For decades it was no more than a whispered rumour in the corridors of Soviet medicine but now a team of doctors claim to have proved that Lenin, communism's greatest icon, died of syphilis.
Israeli doctors, writing in the European Journal of Neurology, say they used medical records pieced together from archives released after the fall of communism to reconstruct the first Soviet leader's illness and death.
The team says Lenin's syphilis caused brain damage and later dementia in the last two years of his life. It came at a crucial time for the Soviet Union, when Stalin was plotting his takeover.
The basis of the disclosures are medical charts, results of a post mortem examination and memoirs from physicians who treated Lenin and were sworn to secrecy after he died in 1924.
Officially, Lenin died of arteriosclerosis, but only eight of 27 doctors who treated him were willing to put their names to the death certificate. Among those who refused to sign were his two personal doctors.
The diagnosis of syphilis was particularly problematic in the 19th and early 20th century as the disease often mimics other brain disorders.
But the discovery that a committee of Soviet doctors prescribed the medicine Salvarsan, an arsenic-based treatment with horribly painful side-effects that is used only to treat syphilis, was a strong indication that his doctors knew the true nature of his disease.
|