Stalin’s Soviet Union · CHAPTER 1 ·
Stalin’s rise to power
Chapter 1 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953: “The Succession”
When Lenin died in January 1924, Stalin was the rival others feared least, yet as General Secretary he controlled party appointments. Zinoviev and Kamenev shielded him from Lenin’s Testament because they needed him against Trotsky, who was exiled to Alma-Ata in January 1928; by 1929 Stalin led without rivals.
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The map above is the world of The Soviet Union, January 1928 — Trotsky exiled; Stalin’s Siberian tour begins.
Part of IB History: The Soviet Union under Stalin →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The central question of this whole atlas is how one man, Joseph Stalin, came to hold more power over more people than any ruler of Russia before him. It also asks how he kept that power for a quarter of a century, and what it cost the people who lived under it. The answer begins with a puzzle, because when Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, died in January 1924, Stalin was the leader his rivals feared least. The country was ruled by the Communist Party, called the Bolsheviks until 1918, which allowed no rival parties and controlled the government much as a parent company controls a subsidiary. Leon Trotsky had built the Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, and Nikolai Bukharin was the party’s favourite thinker, while Stalin held a job that looked like paperwork. As General Secretary he ran the Secretariat, the office that appointed the party’s local secretaries, much as a chief of staff controls who is hired and promoted. Those secretaries chose the delegates to party congresses, the national gatherings that elected the leadership, so the man who appointed them could shape the votes that decided the succession.
Stalin won by allying with one group against the next and letting the party machine do the counting. He joined Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in a ruling trio against Trotsky, then turned on both partners in 1925 and defeated all three when they united in 1926–27. He also offered a hopeful slogan, “socialism in one country”, which promised that the Soviet Union could build a new society without waiting for revolution abroad. In January 1928 the police put Trotsky on a train to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, the first blue arrow on the map. That month Stalin went to Siberia to seize grain from peasants, which set him against Bukharin and the party’s Right, the faction that wanted to keep the New Economic Policy (NEP), Lenin’s 1921 compromise that let peasants sell grain on a free market. By 1929, when the second arrow carried Trotsky to Turkey, no rival was left. The least-feared man had won because the others argued about ideas while he controlled the people who would vote on them.
The full story
Stalin’s rise depended first on surviving a warning from Lenin himself, and the way the leaders handled it shows how the party already worked. In December 1922 and January 1923, partly paralysed by strokes, Lenin dictated notes later called his Testament. He wrote that Stalin had concentrated “unlimited authority” in his hands, and in a postscript of 4 January 1923 he called him “too rude” and proposed removing him as General Secretary, the head of the party’s administrative office, much like a chief of staff. The quarrel behind the postscript was the Georgian Affair, marked on the map at Tiflis, where Stalin and his ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze had bullied Georgian communists into a federation with Armenia and Azerbaijan. When the notes were read to delegation leaders at the Thirteenth Congress, the party’s national gathering, in May 1924, Zinoviev and Kamenev argued that Stalin should stay, because they needed him against Trotsky. The men best placed to stop Stalin chose to shield him, and the text stayed unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1956.
The Secretariat, the office that managed the party’s personnel, mattered because the party was changing underneath its leaders. The “Lenin Enrolment” of 1924 brought in more than 200,000 new members, mostly young workers who owed their careers to the officials who promoted them. Stalin’s apparatus placed reliable secretaries in the provinces, and those secretaries picked the delegates to congresses. This system of appointments, later called the nomenklatura (a list of posts that only the centre could fill), worked like a patronage network, where loyalty is repaid with jobs. Stalin also had the more comforting message: Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” said socialism could survive only if revolution spread to Europe, while “socialism in one country” told a tired party it could build a strong state alone. At the Fourteenth Congress in December 1925 the Leningrad delegation of Zinoviev and Kamenev was overwhelmingly outvoted, and Sergei Kirov was sent to take over their city, which showed that the votes had been assembled before the debate began.
The last stage turned a contest for leadership into a contest over the peasants. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev united as the United Opposition in 1926, but their supporters were sacked and expelled, and in November 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party. On 17 January 1928 agents of the OGPU, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB, carried Trotsky to a train for Alma-Ata, and in February 1929 he was deported to Turkey, as the blue arrows show. By then grain deliveries to the state had collapsed, and on his Siberian tour Stalin seized grain by force, close to what the Left, the faction of Trotsky and Zinoviev, had demanded. Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky wanted to keep the New Economic Policy (NEP), Lenin’s 1921 compromise that let peasants sell their grain on the market. They were branded the “Right deviation” and removed in 1929–30. Stalin defeated the Left by defending NEP and the Right by abandoning it, which shows that he used policy as a weapon, though historians still argue how far he also believed in it.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Reading Lenin’s Testament
Lenin’s Testament damaged almost everyone it named, Stalin included, which explains why the leaders agreed to bury it. Lenin praised Trotsky’s ability but criticised his “excessive self-assurance”, called Bukharin the party’s favourite while doubting that his views were fully Marxist, and reminded readers that Zinoviev and Kamenev had opposed the seizure of power in October 1917. Lenin also proposed enlarging the Central Committee to between fifty and a hundred members to dilute the quarrels at the top. Only the postscript of 4 January 1923 singled out Stalin for removal. Its provenance has become a live debate. Stephen Kotkin argues that the notes were typed, unsigned and handled by Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya and his secretaries, so their authorship cannot be fully proved. Most historians, including Robert Service and Oleg Khlevniuk, accept them as Lenin’s, pointing to the consistent dictation records and to Lenin’s angry letters about the Georgian Affair. Either way, the episode shows the Bolshevik leaders treating Lenin’s words as a weapon, which is how Stalin would later treat Lenin’s legacy as a whole.
Machine politics or real support?
Stalin won both because he controlled the apparatus and because many communists genuinely preferred him, and historians have weighted the two explanations very differently. Trotsky, followed by his biographer Isaac Deutscher, described a bureaucracy that had smothered the revolution, with Stalin as its mediocre representative. The political scientist Robert V. Daniels named the mechanism the “circular flow of power”: the General Secretary appointed regional secretaries, who chose congress delegates, who elected the Central Committee, which confirmed the General Secretary. Social historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick add that the newly promoted workers and officials found Stalin’s blunt, practical style and his promise of progress without foreign revolution attractive, so the machine reflected real preferences as well as manipulated them. Archive-based studies by Kotkin and Khlevniuk portray Stalin as a tireless, well-read Leninist who also excelled at committee work. The strongest answer combines these views, since control of appointments gave Stalin his votes while his message gave the new party a reason to cast them willingly.
The grain crisis that ended NEP
The economic problem that destroyed the Right began with prices, and it explains why the succession struggle ended in a war on the peasants. Under NEP the state bought grain at fixed prices that were kept low to fund industry, while manufactured goods stayed scarce and expensive, so peasants had little reason to sell. In the autumn of 1927 a war scare, fed by Britain’s break in relations in May and the Chinese Nationalists’ massacre of communists in April, coincided with a sharp fall in state grain purchases. Stalin’s answer, tested in Siberia in January–February 1928, was the “Ural-Siberian method”: closing markets, searching farms and prosecuting holders of grain under the criminal code. Bukharin warned that coercion would provoke the peasants and wreck the alliance between workers and peasants on which NEP rested. The historians Moshe Lewin and R. W. Davies show how each emergency seizure reduced the next year’s sowing, so the crisis fed itself and made the leap to collective farms look, to Stalin, like the only exit.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The party had no rules for succession. Lenin led through personal authority, and the party had no office of leader and no procedure for choosing one. Power sat in committees: the Politburo, which made policy, and the Orgburo and Secretariat, which managed people. When Lenin fell ill in 1922, his colleagues ruled collectively and competed in the dark, so whoever controlled the committees could turn a collective leadership into a personal one before anyone noticed the change.
The General Secretary controlled appointments. Stalin became General Secretary in April 1922, a post his colleagues saw as administrative. Through it he oversaw the assignment of thousands of officials and the admission of new members, including the Lenin Enrolment of 1924. Provincial secretaries who owed him their posts sent loyal delegates to congresses, which gave Stalin a reliable majority long before he had a reputation. The job looked dull precisely because its power lay in routine.
His rivals feared Trotsky more than Stalin. Bolsheviks read their revolution through the French one, where the revolution had ended with a general, Napoleon Bonaparte, seizing power. Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army, looked like the obvious Bonaparte, so Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin each allied with Stalin to block him. They mistook a quiet organiser for a safe one, and each discovered too late that the man they had shielded was turning the machine against them in turn.
NEP’s grain problem made policy a weapon. The question of how fast to industrialise, and who should pay for it, divided the party throughout the 1920s. The Left wanted to squeeze the peasants to fund factories; the Right wanted to keep the market and grow slowly. Because the grain crisis of 1927–28 forced a choice, Stalin could adopt whichever position isolated his current opponent, first defending NEP against the Left and then dismantling it against the Right.
THE TURNING POINT
Alma-Ata, January 1928. The train that carried Trotsky to Alma-Ata on 17 January 1928 marks the moment the succession was settled, because the last leader with an independent following was now 3,000 kilometres from Moscow and outside the party. The same month Stalin left for Siberia and began taking grain by force, adopting the method the defeated Left had urged. The two journeys together explain the turn: once Stalin had no rival on the left, he could take over its programme and use it to destroy the Right, and the struggle for Lenin’s succession became a revolution against the peasants.
What it changed
A leader without rivals launched the Great Turn. With Trotsky gone and Bukharin defeated, Stalin could impose forced collectivisation and breakneck industrialisation without a faction able to stop him. The policies of 1929–33 were his choices, made possible by the victory of 1927–29, and the Politburo that approved them was now filled with his allies, such as Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. No one left in the leadership could argue for slower change without being called a “Rightist”, so the succession had settled how fast the country would be changed as well as who would rule it.
Defeated rivals became future defendants. Every leader Stalin beat in the 1920s was later destroyed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in August 1936 after the first Moscow show trial, Bukharin and Rykov in March 1938, and Tomsky shot himself in 1936 before he could be arrested. Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940 by an NKVD agent. The succession struggle supplied the cast of the Great Terror, whose show trials accused the old oppositionists of plotting with foreign powers since the 1920s.
Loyalty replaced debate inside the party. The defeat of open factions ended the party’s tradition of public argument, which the ban on factions in 1921 had already weakened. Opposition now meant expulsion, and later arrest, so officials learned to read the leader’s wishes before he stated them. That habit of anticipating Stalin, like the one Ian Kershaw, writing about Hitler’s Germany, called “working towards the Führer”, made the later cult and the Terror easier to organise.
“Socialism in one country” justified the plans. The slogan that helped Stalin win also defined what came next: if the Soviet Union had to build socialism alone and surrounded by enemies, it had to industrialise at any cost. The Five-Year Plans were presented as the practical form of the idea, with defence as their deepest purpose, and every sacrifice they demanded could be justified by the danger of a war the country might have to fight alone.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did Stalin win the succession mainly through his own skill, or because his rivals made it easy for him?
The evidence supports both, but the decisive factor was the combination of Stalin’s control of appointments with his rivals’ misjudgements. His skill is plain: he grasped earlier than anyone that the Secretariat could produce majorities, he chose allies with care, and his “socialism in one country” spoke to a party tired of waiting for world revolution. Yet his opponents repeatedly helped him. Zinoviev and Kamenev saved him from Lenin’s Testament in 1924, Trotsky refused to fight in the open while he still had support in the army and among students, and Bukharin underestimated Stalin until 1928. Historians weigh these differently: Deutscher and Daniels stress the machine, Kotkin stresses Stalin’s intelligence and conviction, and Fitzpatrick stresses support from below. A reasonable judgement is that skill exploited opportunity, because none of the rivals combined the votes, the timing and the message that Stalin did. The transferable lesson is that in systems without rules for succession, power often passes to whoever controls the routine administration that everyone else ignores.
An interesting fact
Trotsky’s first exile was far from silent. According to his biographers Isaac Deutscher and Pierre Broué, between April and October 1928 Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov sent about 800 political letters and 550 telegrams from Alma-Ata and received around 1,000 letters. Many came from oppositionists in exile across Siberia and Central Asia. The OGPU read much of this correspondence, which helped convince Stalin that a Trotsky inside the Soviet Union, however remote, still led a network. His solution was to deport Trotsky abroad in February 1929, which removed him from the country but left him free to write, and his Bulletin of the Opposition, published abroad from 1929, kept up a running attack on Stalin’s policies for the next decade.
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