Two eminent German professors – a physician, Georg Klemperer, and a general surgeon, Julius Borchardt – were summoned to Moscow. Both thought the headaches were caused by lead poisoning from the bullets still inside his body after the assassination attempt. The Russian doctors who had been treating him regularly had major doubts about the diagnosis: Lenin had been suffering from bad headaches for some years before he had been shot and there was no evidence that the bullets were causing any bother. But Lenin and the Commissar for Health, Nikolai Semashko, a practising doctor before the Revolution, argued there was no point bringing the German professors to Russia at considerable expense and then ignoring their advice. It was decided that the bullet in his neck could easily be removed with fairly minor surgery under a local anaesthetic; but the other was lodged deep within Lenin’s left shoulder and demanded a tricky and potentially dangerous operation. ‘Oh well, let’s get rid of the one so people don’t pester me and worry,’ said Lenin.

Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, New York, 2017, p. 488