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Lenin died on 21 January 1924. Stalin was given the honour of organizing his funeral. Upon Lenin's death, Stalin was officially hailed as his successor as the leader of the ruling Communist Party and of the Soviet Union itself. Against Lenin's wishes, he was given a lavish funeral and his body was embalmed and put on display.
The denial of the existence of Lenin's testament remained one of the cornerstones of historiography in the Soviet Union until Stalin's death on March 5, 1953. After Nikita Khrushchev 's On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences , at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party , in 1956, the document was finally published officially by the ...
Robert Service notes that "institutionally and ideologically Lenin laid the foundations for a Stalin ... but the passage from Leninism to the worse terrors of Stalinism was not smooth and inevitable." [47] Historian and Stalin biographer Edvard Radzinsky believes that Stalin was a genuine follower of Lenin, exactly as he claimed himself. [48]
Although Stalin did not share Lenin's belief that Europe's proletariat were on the verge of revolution, he acknowledged that Soviet Russia remained vulnerable. [154] In February 1920, he was appointed to head the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate (Rabkrin); [155] that same month he was also transferred to the Caucasian Front. [156]
In particular, Trotskyists often claimed and still claim that socialism in one country opposes both the basic tenets of Marxism and Lenin's particular beliefs [12] that the final success of socialism in one country depends upon the revolution's degree of success in proletarian revolutions in the more advanced countries of Western Europe. [13]
During the embalming process, Lenin's brain had been removed; in 1925, an institute was established to dissect it, revealing that Lenin had had severe sclerosis. [15] According to Stalin's secretary, Boris Bazhanov, Stalin was jubilant over Lenin's death while “publicly putting on the mask of grief”.
Time magazine named Lenin one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, [521] and one of their top 25 political icons of all time. [ 522 ] In the Western world, biographers began writing about Lenin soon after his death; some such as Christopher Hill were sympathetic to him, and others such as Richard Pipes and Robert Gellately ...
The Soviet press maintained that Stalin had been Lenin's constant companion while the latter was alive, and that as such, Stalin closely followed Lenin's teachings and could continue the Bolshevik legacy after Lenin's death. [19] Stalin fiercely defended the correctness of Lenin's views in public, and in doing so Stalin implied that, as a ...