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BEERSHEBA, Israel (Reuters) - There were whispers in the Kremlin and salons of Europe for decades but it was never more than idle gossip until a team of Israeli doctors announced that they had solved an 80-year-old medical mystery. The posthumous diagnosis by two psychiatrists and a neurologist recently published in the European Journal of Neurology was that the great Russian revolutionary and Soviet icon Vladimir Lenin died an agonizing death from syphilis. 'It's an amazing story, the degeneration of Lenin's mental and neurological state,' said psychiatrist Dr Eliezer Witztum. The doctors' diagnosis of crippling neurosyphilis that caused massive brain damage and dementia in Lenin in the last two years of his life is more than a historical curiosity that sullies the image of the founder of the Soviet Union. The disease and a decades-long cover-up by the Soviet authorities, who turned Lenin into the deity of their fledgling state, highlights the danger of hiding the mental health of leaders who hold the fate of millions in their hands, the doctors said. 'His (Lenin's) private business affected the lives of millions because of his illness, his inability to lead the country at a crucial time,' said Yoram Finkelstein, head of diagnostic neurology at Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek hospital. 'It was a time of chaos and there was a power vacuum which was unfortunately filled by Stalin.' The retrospective diagnosis was reached using documents released after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union -- Lenin's medical chart, autopsy results and memoirs by physicians who treated Lenin and were sworn to silence after his death in 1924. 'The symptoms are compatible with syphilis as are the mental changes which preceded the overt disease,' said Finkelstein.
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