On This Day: Lenin dies six years after leading world’s first successful communist revolution

JANUARY 21, 1924: Soviet premier Vladimir Lenin died from a brain haemorrhage on this day in 1924 – just over six years after leading the world’s first successful communist revolution.

The death of the 53-year-old, whose embalmed body remains on public display in Moscow, triggered an unprecedented wave of grief in the new workers’ state.

A million people filed past his open coffin to pay their last respects as he lay in state in the House of Trade Unions for four days.

A British Pathé newsreel shows a similar number of mourners braving the bitter cold to join the funeral procession as Lenin body was taken to Red Square.

Few among them thought any other Bolshevik could match the great leader, who became a socialist despite his privileged birth as the son of a maths professor.

Even Winston Churchill, who deeply despised communism, believed Lenin’s talents were unique.

'He alone could have found the way back to the causeway,' the future British Prime Minister remarked after the Soviet Union founder’s death.

'The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth... their next worst his death.'

Lenin, who was influenced by Karl Marx’s writings and inspired by his brother’s execution for plotting to kill the Tsar, had created his own brand of communism.

The brooding intellect dismissed claims that Russia was not ready for revolution since its industrial working classes were still outnumbered by peasants.

He proposed a vanguard party – the most politically conscious proletariat – to encourage other workers to join them and then seize power from the ruling class.

He was able to practise this theory when Tsar Nicholas II – the cousin of Britain’s King George V – was deposed in the liberal February Revolution in 1917.

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It permitted democracy for the first time in Russia and Lenin, who had been exiled, was able to return to preach to the public and form a mass movement.

The Bolsheviks – a radical division of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party – seized power themselves in the October Revolution eight months later.

In the aftermath the Tsar and his family were all killed, a bitter civil war was fought and a secret police and labour camps were set up to crack down on opposition.

But Lenin, who also ended the First World War fighting with Germany by suing for peace, had long been plagued by ill health.

He suffered two strokes in the space of a year – with the one in 1923 – leaving him mute and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics essentially rudderless.

It enabled his disciples to vie for power – with the main rivalry between his deputy Leon Trotsky and Communist Party General Secretary Josef Stalin.

Shortly before his death, the great leader dictated his last testament that called for 'intolerable' Stalin to be removed from his post.

But the iron-willed Georgian was able to suppress this information and worked to deify Lenin while discrediting his rivals.

By 1930, Stalin stood alone at the head of the Soviet state – and took it in a new direction.

He scrapped Lenin’s 'state capitalism', which had tolerated some private enterprise to build the economy, and introduced central planning.

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But he maintained and even beefed up his predecessor’s machinery of terror – killing more than nine million people either in purges or by starvation.

A further 23million Soviets died under Stalin during the Second World War and later leaders of the USSR, which dissolved in 1993, denounced him.

Lenin, on the other hand, remained a hero and even now – decades after the fall of communism in Russia – his preserved body his viewed by two million people a year.