This was not to be; soon afterwards, a blood vessel broke in Lenin's brain. It was later claimed that if Stalin was not convinced of their loyalty they were shot and thrown into the river. Stalin commented that the United States had no choice but to watch "socialism grow". These groups, who concentrated on disrupting German supply lines, proved a constant problem to the German forces. The only purpose of terror is intimidation. 3. Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe of non-party sympathizers and supporters. Lenin was a product of the middle-class. However, the determined resistance put up at Kiev, had considerably delayed the attack on Moscow. 3. Dennis was shocked at rhy cynicism; but he went through with the operation, which turned out very successfully. "Probably," I said. He then went on to claim that Jones description of famine in the Soviet Union was an example of "wishful thinking". I was shocked by his sinister, two-faced, scheming hypocrisy. How could these old Bolsheviks who went through the jails and exiles of Czarism, who were the heroes of the civil war, the leaders of industry, the builders of the party, diplomats, turn out at the moment of "the complete victory of socialism" to be saboteurs, allies of fascism, organizer of espionage, agents of capitalist restoration? The finial stage of Stalin's Rise to Power was the ordered assassination of Trotsky in 1940 in Mexico. (50), At the Tenth Party Congress in April 1922, Lenin proposed a resolution that would ban all factions within the party. Although Germany had been defeated, the USA and Britain were still at war with Japan. Several reasons were given for this action including disrespect for those in authority and reading forbidden books. Ivan Smirnov said: "I communicated Trotsky's instructions on terrorism to the bloc to which I belonged as a member of the centre. Despite such shortages, Stalin continued to force collectivization. (76), With the decline of Trotsky, Joseph Stalin felt strong enough to stop sharing power with Lev Kamenev and Gregory Zinoviev. Duranty argued that unlike Leon Trotsky Stalin was not gifted with any great intelligence, but "he had nevertheless outmaneuvered this brilliant member of the intelligentsia". Now he's always challenging people to drinking contests, and people are getting drunk all over the place." (121), Martemyan Ryutin worked for the Central Committee and was greatly disturbed by the failures in collectivization and industrialization. Sudoplatov, a Chekist, thought "it was hard to imagine such a man could deceive you, his reactions were so natural, without the slightest sense of him posing" but he also noticed "a certain harshness ... which he did not ... conceal". (152), Zaporozhets provided him with a pistol and gave him instructions to kill Kirov in the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. Military, diplomatic, and other elite schools excluded Jews altogether, and the universities fixed narrow quotas for admission of Jewish students. Today, we know Joseph Stalin as a ruthless dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. While the conference was taking place, the British General Election results were announced. For a moment, perhaps, he considered the need to strike back, to die defending himself. The sovkhoz (land was owned by the state and the workers were hired like industrial workers) and the kolkhoz (small farms where the land was rented from the state but with an agreement to deliver a fixed quota of the harvest to the government). Leopold Trepper, head of the Soviet spy ring in Germany, believed that the evidence was planted by a double agent who worked for both Stalin and Adolf Hitler. And don't worry that they may be taken away from you." Instead, Stalin schemed his way into power, using his position as General Secretary, and a series of ruthless political moves . Sergo loved the truth. Gregory Ordzhonikidze commented: "While all over Russia black reaction was reigning, a genuine workers' parliament was in session at Baku." With Charlie and myself at his heels, he walked into the adjoining room, where several secretaries were standing around chatting and asked whether they couldn't dig up a Latin typewriter. He listened without the slightest sign of impatience to my labored Russian and repeated sentences slowly when he thought I might not have grasped the meaning. In the presence of his friends he burst out against his wife in a flood of vulgar abuse." To protect us, and perhaps with some idea of heightening the authenticity of his reports, he emphasized his Ukrainian foray rather than our conversation as the chief source of his information. On 17 February, Frinovsky invited Slutsky to his office where another of Yezhov's deputies came up behind him and drew a mask of chloroform over his face. He turned it on himself and hardened his attitude to people in general. (7), In May, 1899, Joseph Stalin left the Tiflis Theological Seminary. These new governments were often hostile to the Bolsheviks. ", Ryutin did not only blame Stalin for the problems facing the Soviet Union: "The entire top leadership of the Party leadership, beginning with Stalin and ending with the secretaries of the provincial committees are, on the whole, fully aware that they are breaking with Leninism, that they are perpetrating violence against both the Party and non-Party masses, that they are killing the cause of socialism. An official at the British Embassy reported: "A record of over-staffing, overplanning and complete incompetence at the centre; of human misery, starvation, death and disease among the peasantry... the only creatures who have any life at all in the districts visited are boars, pigs and other swine. "Lenin, who detested hero worship and fought religion as an opiate for the people, who canonized in the interest of Soviet politics and his writings were given the character of Holy Writ." This included Nickolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Krestinsky and Christian Rakovsky. ", Robert Service, the author of Stalin: A Biography (2004) has argued: "Yezhov understood the danger he was in and his daily routine became hectic; he knew that the slightest mistake could prove fatal. "It may have been engineered by Stalin himself in order to kill two birds with one stone - to get rid of Kirov and to give an excuse for the great purges that were to follow." I slept in peasants’ huts, sometimes nine of us in one room. (67), Two months later, Leon Trotsky published an open letter where he called for more debate in the Communist Party concerning the way the country was being governed. It was, above all, stamped with an unmistakable simplicity: the hall-mark, I was to learn in the next hour or two, of Stalin himself. His biographer, Robert Service, has commented: "He was pinched-looking after the long train trip and had visibly aged over the four years in exile. In the early years after Lenin died, when he came to power, they all attacked Stalin. Stalin wrote to Lenin: "I'm overdue with my letter, comrade. When Stalin accepted the need for collectivisation he also had to change his mind about industrialisation. Prior to World War I, he organised and conducted robberies to fund the party’s activities. Altogether, it looked more like a debate... conducted in conversational tones by educated people. So I took him away from school. Create. (162), Yuri Piatakov accepted the post of chief witness "with all my heart." It was proposed to take hostages from the former officers of the Tsar's army, from the Cadets and from the families of the Moscow and Petrograd middle-classes and to shoot ten for every Communist who fell to the White terror. On the contrary, we must quicken it as much as is within our powers and possibilities. Stalin rejected this idea and continued to have complete control over government policy. When he entered the seminary he was fifteen and as strong as a lad could be. At the time of Yalta, Germany was close to defeat. (124), Joseph Stalin interpreted Ryutin's manifesto as a call for his assassination. "I don't want in any way to interfere with what you may write," Stalin said, "but I would be interested to see what you make of this interview. He also selected them for their individual qualities. The theoretical mistake of the ruling party remains inexplicable, however, only if you leave out of account the fact that all calculations at that time were based on the hope of an early victory of the revolution in the West." Stalin’s initial response was to write and publish articles that called on the Bolsheviks to support for the Provisional Government. Meetings soon took place between Vyacheslav Molotov, Litvinov's replacement and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister. [interactive] This interactive exercise forms part of the ActiveHistory unit on Stalin's Rise to Power. Stalin, who was in Tsaritsyn at the time, sent a telegram to headquarters suggesting: "having learned about the wicked attempt of capitalist hirelings on the life of the greatest revolutionary, the tested leader and teacher of the proletariat, Comrade Lenin, answer this base attack from ambush with the organization of open and systematic mass terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents." Nearly a quarter of Soviet property had been destroyed during the Second World War. What manner of man was this who was so soon to usurp Lenin's position and attempt to play Lenin's part? • In 1928 Stalin advocates the policies of the left (Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev) by declaring his support of rapid industrialization and use of force to make peasants cooperate. After ten days of silence, Stalin made his move. Lenin was no longer able to speak or write and although he lived for another ten months, he ceased to exist as a power within the Soviet Union. To this day I do not know precisely why, among the score of permanent correspondents in his capital-many of them less outspoken in their criticism of the regime and more amenable to the discipline of the Press Department - he had selected me for this first interview since his rise to supreme power. (120), Some people argued that Duranty had been involved in a cover-up concerning the impact of the economic changes that were taking place in the Soviet Union. On the 10th June the English released similar information. He blamed the policies of Nickolai Bukharin for the failure of the 1927 harvest. This is a mistake. In July 1937 he sent a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Paris explaining his decision to break with the Soviet Union because he no longer supported the views of Stalin's counter-revolution and wanted to return to the freedom and teachings of Lenin. "He's like the symbol of the Party, the lower strata trust him." (114), Stalin gave instructions that concentration camps should not just be for social rehabilitation of prisoners but also for what they could contribute to the gross domestic product. He (Joseph Stalin), of course, understands to the full our contribution to the war; it is a danger to the future that his people don't and now the Americans are making claims to a share in the bomber offensive which is by no means justified, but further dims our glory. Some of these were translations of articles written by Lenin. ", Edvard Radzinsky, the author of Stalin (1996) has pointed out: "After they saw that Piatakov was ready to collaborate in any way required, they gave him a more complicated role. No one was so well qualified as Piatakov to destroy Trotsky, his former god and now the Party's worst enemy, in the eyes of the country and the whole world. This time the conference was held in Yalta in the Crimea. The change would be the work of Stalin and his associates in the Kremlin. (Self-sufficient and militarily strong socialist state) 2. (84), At the 14th Congress of the Communist Party in December, 1925, Zinoviev spoke up for others on the left when he declared: "There exists within the Party a most dangerous right deviation. Germany was now in a strong negotiating position and Molotov found it impossible to agree to Hitler's demands. All told, about 850 Soviet advisers, pilots, technical personnel and interpreters took part in the war. (144), Stalin oversaw the production of appropriate historical texts. Were against the Secretariat, by actually combining politics and organisation, standing above the political body… Personally I suggest that our General Secretary is not the kind of figure who can unite the old Bolshevik high command around him. Nicholas II had called himself "Khozyain of the Russian lands". Even though I agreed with Stalin completely, I knew I had to watch my step in answering him. Wild inventions and monstrous accusations had become an end in themselves, and officials of the secret police applied all their ingenuity to them, as though reveling in the total arbitrariness of their power. And Stalin, of course, a brilliant organizer of demonstrations himself, was well prepared. Stalin had his way and during the 1930s, the gap between the wages of the labourers and the skilled workers increased. idea of Socialism in one country [4. However, it has been argued that Hitler's policy of exterminating the Soviet people guaranteed his defeat. Soviet Communist dictatorship was just as alien to the American people as Nazi dictatorship. My pulse, I am sure, was high. When the vote was taken, the majority of the Politburo supported Kirov against Stalin. Stalin, in contrast, was a crude Georgian of peasant stock. The foreign policies of the capitalist countries since the October Revolution had convinced Stalin that their main objective was the destruction of the communist system in the Soviet Union. The impression created was that the accused, the prosecutor, and the judges were all inspired by the same single - I almost said sporting - objective, to explain all that had happened with the maximum precision. What is extremely important is who counts the votes and how they are recorded." They had got to learn that victory was impossible... unless they knew both how to attack and how to retreat correctly. I spoke a great deal with Smirnov about choosing people for terroristic activities and also designated the persons against whom the weapon of terrorism was to be directed. To motivate the kulaks to do this, they had to be given incentives, or what Bukharin called "the ability to enrich" themselves. Bertram D. Wolfe has argued "his mother, devoutly religious and with no one to devote herself to but her sole surviving child, determined to prepare him for the priesthood." Most of those, including Theodore Mally, were executed. The principles and aims of mass terror have nothing in common with ordinary police work or with security. The waves of hilarity washed Rykov and Tomsky onto the rostrum. Any officer, no matter how remotely connected to Tukhachevsky and the seven deposed generals in the past or present, was rounded up and executed. Daily collaboration with Beria was like being tied in a sack with a wild beast. It was Klementi Voroshilov, the Commissar of War! Members were supporters of Georgian independence from Russia. He was remarkably unlike the scowling, self-important dictator of popular imagination. He argued that members should exercise its right to criticism "without fear and without favour" and the first people to be removed from party positions are "those who at the first voice of criticism, of objection, of protest, are inclined to demand one's party ticket for the purpose of repression". Stalin reacted to the news by announcing that Lenin was to be embalmed and put on permanent display in a mausoleum to be erected on Red Square. On 4th October, these men signed a statement admitting that they were guilty of offences against the statutes of the party and pledged themselves to disband their party within the party. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. It means to lose all shame, to overstep all hounds of baseness. Stalin rallied morale by staying in Moscow. We quiet them and try to convince them that there is nothing menacing, that it is only a cockroach, which they need not fear. •They argued amongst themselves. Reasons why Stalin wanted to carry out the economic policies: 1. Churchill was annoyed at this and said it had not been the British habit to slaughter prisoners of war, especially officers. He hated the routine of the seminary. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. (178), It is claimed that Reinhard Heydrich developed a plan to damage the Red Army. Litvinov had been closely associated with the Soviet Union's policy of an antifascist alliance. The typewriter was found and I was installed in a small room to do my stuff. It is not surprising that, during the stormy years of revolution and civil war, with their ceaseless meetings, rallies, and demonstrations, the revolutionary masses saw or heard little of Stalin." In a fit of temper Stalin made an abusive phone-call to Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, accusing her of endangering Lenin's life by allowing him to write letters when he was so ill. (56), After Krupskaya told her husband of this phone-call, Lenin made the decision that Stalin was not the man to replace him as the leader of the party. Date accessed: January 16, 2021 Stalin earned Lenin’s trust by carrying out instructions reliably, effectively and discretely. He was arrested, but was at first recalcitrant. Joseph Stalin told Nikolai Yezhov that he needed some help in running the NKVD and asked him to choose someone. The respective power of these figures is represented by distributing a large bag of sweets between them. To wait for the Constituent Assembly, which will surely be against us, is nonsensical because that will only make our task more difficult." Yezhov's intention was complete control of the NKVD by using men who could be expected to carry out sensitive assignments without any reservations. Kirov had several advantages over Stalin, "his closeness to the masses, his tremendous energy, his oratorical talent". (148), At the 17th Party Congress in 1934, when Sergey Kirov stepped up to the podium he was greeted by spontaneous applause that equalled that which was required to be given to Stalin. Lenin wrote, “Comrade Stalin has enormous power. Sources tell us that when Stalin came to know about his associate’s remark, he initially hesitated and tried to dismiss it by saying that such remarks contributed to a cult of personality. According to Adam B. Ulam, the author of Stalin: The Man and his Era (2007): "In Party circles Ordzhonikidze enjoyed genuine popularity. Norman Pereira’s essay on Stalin’s rise to power in the USSR was a cautious attempt to challenge consensus. (136), Gareth Jones wrote to the New York Times complaining about Duranty's article in the newspaper. He looked round to see which of his colleagues could be relied upon to form a close nucleus capable of the determined and swift action which would be needed in the emergencies to come. Some historical interpretation would also be … In areas occupied by the enemy, partisan units, mounted and on foot, must be formed; sabotage groups must be organized to combat enemy units, to foment partisan warfare everywhere, blow up bridges and roads, damage telephone and telegraph lines, set fire to forests, stores and transport. (134), Duranty published an article in the New York Times on 31st March 1933, where he argued that there was a conspiracy in the agricultural sector by "wreckers" and "spoilers" had "made a mess of Soviet food production". Stalin now decided to purge the Red Army. In an article in Pravda, Bukharin wrote: "Enrich yourselves, develop your holdings. Ordzhonikidze's home was searched by the NKVD. Gravity. Joseph Stalin's forced industrialization of the Soviet Union caused the worst man-made famine in history. Lenin wrote, “Comrade Stalin has enormous power. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years hard labour, Kamenev to five. (133), Eugene Lyons and his friend Walter Duranty, who were both very sympathetic to Stalin, decided to try and undermine these reports by Jones. The volume of evidence brought forward at this trial was sufficient to convince the most sceptical that these men, in conjunction with Trotsky and with the Fascist Powers, had carried through a series of abominable crimes involving loss of life and wreckage on a very considerable scale. This enabled Stalin to remove thousands of supporters of Leon Trotsky, his main rival for the leadership of the party. Trotsky added that the Politburo was ruining everything Lenin had stood for and unless these measures were taken, the original goals of the October Revolution would not be achievable. Any one of a dozen other correspondents would have served Moscow's purpose just as well. (132), Eugene Lyons, the Moscow correspondent of the United Press International pointed out in in his autobiography, Assignment in Utopia (1937): "On emerging from Russia, Jones made a statement which, startling though it sounded, was little more than a summary of what the correspondents and foreign diplomats had told him. However, Stalin was still suspicious of the British and thought that Churchill was trying to trick him into declaring war on Germany. Stalin also sent large quantities of Soviet tanks and aircraft to the Republicans. Later I wondered whether his arrival was quite as accidental as it seemed. Edvard Radzinsky, the author of Stalin (1996) has pointed out: "Stalin had a secret and extremely important aim in Spain: to eliminate the supporters of Trotsky who had gathered from all over the world to fight for the Spanish revolution. He did not just socialize with the magnates: he patronized junior officials too, constantly searching for tougher, more loyal, and more tireless lieutenants. I have two children, one is an army pilot, the other a Young Pioneer. At the conference it was agreed to divide Germany up amongst the Allies. (11), Joseph Iremashvili, one of his Georgian comrades pointed out: "Koba became a divinity for Soso. Soldiers dominated the Soviet. From the 1930s onwards, under the influence of Trotsky’s autobiography, even most anti-Communists subscribed to a condescending analysis of how Stalin had won the struggle against his great rival. At the time of the February Revolution, Stalin was co-editor of Pravdaand one of the higher-ranking Bolsheviks in Russia (though only by default, since a dozen other higher-ranked Bolsheviks were in exile. Zinoviev and Kamenev united behind Stalin and accused Trotsky of creating divisions in the party. The rise of Stalin was as clever and manipulative as it was unexpected. This site is created and maintained by Alpha History. The struggle had been dangerous, long, and all the more under-handed because the opponents were few in number and weak. Stalin wrote an article for Pravda attacking officials for being over-zealous in their implementation of collectivisation. No man could ever fill his place, but it was not impossible that someone able and willing to act in his tradition could have carried on where he left off, and all knew that Trotsky was best fitted for that difficult post. At the plenum of the Central Committee in October, Stalin pointed out that Trotsky was originally a Menshevik: "In the period between 1904 and the February 1917 Revolution Trotsky spent the whole time twirling around in the company of the Mensheviks and conducting a campaign against the party of Lenin. In his acceptance speech he argued: "I went to the Baltic states viciously anti-Bolshevik. (86), In September 1926 Stalin threatened the expulsion of Yuri Piatakov, Leon Trotsky, Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Mikhail Lashevich and Grigori Sokolnikov. Lenin wrote a testament in December 1922 called “Letter to Party Congress” and presented to congress in 1924. Having gone away a young revolutionary, he was coming back a middle-aged political veteran." It won't spread westward unless a new war wrecks the established system." He added: "Stalin has created a great Frankenstein monster, of which... he has become an integral part, made of comparatively insignificant and mediocre individuals, but whose mass desires, aims, and appetites have an enormous and irresistible power. Joseph Stalin was a Georgian born student radical who became a member and eventually became leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.He served as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953. As Stalin was to admit to Winston Churchill, approximately ten million people died as a result of collectivisation. His way of dealing with the problem was by mass exterminations. The Bolshevik organizations in Petrograd were controlled by a group of young men including Vyacheslav Molotov and Alexander Shlyapnikov who had recently made arrangements for the publication of Pravda, the official Bolshevik newspaper. The truth must be printed." (99), In December, 1929, Stalin made a speech at the Communist Party Congress. (187), Eugene Lyons, the author of Workers’ Paradise Lost: Fifty Years of Soviet Communism: A Balance Sheet (1967) argued: "Somewhere along the line, however, Stalin apparently decided to join the anti-Semitic tide instead of fighting it. Useful documents. He carried away the imprint of a ruthless, steel-armored personality, with few of those human attributes which I had seen to relieve its harshness: a picture more consistent with Stalin's public character. Stalin was appointed as General Secretary and was now given the task of dealing with the "factions and cliques" in the Communist Party. Yagoda assigned the task to Vania Zaporozhets, one of his trusted lieutenants in the NKVD. Immediately following his death, the Soviet government launched a peace offensive that resulted a few months later in the settlement of the Korean war. In reply to a speech made by a delegate he argued: "Osinsky has praised Stalin and praised Kamenev, but he has attacked Zinoviev, thinking that for the time being it would be enough to remove one of them and that then would come the turn of the others. Today I have come to the opinion that the deification of Stalin, or the "cult of the personality", as it is now called, was at least as much the work of Stalin's circle and the bureaucracy, who required such a leader, as it was his own doing. She pleaded with him to release friends who had been arrested as supporters of Leon Trotsky. Understandably, given this background, Joseph's mother was very protective towards him as a child. He still regarded the party, no matter how or by whom it was led, as the legitimate spokesman of the working-class. Created by. Tough-skinned, ruthless drill-sergeants from the ranks of the proletariat had displaced the argumentative intellectuals... By education, experience, and interests the group around Lenin had been cosmopolitan and internationalist; it was brilliant and cultured, at home in Europe and European languages; and it was middle-class in its origins.