Lessons

The story of Lenin's brain continues to fascinate. It has been the subject of a novel,2 and scientific papers about Vogt and his work on Lenin's brain continue to be published in scientific journals to the present day. As told above, the story extracted from the official Soviet archives raises a number of questions and puzzles.

The first of these is why Stalin appeared to be paving the way for Vogt's removal from the project. Vogt, in his public lectures and writings, represented the view that Lenin's brain showed distinct anatomic signs of genius. Apparently, this is what he told a "small group of Soviet leaders” in 1929. Why then did he represent a danger to the Soviet side? Vogt operated in the area of international science, where debate and counter-hypotheses are welcomed, not in the controlled environment of Soviet science. Vogt's findings of Lenin's genius could be publicly challenged and even turned on their head, such as the counter-argument that Lenin's "giant pyramidal cells” could also be indicators of mental retardation. In "Soviet” science there were no counter-arguments, especially when it was the party line that Lenin was a genius.

The second puzzle is why the Central Committee's files on Lenin's brain were included by Russian archivists in the archival collection (Fond 89) "The Communist Party on Trial.” This archival collection was created as evidence for prosecutors in the trial of the Communist Party, which took place early in the Yeltsin regime (and never addressed the key issue of past terror). The inclusion of these files, therefore, meant that they somehow provide evidence of misdeeds or crimes. But what was the crime or misdeed in this case?

The "crime” that the Lenin brain file discloses was the extreme elitism of the Soviet regime. Although the Soviet Union was a "worker-peasant state,” workers and peasants were not to be in charge; the state was to be run on their behalf by a Stalin or a Politburo. Workers and peasants were to be controlled by wise and even genial Bolsheviks who knew what was good for the masses. In their own conversations, the Bolsheviks spoke of peasants and workers with derision. In a Politburo meeting of the mid-i92os, peasants were described as so greedy they would grab a small bit of land even if it belonged to Saint Peter. Workers were sullen, unwilling to work, and unreliable. Lenin, until the Bolshevik revolution, had never met a worker or been in a factory. Without this enlightened elite to manage these unruly masses, there would never be a peasant-worker paradise.

By this logic, the creators of this dictatorship of the proletariat must themselves be head and shoulders above the rest. This thought was expressed by Leon Trotsky reporting on Lenin's worsening physical condition: "Lenin was a genius, a genius is born once in a century, and the history of the world knows only two geniuses as leaders of the working class: Marx and Lenin. No genius can be created even by the decree of the strongest and most disciplined party, but the party can try as far as it is possible to make up for the genius as long as he is missing, by doubling its collective exertions.” 3

Vogt's comparison of Lenin's brain with those of "ordinary people” and even criminals would therefore be the ultimate sacrilege. More politically correct Soviet scientists approached this sensitive topic with much greater delicacy by comparing Lenin's brain with those of leading figures of the sciences and arts, but even here they had to obtain Trotsky's result—to demonstrate that Lenin's brain was superior even to prominent scientists and literary figures.

The final puzzle is why, after waiting eleven years for the result, Stalin failed to publicize Lenin's genius through the controlled Soviet press? One explanation may have been that by 1936, at the very time when Stalin was executing his most prominent political rivals, he did not want to remind the party of a "genius” Lenin, who might have treated his enemies more humanely. It may also be that the habit of secrecy was too hard to break. All the documents in the file from 1925 to 1936 are labeled "secret” or "top secret.” At no point was there an announcement that Lenin's brain was being studied. To inform the public that Soviet scientists had found that Lenin was a genius was more than the security conscious Soviet leadership was prepared to bear.