A Farewell to Lenin: Stalin’s Litany of Vows

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A Farewell to Lenin: Stalin’s Litany of Vows

January 22, 2014 by Vladimir Tismaneanu

Ninety years ago, on January 21, 1924, the founder of the Bolshevik party and of the Soviet Union, the undisputed coryphaeus of world communism, passed away. Lenin’s last year was nothing but an endless agony. Isolated in a mansion turned into a sanatorium of sorts, a former artistocratic residence located outside Moscow, Lenin was in fact a prisoner of information strictly filtered by the Bolshevik leadership’s emissary, the Politburo member and the head of the party’s department of cadres, the Georgian-born revolutionary Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known as Stalin, and also, for his close friends, as Koba. http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/a-farewell-to-lenin-stalins-litany-of-vows/