Premium
Trotskii and Lenin's Funeral, 27 January 1924: A Brief Note
Author(s) -
THATCHER IAN D.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.12
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1468-229X
pISSN - 0018-2648
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-229x.2009.00451.x
Subject(s) - false accusation , limelight , history , power (physics) , law , communism , simple (philosophy) , political science , philosophy , politics , epistemology , engineering , physics , electrical engineering , quantum mechanics
Leon Trotskii was fond of recalling Lenin's assessment of Stalin as a ‘cook making only peppery dishes’. 1 Out of the many instances in which Trotskii presented Stalin as a sly manipulator, one of the most famous is when Stalin supposedly lied to Trotskii about the date of Lenin's funeral, in this way keeping his rival for power out of the limelight as Stalin posed as Lenin's nearest and dearest mourner. It is a simple and appealing way of making an accusation of mendacious cunning stick, for the first questions that seem to be asked of any funeral are ‘how was the turnout?,’‘who attended?’ This brief note seeks to clarify what Trotskii claimed about his absence from Lenin's funeral and in which texts, for there are different versions. It will also chart how historians have reported this incident. Finally, it will assess how far archival materials that became accessible after communism's collapse can shed new light.