Death and state funeral of Vladimir Lenin

• 1. Introduction

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  At 18:50 on Monday, the 21st of January 1924, Vladimir Lenin died at Gorki, a small estate outside Moscow. He was 53 years old and had fallen into a coma before the end came. Soviet authorities recorded the cause of death as an incurable disease of the blood vessels. A commission of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party was charged with organising a state funeral. What followed was shaped not only by grief but by calculation and rivalry. Those decisions would take years to come into full view.

• 2. The Public Ceremony

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  On the 23rd of January, Lenin's coffin left Gorki by train and arrived in Moscow. It was installed at the Hall of Columns in the House of the Unions, where it lay in state for three days. On the 27th of January, to the sound of martial music, the body was carried out to Red Square.

  Tens of thousands had gathered despite freezing temperatures. Mikhail Kalinin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Joseph Stalin each delivered speeches before the assembled crowd. By evening, the coffin was placed inside a temporary wooden mausoleum beside the Kremlin Wall. That first structure would later give way to the permanent Lenin's Mausoleum.

• 3. The Absent Rivals

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  One name was conspicuously missing from that day's list of speakers: Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had been convalescing in the Caucasus and would later claim he was given the wrong date for the funeral.

  Boris Bazhanov, who served as Stalin's personal secretary, gave that claim its clearest confirmation. Bazhanov stated that Stalin "sent a telegram to Trotsky, who was in the Caucasus undergoing medical treatment, giving a false date for Lenin's funeral." French historian Pierre Broue went further. He cited correspondence from the Moscow archives between Stalin and Nestor Lakoba, the secretary of the Abkhazian party. Those documents pointed to Stalin's deliberate effort to keep Trotsky in Sukhumi.

  Alexei Rykov was also absent that day. He had traveled to Italy with his wife and suffered from influenza there. Trotsky would later offer his own tribute to Lenin, publishing a short book simply titled "Lenin" in 1925.

• 4. The Decision to Preserve

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  Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's widow, formally objected to what came next. Against her protests, the Soviet leadership ordered Lenin's body embalmed for permanent public display in the Red Square mausoleum.

  During the embalming process, Lenin's brain was removed. In 1925, an institute was established specifically to study and dissect it. The examination found that Lenin had suffered from severe sclerosis.

  A formal order from the commander of the Moscow Garrison established a guard of honour at the mausoleum. This post became known colloquially as the "Number One Sentry," a title it carried for nearly seven decades.

• 5. Stalin's Private Face

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  Boris Bazhanov described Stalin's inner state in stark terms. According to Bazhanov, Stalin was jubilant over Lenin's death while "publicly putting on the mask of grief."

  Old Bolshevik Grigory Sokolnikov also described Stalin's private manner. Sokolnikov reported Stalin making disparaging remarks about Lenin's death, with the words that he "couldn't die like a real leader!"

• 6. A Century of Questions

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  After the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, the guard of honour at the mausoleum was formally disbanded. In 2018, Vladimir Petrov, a Russian MP, proposed that Lenin's body be buried in 2024, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of his death. His argument was direct: maintaining the remains in the mausoleum was costing the state too much money. Petrov also floated replacing the body with a wax or rubber model. The proposal came to nothing. As 2024 arrived, the wax or rubber replacement Petrov had suggested still had not materialized. The body embalmed against Krupskaya's wishes in January 1924 remained exactly where it had been placed.