'Lenin and Stalin Speaking to Red Guards in the Smolny, 1917', (1939). Russian communist revolutionaries Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924) and Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) speaking to volunteer Red Guards in Saint Petersburg. Stalin became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party in 1922, and after the death of Lenin in 1924, effectively became ruler of the Soviet Union. From Stalin on Lenin. [Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1939]