The revolutionary Vladimir Lenin died at only 53 years old. But his death was a long time coming. He had lived with increasingly bad health for a while, including insomnia, increasing sensitivity to sound, and a series of strokes that left him progressively paralyzed. He considered suicide to escape, but no one would provide him with poison.
At the time, nobody knew what was wrong with him.
First Russian doctors suspected mental exhaustion. Then lead poisoning or metal oxidation, from bullet wounds he had received ten years earlier. Finally, they settled on syphilis because at that time everyone had syphilis. It was only after Lenin died in 1924, and they performed an autopsy that the true, horrifying cause of death was discovered. Vladimir Lenin’s brain had been slowly turning into stone.
The technical name for his condition was cerebrovascular atherosclerosis. It happens because calcium deposits built up in his cerebral arteries, to the point they became nearly solid, and blocked off nutrients to much of his brain. When the morticians tapped the affected areas with tweezers, they made a sound like stone. Unfortunately, cerebrovascular atherosclerosis is nearly untreatable even today.
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