1923, The last photo ever taken of Vladimir Lenin, who by this photo had three strokes and was totally mute
Born into a middle-class, well-educated family in Simbirsk, Russia on April 22, 1870, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov rose from a communist revolutionary to the head of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution of 1917. His bloody coup brought an end to the Romanov dynasty and centuries of imperial rule in Russia.
After leading the Red Army to victory in Russia’s civl war, Lenin helped draft a treaty between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Transcaucasus (now Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) to form the Union of Soviet Republics, or the USSR. Although by that time his health wa sin serious decline. Between 1922 and his death in 1924 he suffered a series debilitating strokes that hindered his thinking and made it nearly impossible for him to speak.
Even though he was still considered to be at the top of the hierarchy in the USSR, Lenin was in hiding because of his condition, something that gave Joseph Stalin a chance to move in and take power. When Lenin passed away in 1924, he was only 53 years old.
