For decades it was no more than a whispered rumour in the corridors of Soviet medicine but now a team of doctors claim to have proved that Lenin, communism's greatest icon, died of syphilis. Israeli doctors, writing in the European Journal of Neurology, say they used medical records pieced together from archives released after the fall of communism to reconstruct the first Soviet leader's illness and death. The team says Lenin's syphilis caused brain damage and later dementia in the last two years of his life. It came at a crucial time for the Soviet Union, when Stalin was plotting...