Vladimir Lenin: Difference between revisions

The Soviet government publicly announced Lenin's death the following day, with head of State [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kalinin 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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Trade_Unions 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."

Three days after his death, Petrograd was renamed [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg Leningrad] in his honour, so remaining until 1991, when the USSR dissolved, yet the administrative area remains "Leningrad Oblast". In the early 1920s, the Russian [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmism_%28Russian%29 cosmism] movement proved so popular that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Krasin Leonid Krasin] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bogdanov Alexander Bogdanov] proposed to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics cryonically preserve] Lenin for future resurrection, yet, despite buying the requisite equipment, that was not done.Instead, the body of V. I. Lenin was [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embalming embalmed] and permanently exhibited in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Mausoleum Lenin's Mausoleum], in Moscow, on 27 January 1924.

Despite the official diagnosis of death from stroke consequences, the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov reported that Lenin died of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosyphilis neurosyphilis], according to a publication by V. Lerner and colleagues in the ''European Journal of Neurology'' in 2004. The authors also note that "It is possible that future DNA technology applied to Lenin's preserved brain material could ultimately establish or disprove neurosyphilis as the primary cause of Lenin's death."