Rupert Colley - Stalin - History in an Hour

Stalin visits Lenin during Lenin’s convalescence

Krupskaya remained a thorn in Stalin’s side, demanding that Lenin’s Testament be read out, as her husband had wished, at the forthcoming Thirteenth Party Congress, due in May 1924. Determined to suppress it, Stalin silenced her by threatening to find Lenin a ‘new widow’; Krupskaya was to die, a frightened woman, aged seventy in 1939.

Stalin took the lead in organising Lenin’s funeral and appeared as the chief pallbearer. Trotsky, who was recovering from illness near the Black Sea, missed the funeral – Stalin having deliberately told him the wrong date. Stalin initiated the deification of Lenin, in which the great leader’s image was seen everywhere and his memory held in reverential terms. Within days of his death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Stalin’s broken relationship with Lenin was quietly forgotten and he reinvented himself as the bearer of Lenin’s legacy. To doubt Stalin was to doubt Lenin and question the whole legitimacy of the Revolution.

Opposition

Kamenev and Zinoviev, motivated by their fear of the arrogant Trotsky, joined forces with Stalin and together the three men assumed unofficial leadership of the Party as a troika. Between them they managed to get the Central Committee to agree on suppressing Lenin’s Testament. Stalin had offered to resign over the issue. The committee, including Trotsky, rejected his offer. They would all pay dearly for their support.

Leon Trotsky

Trotsky and his supporters, labelled as the ‘Left Opposition’, opposed the party on many accounts and were attacked on all sides. Their views, ‘Trotskyism’, became a profanation of immense proportions. Stalin had on his side Kamenev, Zinoviev and Pravda editor Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin’s ‘favourite of the whole Party’.

Nikolai Bukharin

Stalin used his power to dismiss his perceived dissenters within the Party and replace them with loyal followers. In January 1925, Stalin was strong enough to force Trotsky’s resignation from his post of People’s Commissar for War.

Kamenev and Zinoviev felt that perhaps Lenin had been right after all – that Stalin had too much power. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925, Kamenev suggested that Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary and that his accumulation of power was ‘harmful to the Party’. He received a hostile reception.

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