What Vogt saw in Lenin’s brain
Vladimir Lenin died on January 21, 1924, at the age of 54. His body was embalmed and placed in the Mausoleum in Red Square, and his brain was stored in formaldehyde for two years before being transported for study.
The main investigator of the brain of the leader of the proletariat was the German neurologist Oskar Vogt, who was specially invited to the USSR. By specialty Vogt was a morphologist; examined the internal structures of the brain and compared samples. Therefore, after Lenin’s death, it was he who was invited to describe, through histological examination, the features of the brain of the great leader of the proletariat. This type of research involves examining tissue samples under a microscope and is widely used in modern medicine, helping to make an accurate diagnosis for a number of diseases.
The work began in 1926 – then Vogt was allowed to open a small laboratory, which later evolved into the Moscow Brain Institute. From 1926 to 1930 Vogt supervised his work. He conducted a comprehensive analysis of Lenin’s brain, examining 30,953 sections. 153 pages of the report from this study have survived.
In it, Vogt describes Lenin’s work in various regions of his cerebral cortex, III. provided evidence that layer pyramidal neurons (the main excitatory neurons of the mammalian brain) are extraordinarily large and numerous. According to him, these can probably be considered as the structural basis for rich associative connections between different areas of the cortex.
As a neurophysiologist, head of the laboratory of neurophysiology and neural interfaces at the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University, he told socialbites.ca. Lomonosov Alexander Kaplan, Vogt was a good anatomist, but he could not draw conclusions about what functions this or that brain structure performs.
“Anatomically, we now know 95% of what is known about how the brain works. In Vogt’s time, we knew 5%. Nowadays, you can place a person in a 7 Tesla MRI and see all the structures inside, including individual cells. It is clear that at that time Vogt could only guess which brain structures were responsible for what. And he guessed wrong because he believed that pyramidal neurons were somehow connected to associations. It is now known that pyramidal neurons are motor output neurons that carry information from the cerebral cortex to the muscles. They were not designed to connect different parts of the cortex necessary for associations, Kaplan noted.
Other conclusions from Vogt’s report included information About other features of Lenin’s “brilliant” brain. He himself noted: “The complexity of the relief and configuration of the gyri, especially in the frontal lobe, a large percentage of the cortex in the depth of the sulcus and, as a result, an increase in the total size of the cerebral cortex, also in relation to the rest of the brain (role in the functions of assessing the situation, predicting and generalizing particularly large size of the frontal lobe.”
According to neurophysiologist Kaplan, the large percentage of cortex deep in the sulcus is explained by the small size of Lenin’s skull. But this does not give the right to draw conclusions about his mental abilities – this is just a feature of the structure of the skull and brain.
“Lenin’s brain is smaller than the average human brain, weighing 1340 grams. It has more “wrinkles” because it has to fit into a relatively small skull. Therefore, Vogt saw these grooves and it turned out that the percentage of bark contained within the grooves was large. But that doesn’t mean anything. Let me remind you that Einstein had an even smaller brain, weighing 1230 grams,” explains Kaplan.
Vogt’s collapse
Vogt writes in his report that the above-mentioned features were revealed mainly by examining the right hemisphere of the brain, since the left hemisphere was severely damaged. But that didn’t stop Vogt assumestructural features can explain the genius of Lenin’s personality. He called Ilyich “an athlete of associative thought” (“Assoziationsathlet”).
However, some colleagues thought Vogt’s conclusion was exaggerated. Moreover, there were reports in the scientific community that Vogt himself admitted that he “exaggerated his research findings.”
“Confronted with Lenin’s greatly reduced brain, Vogt was unable to detect any specific areas that would indicate extraordinary mental abilities. But it still declared Lenin a cognitive “athlete” with an increased ability to make connections in the brain due to the unusual density of a particular type of cells in the upper layers of his cortex,” one of the articles reads. published in nature.
The Soviet government also began to become disillusioned with Vogt. Firstly, the German scientist completely stopped appearing in Moscow since 1928. Secondly, Vogt took one of Lenin’s brain slices to Germany and constantly showed it at conferences. In January 1932, AI Stetsky, head of the cultural and propaganda department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks reported To Stalin:
“Professor Vocht (old spelling of the surname Vogt),” Stetsky wrote, “based on the anatomical analysis of Lenin’s brain, put forward a theory of mechanical genius: the existence of a large number and a strange arrangement of pyramidal cells. In the German Encyclopedia of Mental Diseases (Handbuch) der Geister Kranungien) one of the “quantities” Prof. Spielmeyer – made claims It is claimed that such large pyramidal cells are also present in retarded people.. In connection with this, a number of malicious notes about Comrade were published in the bourgeois press. Lenin. Prof. Focht does not oppose these notes or Prof. Spielmeier.”
In Moscow, scientists began to write notes about Vogt’s inadequacy with demands that he be replaced by Soviet researchers who were not inferior in knowledge to their own. socialbites.ca is publishing one of these documents for the first time. The document was provided to the editors by physician-researcher Valery Novoselov.
According to the researcher, this A note was written by Lamkin, military commissar of the Military Academy of the Red Army, to Andrei Bubnov, head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army, on January 11, 1928.. Judging by the handwritten note in the margin, the note “To Stalin” must have been shown to him. Novoselov believes that the note was written by Bubnov, to whom Stalin was obliged to provide any information on this matter.
The document says:
In connection with the articles published in the press popularizing FOHTA’s work on LENIN’s brain, heated evaluations arose among the scientific workers of the Academy entrusted to me. Without going into the essence and evaluations of these decisions, I consider it my party duty to draw your attention to the following issues:
- The FOCHT school of study of the brain has been subject to some criticism, comparing it with modern methods of studying the brain, which are supposed to be more scientifically valuable.
- FOHTA’s studies published in the press do not satisfy the curiosity of our neurologists, allegedly because they are not sufficiently scientifically proven and, most importantly, not comprehensively considered.
- There are special conversations about why we should not use our /USSR/ scientists in brain research, supposedly in terms of their knowledge they are no longer inferior to the Faculty of Chemical Technology.
brain with cords inside
So what did doctors see when they removed Lenin’s brain after his death, which was affected by neurosyphilis and destroyed by bleeding in the quadrigeminal region (the area of the brain that contains the subcortical vision and hearing centers)? Was the brain contagious?
According to doctor-researcher Valery Novoselov, author of the book “The Death of Lenin”. medical detective” After death, the brain posed a serious danger of transmitting syphilis to others.
“The source of the disease – in this case the pale spirochete – was not completely destroyed as the process continued, so there was a very high probability that this biological material was infectious. If I were to open the corpse of such a patient, of course I would be very careful,” explains Novoselov.
Externally, Lenin’s brain was also special, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko, who was present at the autopsy, describes it as follows: “It turned out that individual branches of the arteries feeding especially important centers of movement and speech in the left hemisphere were very changed. These are laces, not tubes. The walls got thicker.”
The presence of cords is explained by the fact that vascular occlusion in neurosyphilis is much greater than in atherosclerosis and causes this effect.
“The inflammatory process caused the vessels to become cords. So, during the autopsy, doctors saw a destroyed brain with cords inside,” says Novoselov.
Currently, Lenin’s brain is located in the Laboratory of Cytoarchitectonics and Brain Evolution at the same Brain Institute, which is now part of the Scientific Center for Neurology, under the leadership of Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Irina Bogolepova.