant groups throughout the former Empire. The country's bourgeoisie, stripped of many of its rights, soon turned to resistance. In
South Russia, a
Volunteer Army was established by the anti-Bolshevik generals
Lavr Kornilov and
Mikhail Alekseyev in December 1917. This army subsequently came under the control of
Anton Denikin, who led it in an advance through the Don region and into southern Ukraine, later taking control of
Kursk and
Orel. In Siberia, the anti-Bolshevik general
Alexander Kolchak proclaimed himself "Supreme Ruler of Russia", and led an army that pushed toward Moscow, seizing
Perm in December 1918; they were ultimately thwarted and forced back into Siberia in July 1919. Kolchak would be captured by the Irtutsk Soviet and executed. These anti-Bolshevik armies carried out the
White Terror, a system of oppression against perceived Bolsheviks and groups assumed to support them. Western governments backed the White forces, feeling that the Treaty of Brest Litovsk was a betrayal to the Allied war effort and angry about the Bolsheviks' calls for world revolution. In December 1917, the British government began financing the White
Don Cossack army of
Alexey Kaledin, however they were defeated in February 1918. This Western support soon took a more active role in the conflict; by July 1918, 4000 troops provided by the United Kingdom, France, United States, Canada, Italy, and Serbia had landed in
Murmansk, taking control of
Kandalaksha; by August their troop numbers had grown to 10,000. In November 1918, British, US, and Japanese forces landed in
Vladivostok, the latter soon having 70,000 troops based in Siberia. Japan saw this as an opportunity for territorial expansion, desiring to bring Russia's Far Eastern Maritime Province under its own imperial control. While Japanese troops remained to play a part in the civil war, Western troops were soon ordered home, although Western governments continued to provide White armies with officers, technicians, and armaments. During the civil war, the scarcity and rationing of goods gave impetus to a growth in centralised economic control, in doing so largely eliminating private trade and providing the state with an economic monopoly. The Whites were bolstered when 35,000
prisoners of war – former members of the
Czech Legion – who had been captured by the Russian Imperial Army, turned against the Soviet government while they were being transported from Siberia to North America as part of an agreement with the Allies. They established an alliance with the
Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), an anti-Bolshevik government that had been established in
Samara. Komuch and the Czech legion advanced on
Kazan but were defeated by the Red Army at the
Battle of Sviyazhk. Responding to these threats to the Sovnarkom, Lenin tasked the senior Bolshevik
Leon Trotsky with establishing a
Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. With Lenin's support, in September 1918 Trotsky organised a
Revolutionary Military Council, remaining its chairman until 1925. Recognising that they often had valuable military experience, Lenin agreed that officers who had previously been loyal to the Tsar could serve in the Red Army, although Trotsky established military councils to monitor the activities of such individuals. The Red Army were sent into the newly independent national republics on Russia's borders to aid Marxists there in establishing soviet systems of government. This resulted in the establishment of the
Commune of the Working People of Estonia, the
Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic, the
Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, the
Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia, and the
Ukrainian Soviet Republic, all of which were officially independent of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Many senior Bolsheviks disliked Sovnarkom's encouragement of such nationalisms, viewing it as a violation of socialism's internationalist ethos. Lenin insisted to them that national and ethnic sensibilities needed to be respected, but reassured these Bolsheviks that the ultimate power wrested with Moscow and that these national governments were
de facto regional branches of central government. After the Brest Litovsk Treaty, the Left SRs had increasingly come to view the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolutionary cause. In July 1918, a member of the Left SR,
Yakov Grigorevich Blumkin, assassinated the German ambassador to Russia,
Wilhelm von Mirbach, hoping that the ensuing diplomatic incident would lead to a relaunched revolutionary war against Germany. Seeking to defuse the situation, Lenin issued his personal condolences to the German Embassy. The Left SR
launched a coup in Moscow, shelling the Kremlin and seizing the city's central post office, however their uprising was soon put down by Trotsky and two Latvian battalions. The party's leaders and many of their members were arrested and imprisoned, although the Bolsheviks showed greater lenience toward them the Left SRs than they had done to many of their other critics. On 9 July, at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, a ban was declared on the party being involved in any of the country's soviets. The Bolsheviks primarily held the area of
Great Russia, while the White opposition were situated largely in the peripheries of the former Empire, in regions dominated by non-Russian ethnic groups. Significantly, the Bolsheviks held control of Russia's two largest cities, Moscow and Petrograd. Aiding the Red war effort was that the Bolsheviks'
anti-capitalist stance appealed to many of the country's proletariat, while their redistribution of land appealed to much of the peasantry, and the ethnic Russian supremacism expressed by various White generals alienated certain ethnic minorities. Further hindering the White cause was that they were fragmented and geographically scattered, while the Whites also failed to produce an effective unifying message, with their pro-royalist statements generating little support. 13 million people died in the civil war. In the summer of 1919, Denikin's armies were forced back into Ukraine, and from there into
Crimea, with Denikin himself fleeing to Europe. In December 1919, the Red Army retook Kiev. By January 1920, the Whites had been defeated in Russia itself, although fighting continued in the Empire's former neighbouring territories. Although Lenin had allowed these non-Russian nations to cede from the Empire, he and the Bolsheviks desired to incorporate them into their new socialist state. Intent on establishing a Soviet Republic in Ukraine, he was concerned that the Ukrainian Communist Party had lacked widespread support among ethnic Ukrainians, and so persuaded the party to accept
Borotbists – a group who had split from the
Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party – to be incorporated into the Ukrainian Communist Party. Although Ukraine and Russia were officially presented as two separate states at this period, the Ukrainian Soviet government was strongly influenced by Lenin's government in Russia. In July 1918,
Yakov Sverdlov informed Lenin and the Sovnarkom that the Yekaterinburg Soviet had overseen the
shooting of the Romanov family in order to prevent them from being rescued by advancing White troops. Although lacking proof, biographers and historians like Pipes Volkogonov have expressed the view that the killing itself was probably originally sanctioned by Lenin. For Lenin, the execution was axiomatic, and he highlighted the precedent set by the
execution of Louis XVI in the
French Revolution. The execution prevented the Romanovs being used as a rallying point by the White armies and would reiterate to the Russian population that there would be no monarchical restoration. Publicly, the death of
Nicholas II was announced, although it was erroneously claimed that his immediate family remained alive. In 1920, the
Polish-Soviet War broke out after Poland attempted to annex parts of
Belarus and
Western Ukraine; by May 1920 they had conquered
Kiev. After forcing the Polish army back, Lenin urged the Russian Army to push into Poland itself, believing that the Polish proletariat would rise up to support the Russian troops and thus spark European revolution. Although Trotsky and other Bolsheviks were sceptical, they eventually agreed to the invasion; however, the Polish proletariat failed to raise up against their government, and the Red Army was defeated at the
Battle of Warsaw. Lenin had also sent a note to
E. M. Sulyanski, in which he called on the Red Army to hang kulaks, clergy, and landed gentry, before blaming these attacks on
Green armies. The Polish armies began to push the Red Army back into Russia, forcing Sovnarkom to sue for peace; the war culminated in the
Peace of Riga, a treaty in which Russia ceded territory to Poland and paid them reparations.
Red Terror, famine, and the New Economic Policy poster from 1920, showing Lenin sweeping away monarchists and capitalists; the caption reads, "Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth" While Lenin was absent, of 5 September 1918 Sovnarkom passed a decree, "On Red Terror", which Lenin later endorsed. This decree called for perceived class enemies of the proletariat to be isolated in
concentration camps, and for those aiding the White Armies or rebellions to be shot; it decreed that the names of those executed should then be published. The purpose of the
Red Terror was to eliminate the bourgeoisie as a class, an aim that was repeatedly called for within the Bolshevik press. However, it was not simply bourgeoise who were executed, but also many others who were deemed to oppose the Bolsheviks. The Cheka claimed the right to both sentence and execute anyone whom it deemed to be an enemy of the government, without recourse to the Revolutionary Tribunals. Accordingly, throughout Soviet Russia the Cheka carried out executions, often in large numbers, with the Petrograd Cheka for instance shot 512 people to death over the course of a few days. The cycle of violence was not purely initiated by the Bolsheviks, who were targets of violence as well as its perpetrators. Given that he rarely left Moscow, Lenin never witnessed this violence first hand. He sought to publicly distance himself from such violence, rarely signing his name to the Sovnarkom's repressive decrees. Similarly, he did not typically call for the shooting of counter-revolutionaries and traitors within his published articles and public speeches, although he regularly did so in his coded telegrams and confidential notes. Many middle-ranking Bolsheviks expressed disapproval of the Cheka's mass executions and feared the organisation's apparent unaccountability for its actions. The Party brought in attempts to restrain its activities in early 1919, stripping it of its powers of tribunal and execution, however this only applied in those few areas not under official
martial law; the Cheka therefore were able to continue their activities as before in large swathes of the country. By 1920, the Cheka had become the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia, exerting influence over all other state apparatus, to the extent that Pipes considered the country to be a
police state. There are no surviving records to provide an accurate figure of how many perished due to the Red Terror, although the later estimates of historians have ranged from 50,000 to 140,000. The majority of these were either well-to-do citizens or members of the Tsarist administration. The establishment of concentration camps was entrusted to the Cheka, with
Dzerzhinsky orchestrating their construction from the spring of 1919 onward. Sovnarkom ordered every provincial and district capital to establish such camps. They would subsequently be administered by a new government agency,
Gulag. By the end of 1920, 84 camps had been established across Soviet Russia, holding circa 50,000 prisoners; by October 1923, this had grown to 315 camps with approximately 70,000 inmates. Those interned in the camps were effectively used as a form of
slave labor. Militantly atheist, the Communist Party wanted to demolish organised religion, with the new government declaring the separation of church and state, while the Bolshevik press denounced priests and other religious figures as counter-revolutionaries. During the
Russian famine of 1921,
Patriarch Tikhon called on Orthodox churches to sell unnecessary items to help feed the starving, an action endorsed by the government. In February 1922 Sovnarkom went further by calling on all valuables belonging to religious institutions to be forcibly appropriated and sold. Tikhon opposed the sale of any items used within the
Eucharist, and many clergy resisted the appropriations. Facing this resistance, Lenin issued a decree in May 1922 calling for the execution of priests. Between 14,000 and 20,000 priests were killed as a result. Although the
Russian Orthodox Church – the largest religious organisation in Russia – was worst affected, the government's anti-religious policies also impacted on
Roman Catholic churches, Jewish synagogues, and Islamic mosques. Caused in part by a drought, the famine that affected Russia was the most severe that the country had experienced since
that of 1891. The famine was exacerbated by the government's requisitioning efforts, as well as their decision to continue exporting large quantities of Russian grain rather than using it for domestic consumption. In 1920 and 1921, Russia witnessed a number of peasant uprisings against the government, sparked by local opposition to the requisitioning, but these were suppressed. Among the most significant was the
Tambov Rebellion, which was put down by the Red Army. To aid the famine victims,
Herbert Hoover, the future President of the United States, established an
American Relief Administration to distribute food. Lenin was suspicious of this aid, and had it closely monitored. Within the Communist Party itself there was dissent from both the
Group of Democratic Centralism and the
Workers' Opposition, both of whom criticised the Russian state for being too centralised and bureaucratic. The Workers' Opposition, who had connections to the state's official trade unions, also expressed the concern that the government had lost the trust of Russia's working class. The 'trade union discussion' preoccupied much of the party's focus in this period; Trotsky angered the Workers' Opposition by suggesting that the trade unions be eliminated, seeing them as superfluous in a "
workers' state", but Lenin disagreed, believing it best to allow their continued existence, and most of the Bolsheviks eventually embraced this latter view. Seeking to deal with the problem of these dissenting factions, at the
Tenth Party Congress in February 1921, Lenin brought about a ban on factional activity within the party, under pain of expulsion. In February 1921, workers went on strike in Petrograd, resulting in the government proclaiming
martial law in the city and sending in the Red Army to quell demonstrations. On 1 March 1921, the
Kronstadt rebellion began as sailors in
Kronstadt revolted against the Bolshevik government, demanding that all socialists be given freedom of press, that independent trade unions be given freedom of assembly, and that peasants be allowed free markets and not be the subject to forced requisitioning. Lenin sent
Mikhail Kalinin to talk to the rebelling sailors, but they rejected his arguments and denounced the Bolshevik administration, calling for a return to rule by the soviets. On 2 March, Lenin and Trotsky issued an order in which they described the Kronstadt sailors as "tools of former Tsarist generals". Trotsky ordered the sailors to surrender, and when they refused he began bombing them and attacking them; the rebellion was subdued on 17 March, with thousands dead and many survivors sent to labor camps In the face of famine and peasant uprisings, Lenin met with a number of peasant delegates to discuss the issues involved, concluding that the government's popularity was at its lowest point. Acknowledging Russia's economic woes, in February 1921 he suggested the introduction of a
New Economic Policy (NEP) to the Politburo, eventually convincing most senior Bolsheviks of its necessity. He subsequently gained support for the move at the 10th Party Congress, held in March, with the NEP passing as law in April. Lenin explained the policy in a booklet,
On the Food Tax, in which he stated that the NEP represented return to the Bolsheviks' original economic plans, but which had been derailed by the civil war, in which they had been forced to resort to an economic policy which he now called "
war communism", a term first developed by Bogdanov. Designed to allow for renewed economic growth, the NEP allowed for the restoration of some private enterprise within Russia, permitting the reintroduction of the wage system and allowing peasants to sell much of their produce on the open market. The policy also allowed for a return to privately owned small industry, although basic industry, transportation, and foreign trade all remained under state control. Lenin termed this "
state capitalism", although many Bolsheviks thought it to be a betrayal of socialist principles. Expressing the view that "the efficient peasant must be the central figure of our economic recovery", he argued that Russia's peasantry lacked socialist values and that it would take time for them to learn them, and that the introduction of socialist reforms to agriculture through the formation of
collectivised farms would have to wait. Similarly, he argued that the NEP was still Marxist because capitalist elements were needed to develop the
units of production to a level where they could then be socialised as state property. Lenin biographers have often characterised the introduction of the NEP as one of Lenin's most significant achievements, with Service suggesting that had it not been implemented then the Bolshevik government would have been quickly overthrown amid popular uprisings. Seeking to establish trade links in order to advance their own economy, the Soviet Union sent a delegate to the
Genoa Conference; Lenin had hoped to attend himself, but was prevented by ill health. The new government also signed a commercial and diplomatic treaty with Germany, the
Treaty of Rapallo, as well as the
Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement with the United Kingdom in March 1921, seeking to encourage the
Russo-Asiatic Corporation of Great Britain to revive its copper mining operations within Russia. Lenin hoped that by allowing foreign corporations to invest in Russia, it would exacerbate rivalries between the capitalist nations and hasten their downfall; for instance, he unsuccessfully attempted to rent the oil fields of
Kamchatka to an American corporation in order to exacerbate tensions between the U.S. and Japan, who desired Kamchatka for their empire. In 1922,
Dmitry Kursky, the
People's Commissar for Justice, began the formation of a new criminal code for the RSFR; Lenin aided him in doing so, asking that terror "be substantiated and legalized in principle" and that the use of
capital punishment by expanded for usage in a wider array of crimes.
Communist International After the Armistice on the Western Front, Lenin believed that the breakout of world revolution was imminent, particularly in Europe. His government supported the establishment of the
Hungarian Soviet Republic, led by
Béla Kun, in March 1919, as well as the establishment of the
Bavarian Council Republic and various revolutionary socialist uprisings in other parts of Germany, among them that of the
Spartacus League. They funded not only communist groups in Europe but also those active in various parts of Asia, including Korea, China, India, and Persia. In late 1918, the British
Labour Party called for the establishment of an international conference of socialist parties, the
Labour and Socialist International. Lenin saw this as a revival of the
Second International which he had despised and decided to offset its impact by formulating his own rival conference of international socialists. Lenin set about organising such a conference with the aid of Zinoviev, Trotsky,
Christian Rakovsky, and
Angelica Balabanoff. On 2 March 1919, the First Congress of the
Communist International ("Comintern") opened in Moscow. It lacked a global coverage; of the 34 assembled delegates, 30 resided within the countries of the former Russian Empire, and most of the international delegates were not officially recognised by the socialist parties within their own nations. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks dominated proceedings, with Lenin subsequently authoring a series of regulations that meant that only socialist parties that endorsed the Bolsheviks' views were permitted to join Comintern. Comintern remained financially reliant on the Soviet government. During the first conference, Lenin spoke to the delegates, lambasting the parliamentary path to socialism espoused by revisionist Marxists like Kautsky and repeating his calls for a violent overthrow of Europe's bourgeoisie governments. While Zinoviev became the International's President, Lenin continued to wield great control over it. The First Congress of the Communist International was followed by the
Eighth Congress of the Bolsheviks, at which Lenin was repeatedly criticised for the measures that his government had implemented. One point of criticism surrounded Lenin's granting of national to sovereignty for Finland; there, a soviet republic had failed to materialise, with
a monarchy having been created instead. The Second Congress of the Communist International opened in Petrograd's Smolny Institute in June 1920, representing the last time that Lenin visited a city other than Moscow. There, he encouraged foreign delegates to emulate the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, and abandoned his longstanding viewpoint that capitalism was a necessary stage in societal development, instead encouraging those nations under colonial occupation to transform their pre-capitalist societies straight into socialist ones. For this conference, he authored
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, a short book in which he articulated his criticism of far left elements within the British and German communist parties who refused to enter those nations' parliamentary systems and trade unions; instead he urged them to do so in order to advance the revolutionary cause. The conference had to be suspended for several days due to the ongoing war with Poland, before the Congress subsequently moved to Moscow, where it continued to hold sessions until August. However, Lenin's predicted world revolution failed to materialise, as the Hungarian Soviet Republic was overthrown and the German Marxist uprisings suppressed
Lenin's declining health and the Soviet Union A number of prominent Western socialists travelled to Russia, during which they met with Lenin; these included the philosopher
Bertrand Russell in summer 1920 and the author
H. G. Wells in September 1920, the latter having been introduced to Lenin through Gorky. He was also visited by the anarchists
Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman in January 1920. In April 1920, the Bolsheviks held a party to celebrate Lenin's fiftieth birthday, with widespread celebrations taking place across Russia and poems and biographies dedicated to him being published. All of this embarrassed and horrified Lenin himself. Between 1920 and 1926, twenty volumes of Lenin's
Collected Works were edited by Kamenev and published; that material which was deemed inappropriate for the needs of the Soviet government were omitted. He became increasingly concerned with the illness of his close friend
Inessa Armand, who visited him at the Kremlin on several occasions; although she temporarily recovered, she subsequently relapsed. He sent her to a sanatorium in
Kislovodsk, Northern Caucusus in order to recover, but there she contracted
cholera during a local epidemic and died in September 1920. Her body was transported by train to Moscow, arriving there in October, where Lenin collected the coffin from the train station; observers noted that he was overcome by grief. Her corpse was buried beneath the Kremlin Wall. During his leadership of the Soviet administration, Lenin struggled against the state bureaucracy and the corruption within it, and became increasingly concerned by this in his final years. Condemning such bureaucratic attitudes, he suggested a total overhaul of the Russian system to deal with such problems, in one letter complaining that "we are being sucked into a foul bureaucratic swamp". Lenin had become seriously ill by the latter half of 1921, however continued working hard. He was suffering from
hyperacusis and
insomnia, as well as regular headaches. At the Politburo's insistence, On 13 July he left Moscow for a month's leave, spending the time at
his Gorki mansion. There, he was cared for by his wife and sister,
Maria Ilinichna, who visited on weekends. On 13 November 1921 he spoke at the Comintern Congress, although in December had to return to Gorki to recuperate. Lenin began to contemplate the possibility of
suicide, asking both Krupskaya and Stalin to acquire
potassium cyanide for him. In total, 26 physicians would be hired to help Lenin during his final years; many of them were foreign, and had been hired at great expense. Some suggested that his sickness could have been caused by metal oxidation arising from the bullets that were lodged in his body; in April 1922 he underwent a surgical operation to remove them at
Soldatenkov Hospital. The symptoms continued after this, with Lenin's doctors unsure of the cause; some believed that he was suffering from
neurasthenia or
cerebral arteriosclerosis, or a combination of these diseases. In May 1922, he then suffered his first stroke, temporarily losing his ability to speak and being paralysed on his right side. He convalesced at Gorky, and had largely recovered by July. He returned to Moscow in October 1922, although his condition again deteriorated the next month. In December 1922 he suffered his second stroke and returned to Gorky. Between June and August 1922, a trial of the SR leaders was held in which they were found guilty of conspiring against the government. Lenin urged for their execution, although other Bolsheviks cautioned against this, suggesting that they be kept imprisoned indefinitely under the threat of execution if any further SR attempts against the government were made. This attitude prevailed, and the SR leaders were kept in prison until later being killed during the
Great Purges of Stalin's leadership. The Bolsheviks continued to oppose the Mensheviks and their calls for a more democratic basis to socialism. In March 1923, while Lenin was ill, the Politburo ordered the expulsion of any Mensheviks from state institutions and enterprises, and their banishment to labor camps in
Narym; their children were to be sent to a camp in
Pechera, ultimately resulting in the virtual eradication of Menshevism in Russia. In October 1922, Lenin proposed that Trotsky should become first deputy chairman of the
Council of People's Commissars at a meeting of the Central Committee, but Trotsky declined the position. During December 1922 and January 1923 Lenin dictated a Postscript, "
Lenin's Testament", in which he discussed the personal qualities of his comrades, particularly Trotsky and Stalin. Here, he recommended that Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary, deeming him inappropriate for the position. Instead he presented Trotsky as the best suited person for the position, describing him as "the most capable man in the present Central Committee"; he highlighted Trotsky's superior intellect but at the same time criticized his self-assurance and inclination toward excess administration. According to Stalin’s secretary,
Boris Bazhanov, Lenin “in general leaned towards a
collegial leadership, with Trotsky in the first position”. Concerned at the survival of the Tsarist bureaucratic system in Soviet Russia, during this period he dictated a criticism of the bureaucratic nature of the
Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, calling for the recruitment of new, working-class staff as an antidote to this problem. In another article, "On Co-operation", he emphasized the need for the state to enhance literacy and numeracy in Russia and to encourage punctuality and conscientiousness within the populace, as well as calling for the peasants to join co-operatives. In Lenin's absence, Stalin – by now the General Secretary of the Communist Party – had begun consolidating his power by appointing his supporters to prominent positions, with Lenin being almost unique in recognising that Stalin was likely to dominate the party in future. Publicly, Stalin sought to cultivate an image of himself as Lenin's closest intimate, and his deserving successor as Soviet leader, while the other senior Bolsheviks also circled for positions of power. In December 1922, as Lenin's health deteriorated, Stalin took responsibility for his regimen, and was tasked by the Politburo with controlling who had access to him. Lenin was however becoming increasingly critical of Stalin; while Lenin was insisting that the state should retain its monopoly on international trade during the summer of 1922, Stalin was leading a number of other Bolsheviks in unsuccessfully opposing this. There were personal arguments between the two as well; Stalin had upset Krupskaya by shouting at her during a phone conversation, which in turn greatly angered Lenin, who sent Stalin a letter expressing his annoyance. However, the most significant political division between the two emerged during the
Georgian Affair. Stalin had suggested that Georgia, as well as other neighbouring countries like Azerbaijan and Armenia, should be merged into the Russian state, despite the protestations of their national governments. Lenin saw this as an expression of
Great Russian ethnic chauvinism on behalf of Stalin and his supporters, instead calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union, which he suggested by called the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. Stalin ultimately relented to this proposal, although changed the name of the newly proposed state to the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which Lenin agreed to. Lenin sent Trotsky to speak on his behalf at a Central Committee plenum in December, where the plans for the USSR were sanctioned; these plans were then ratified on 30 December by the Congress of Soviets, resulting in the formation of the Soviet Union. In March, Lenin suffered a third stroke and lost his ability to speak; that month, he experienced partial paralysis on his right side and began exhibiting
sensory aphasia. By May, he appeared to be making a slow recovery, as he began to regain his mobility, speech, and writing skills. On 18 October 1923, he made a final visit to Moscow and the Kremlin. In this final period of his life, Lenin was visited by Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, with the latter visiting him at his Gorki dacha on the day of his death. Lenin died at his Gorki home on 21 January 1924, having fallen into a
coma earlier in the day. His official cause of death was recorded as an "incurable disease of the blood vessels".
Funeral The Soviet government publicly announced Lenin's death the following day, with head of State
Mikhail Kalinin tearfully reading an official statement to delegates of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets at 11am, the same time that a team of physicians began a postmortem of the body. On 23 January, mourners from the Communist Party Central Committee, the Moscow party organisation, the trade unions and the soviets began to assemble at his house, with the body being removed from his home at about 10am the following day, being carried aloft in a red coffin by Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin, Bukharin, Bubhov and Krasin. Transported by train to Moscow, mourners gathered at every station along the way, and upon arriving in the city, a funerary procession carried the coffin for five miles to the
House of Trade Unions, where the body lay in state. Over the next three days, around a million mourners from across the Soviet Union came to see the body, many queuing for hours in the freezing conditions, with the events being filmed by the government. On Saturday 26 January, the eleventh All-Union Congress of Soviets met to pay respects to the deceased leader, with speeches being made by Kalinin, Zinoviev and Stalin, but notably not Trotsky, who had been convalescing in the Caucasus. Lenin's funeral took place the following day, when his body was carried to Red Square, accompanied by martial music, where assembled crowds listened to a series of speeches before the corpse was carried into a vault, followed by the singing of the revolutionary hymn, "You fell in sacrifice." Despite the freezing temperatures, tens of thousands attended the funeral. ==References==