One brief paragraph terrorized Joseph Stalin. It was the postscript to the document known as Lenin’s Testament. That document has never been authenticated, yet it weighed on Stalin because, even if the text was fake, it was plausible that it represented Lenin’s thought: “Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in relations among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin.” Stalin didn’t fear men, but he never stopped dreading those words, because Lenin’s opinion vested him with authority.
Stephen Kotkin, the director of Russian studies at Princeton, sets himself apart from other historians by treating the Testament as a major influence on Stalin. Kotkin devotes only one sentence to the possibility that the Testament could be genuine. He then proposes two likelier interpretations. The first is that Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, created and released the letter because she believed that it represented what Lenin really thought. (The document is supposed to have been dictated between December 1922 and January 1923, at a time when a series of strokes had rendered Lenin mostly incoherent.) The second is that Krupskaya invented the Testament to diminish Stalin’s stature within the party and dilute his power.
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