Lenin s Testament

Lenin's Testament is the name given to a document written by Vladimir Lenin in the last weeks of 1922 and first weeks of 1923, and which was the last document Lenin ever wrote. He wanted it to be published in Pravda and read out at the Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to be held in April 1923. The dying Lenin had been afflicted by a series of strokes and was confined to his home on doctor's orders. He died weeks before the congress.

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 most significant aspect of the Testament was Lenin's criticism of Stalin - not just of his actions on the nationality question, but of his leadership generally. Specifically, Lenin wrote:

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.

Lenin also criticized other Politburo members. He said Trotsky's initial siding with the Mensheviks instead of the Bolsheviks was "no accident", nor was Zinoviev and Kamenev's resistance to the October Revolution. He also criticized other Politburo members by name in addition to his general political suggestions.

The Testament was not published by the Politburo. Critics of Stalin maintain that this was done so that Stalin could consolidate his position in the Politburo.

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