Lenin's widow opposed embalming him and gave the party his letter asking it to remove Stalin; the party put the body on display and kept the letter from the congress floor

Between 23 December 1922 and 4 January 1923 Vladimir Lenin, disabled by strokes, dictated letters to the next party congress that became known as his testament. In the addition of 4 January 1923 he wrote that "Stalin is too rude" for the post of General Secretary and suggested the comrades think about "removing Stalin from that post." His wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, kept the document under lock and key while he might recover. Lenin died on 21 January 1924. Telegrams asked that his body not be buried, and a wooden mausoleum designed by Alexei Shchusev went up on Red Square within days. Krupskaya and Lenin's brother Dmitry Ulyanov opposed embalming. In late March 1924 Boris Zbarsky and Vladimir Vorobyov began embalming the body, work that took about four months. Krupskaya gave the testament to the Central Committee for the 13th Party Congress in May 1924. The leadership voted, over her objections, that it be read only to each delegation separately, with no notes taken and no mention in the plenary sessions. Stalin kept his post. Trotsky later wrote that hundreds of his supporters were arrested and exiled for copying it. The Soviet Union first published the text in 1956. In 2016 the federal budget paid 13,081,500 rubles to preserve the body. In 2018 a regional deputy proposed burying Lenin and replacing him with a replica, and a communist party official called for the deputy's prosecution. The body was still in the mausoleum in 2026^†.