In December 1922 and January 1923, Vladimir Lenin, gravely ill and increasingly alarmed at the character and direction of the Soviet state, dictated a series of notes to his secretaries that have since become known as his Testament. In it, he assessed the leading figures of the Communist Party, proposed organisational reforms, and demanded the removal of Joseph Stalin from the post of General Secretary. The document was suppressed at Stalin’s insistence following Lenin’s death in January 1924.
In this pamphlet, Leon Trotsky exposes the suppression of Lenin’s Testament as a political crime of the first order, a deliberate falsification of history by the emerging Stalinist bureaucracy. Written against the backdrop of his own intensifying persecution, Trotsky reconstructs the circumstances of the Testament’s composition, demonstrates the conscious effort to bury its conclusions, and shows how the bureaucratic apparatus used the suppression to consolidate power against the working class and against the programme of international socialist revolution.
This work illuminates one of the earliest and most revealing episodes in the Stalinist degeneration, the moment when the emerging bureaucratic faction demonstrated its willingness to falsify the political record of Lenin himself in order to protect its position. It is indispensable for understanding the evolution of the Soviet Union.
43 pages