We learned this week that, as one of my military correspondents delicately put it, "Lenin was a syphilitic whore-monger who sampled the delights of Paris and died raving mad."
In fact this news item, arriving about a century too late to be acted upon effectively, is not in itself new.
The Soviet Communists went to some length to destroy Lenin's medical records, and kill an unknown number of persons who might be aware of them. Yet as ever happens, they missed some bits, and diary scraps remain from Soviet doctors who treated him, and rather more from doctors who had treated him in Europe. Historians seemed previously hesitant to investigate this "little fact," woven into the background of the great tapestry of mass murder and unspeakable tyranny
Diagnoses of syphilis have previously been made for several other of the great monsters of history, including Lenin's predecessor Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII of England, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler.
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