- For decades it was no more than a whispered rumour in
the corridors of Soviet medicine but now a team of doctors claim to have
proved that Lenin, communism's greatest icon, died of syphilis.
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- Israeli doctors, writing in the European Journal of Neurology,
say they used medical records pieced together from archives released after
the fall of communism to reconstruct the first Soviet leader's illness
and death.
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- The team says Lenin's syphilis caused brain damage and
later dementia in the last two years of his life. It came at a crucial
time for the Soviet Union, when Stalin was plotting his takeover.
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- The basis of the disclosures are medical charts, results
of a post mortem examination and memoirs from physicians who treated Lenin
and were sworn to secrecy after he died in 1924.
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- Officially, Lenin died of arteriosclerosis, but only
eight of 27 doctors who treated him were willing to put their names to
the death certificate. Among those who refused to sign were his two personal
doctors.
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- The diagnosis of syphilis was particularly problematic
in the 19th and early 20th century as the disease often mimics other brain
disorders.
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- But the discovery that a committee of Soviet doctors
prescribed the medicine Salvarsan, an arsenic-based treatment with horribly
painful side-effects that is used only to treat syphilis, was a strong
indication that his doctors knew the true nature of his disease.
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