MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · January 21 · 1924
ON THIS DAY · 21 JANUARY 1924
Lenin dies at Gorki
21 Jan 1924 — Silenced by strokes, Lenin dies at 53, his “Testament” warning against Stalin unheeded. Petrograd becomes Leningrad; the succession struggle he feared is already under way.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
Look at the settled map. The red has flooded back out almost to the old imperial frontiers, and on 30 December 1922 it acquired a name: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, founded at Moscow as a federation of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia — nationality in the form, the Party in the content. The last foreign troops had left Vladivostok in October. The empire had been destroyed and rebuilt on the same ground under a new flag, by a party that had promised peace, land and bread and delivered civil war, requisition and famine — and yet had won, and would now rule for seven decades.
From Chapter 12 — What Had Been Made of The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924 (JAN 1924).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — The civil war forged the state. The USSR of 1924 was the child of its war, not of 1917’s hopes. Centralization, one-party rule, the security police, the militarized economy and the…
- The turn — Lenin dies at Gorki, 21 January 1924. The revolution’s founder died at fifty-three, his final warnings unheeded and his succession unsettled. Lenin’s death matters less for the man than…
- What it changed — Stalin’s rise. The man who held the dull administrative offices — General Secretary above all — controlled who joined the Party, who was promoted, who was posted…
Then ask the room: Was the Soviet outcome — a one-party dictatorship — the inevitable result of 1917, or a contingent product of the civil war and its aftermath? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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