CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: THE SECRETARIAT AND LENIN SUCCESSION. Contains: Lenin succession, first year as secretary general, division in the party, the retreat from democracy.

1. HISTORY CAMBRIDGE A2 (PAPER 4)
PRESENTATION 6 - HOMEWORK
STALIN MODULE
2. STALIN AND THE PARTY
THE SECRETARIAT
AND LENIN
SUCCESSION

2. POWERPOINT BASED ON
Lynch, Stalin’s Russia 1924-53, Chapters 1 and 2
Harris, Stalin - a new history
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky: 1921–1929, pp. 88–118
Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 1955
Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution
Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution
A Political Biography, 1888–1938
Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin
Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System
Mawdsley and White, The Soviet Elite, pp. 36–9

3. Lenin succession
In the early 1920s, the situation in the Politburo was similar to that of Party
committees in the provinces. The Lenin succession was yet another power
struggle among ambitious Party leaders. Before his death, Lenin had
identified the two top pretenders – Stalin and Trotsky – and worried about
the consequences of the inevitable conflict between the two.
Trotsky’s arrogant certainty that he was uniquely suited to lead the
Revolution after Lenin was well known, as was Stalin’s ambitiousness.
Stalin would not be restrained by concerns of political principle from using
the Secretariat in any way that would further those ambitions. He would
squeeze every political advantage he could from it.

4. First year as secretary general
In his first year as General Secretary, it only seemed to be getting him into
trouble. In the face of a direct attack at the Twelfth Congress on the
question of intra-Party democracy, Stalin was on the defensive.
While he argued that the goal of Party secretaries to ‘build a unified and
disciplined leadership group was healthy and necessary’, he agreed that
‘the means they have employed have frequently not been appropriate’.

5. Divisions in the party leadership
Lenin’s criticisms of Stalin and the Secretariat only a few months before left him
politically vulnerable, but Stalin quietly held to his position, understanding its
popularity among Party secretaries. Through the summer and autumn of 1923,
while Lenin’s health was declining, divisions in the Party leadership were
increasingly obvious. Trotsky and other prominent members of the Party attacked
Stalin and the ‘secretarial regime’, but only after it was clear that Lenin’s
condition was hopeless did Stalin drop his defensive tone in public. At the
Thirteenth Party Conference in January, only days before Lenin’s death, Trotsky’s
political ally Evgenii Preobrazhenskii railed at the dictatorial methods of Party
secretaries:
We must (encourage) a broad discussion of all crucial questions of intra-party life . . . such
that issues of concern to Party members can be posed not only by Party committees, but
also on the initiative of Party cells and even individual comrades.

6. Support of the delegates
He recommended, among other things, that the ‘elective principle be
restored to executive Party organs (Party committee bureaus)’. To any
Party secretary, the implications of such a policy were immediately clear.
They would be open to attack from any disgruntled Party member, to say
nothing of groups of ‘comrades’ who might want to topple them from their
leadership posts. With Lenin out of the way, unable to apply his
overwhelming authority in the Party, Stalin could be sure of the support of
the delegates. They were, after all, overwhelmingly made up of Party
secretaries. Stalin told them what they wanted to hear:
Democracy is not something appropriate to all times and places… Democracy
demands a certain minimum of culture [kultur’nost’] from the members (Party) cells
and organisations as a whole . . . Of course we need to retreat from it.

7. New economic policy
Such a statement would have
been unthinkable only a year
before, but here, it was only the
preface to a direct attack on
Trotsky.
He insisted that what Trotsky was
promoting was not democracy,
but a ‘freedom of group struggle’
(svoboda gruppirovok) that would
be fatal in the ‘current conditions’
of the New Economic Policy.

8. It is not the (Secretarial) regime that is to blame (for the necessity of the retreat),
but rather the conditions in which we live, the conditions of the country… If we
were to permit the existence of group struggle, we would destroy the Party, turn it
from a monolithic, united organisation into an alliance of groups and factions. It
would not be a Party, but rather the destruction of the Party… Not for one minute
did Bolsheviks ever imagine the Party as anything but a monolithic organisation,
cut from one piece, of one will… In the current conditions of capitalist encirclement,
we need not only a united Party, but a Party of steel, capable of withstanding the
onslaught of the enemies of the proletariat, capable of leading the workers into a
decisive struggle.
STALIN

9. THE RETREAT FROM DEMOCRACY
The ‘retreat’ from democracy proved to be durable. Party secretaries were
pleased to repeat Stalin’s phrases about the importance of Party unity and use
them to legitimise the repression of any challenge to their power.
Despite their expanded powers, challenges to the authority of local secretaries
remained a fact of political life. In the early 1920s, the general confusion over
administrative responsibilities had created a fertile soil for power struggles.
Though the administrative hierarchy was gradually set and clarified, political
ambitions could not be so easily satisfied and power struggles continued. In
part, they were fuelled by policy differences among Politburo leaders.

10. OPPOSITION (GASTROLERY) WAS POLITICAL SUICIDE
It quickly became apparent to Party members in the regions that to join an
opposition was political suicide, and, as such, its leaders in Moscow had
great difficulty generating support within local organisations. Instead, they
sent their members out from Moscow to organise demonstrations, speak
at Party meetings, and distribute ‘oppositionist literature’.
These ‘touring’ oppositionists (gastrolery) could not be stifled so easily
because they had no local status. When they appeared in a given region,
the local Party committee would gather a team of leading officials to
arrange a counter-demonstration. The gastrolery never seem to have
presented a threat to the local secretaries, but they were a constant
source of irritation.

12. ROLE OF IDEAS AND POLICIES
All this is not to say that the situation of the oppositions was hopeless
from the start. Though Stalin sustained and deepened his relationship
with Party secretaries in the course of the 1920s, the strength of that
relationship alone was not sufficient to decide the succession struggle.
Early explanations of Stalin’s victory emphasised the victory of machine
politics over political principle, but for the last forty years, historians have
also focused on the role of ideas and policies.

13. ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF THE FUTURE
New archival sources only serve to reinforce our sense of the succession
struggle as a see-saw battle of thesis and counter-thesis, of alternative
visions of the future of the Revolution, presented to the Party elite and
the broader membership.
In his letters to Molotov, for example, Stalin insisted on responding
publicly to every speech and article of his rivals. For example, in the
summer of 1926, Stalin told Molotov to make sure that Bukharin
responded to Zinoviev’s criticisms of the foreign policy of the Politburo
majority.
Zinoviev’s views, he wrote, ‘are in the air and find support among those in
the Comintern with Rightist tendencies’.

14. ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF THE FUTURE
New archival sources only serve to reinforce our sense of the succession
struggle as a see-saw battle of thesis and counter-thesis, of alternative
visions of the future of the Revolution, presented to the Party elite and
the broader membership.
In his letters to Molotov, for example, Stalin insisted on responding
publicly to every speech and article of his rivals. For example, in the
summer of 1926, Stalin told Molotov to make sure that Bukharin
responded to Zinoviev’s criticisms of the foreign policy of the Politburo
majority.
Zinoviev’s views, he wrote, ‘are in the air and find support among those in
the Comintern with Rightist tendencies’. STALIN LETTERS

15. Trotsky’s mistake
Oppositionist ideas may have been ‘in the air’, but to what extent did they
pose a threat to Stalin’s ambition to take control of the Party? Stalin gave
his own views on the subject in a conversation with his inner circle on the
day of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution.
Stalin observed that his victory over the oppositions, and Trotsky in
particular, had been improbable. He had been an ‘unknown’, ‘lacking
talent as a theoretician’ (praktik), a ‘second-rater’ (zamukhryshka). Trotsky
was a great orator, and his closeness to Lenin was commonly
acknowledged.
How had he defeated him? Trotsky’s mistake, according to Stalin, was to
try to decide matters ‘with a majority of votes in the Central Committee’.

16. The mass of average party members
In contrast, Stalin attributed his victory to the mass of average Party
members (seredniatskaia massa partii) who supported him for his
concrete achievements. Stalin likened them to officers, who had shown
loyalty not to the Generals who have the best training, but to those who
bring victory in battle.
Accepting that such utterances must be treated with caution, Stalin’s
remarks make considerable sense in the context of what we know about
the succession struggle.

17. Trotsky and his logical strategy
For Trotsky, seeking a majority in the Central Committee was a logical
strategy. Central Committee members tended to have been in the Party
longest. They had a higher level of education and stature in the Party.59
They were likely to have been the most independent-thinking of Party
members, the least beholden to Stalin, the most likely to have been open
to Trotsky’s views.
Furthermore, as members of the Central Committee, Party statutes
assigned them the right to elect the Politburo. They could, thus, have had
a decisive influence in the struggle. And yet neither Trotsky nor any of
Stalin’s other rivals was able to obtain a majority.

18. Back to the basics
Some have argued that Stalin tipped the weight of the Central Committee
in his favour by excluding his opponents from it and appointing his
supporters.
Yet there is little evidence to suggest that Stalin could control the slates of
Central Committee members up for election at the Party congresses in the
1920s, or overtly manipulate its expansion in his favour.
Rather, it appears as though Stalin largely carried the Central Committee
on the basis of his policies and, in time, on the concrete results they
brought. In this, Stalin appears to have had the upper hand from the
beginning.

19. 1925 election
From the earliest stages of the struggle in the early 1920s, those voting for
the slates of candidates to the Central Committee struck members of the
oppositions off their ballots more frequently than they struck off Stalin or
the Politburo majority.
By 1925, in the election of the Central Committee at the Fourteenth Party
Congress, 217 voters struck Kamenev off their ballots; 224 struck off
Zinoviev. By contrast, 87 struck off Stalin and 83 Bukharin.
Stalin had the clear advantage, though his failure to obtain those 87 votes
suggests that if he did try to stack the Central Committee with his cronies,
he was not doing a very good job.

20. 720,000 votes for second raters
In his own memory of the events, Stalin nevertheless placed greater emphasis on the support he
had in the broader Party membership: ‘In 1927,’ he observed, ‘720,000 Party members voted for
the Central Committee line. That is, the backbone of the Party voted for us ‘‘second raters.’’
Four to six thousand voted for Trotsky and a further 20,000 abstained.’62 Stalin’s control of the
Central Committee may have been tenuous in the early stages of the struggle, but through his
work in the Secretariat, his grip on broader Party officialdom effectively undermined the spread
of ideas other than some abstractly understood ‘Central Committee line’. Stalin’s ‘average’ Party
official saw concrete dangers in intra-Party democracy, that is, the unrestricted, open discussion
of policy. They actively and aggressively helped Stalin to choke off debate, and to identify and
eliminate signs of ‘oppositional’ activity. Stymied in the Central Committee, the oppositions could
gain no purchase in the broader Party officialdom.

21. Retaining majority in the politburo
When Stalin led the purge of the Left Oppositionists in the Komsomol,
when he directed the attack on Zinoviev’s stronghold in the Leningrad
Party, and when he initiated the campaign against the ‘Right danger’, he
knew he had the support of the majority of Party officials.
He did not demand the persecution of oppositionists. He needed only to
defend that persecution in the name of ‘Party unity’. It was not his
position as General Secretary per se that won him this advantage.
Rather, it was his ability to retain a majority in the Politburo. As long as he
held the majority and could define the ‘Central Committee Line’, he could
portray all challenges to it as ‘opposition’ and ‘factionalism’.

22. Stop! What is a politburo?
A politburo is the executive committee
for a number of (usually communist)
political parties. The term "politburo"
comes from the Russian Politbyuro
(Politicheskoye Byuro - Political
Bureau).
The very first politburo was created in Russia by the Bolshevik Party in 1917
to provide strong and continuous leadership during the Russian Revolution
occurring during the same year. The first Politburo had seven members:
Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov. During the
20th century, nations that had a politburo included the USSR, East Germany,
Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia and China. Today, there are five countries: China,
North Korea, Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba.

23. Support for stalin
In December 1925, Lev Kamenev reviewed Stalin’s abuses of power to the
delegates of the Fourteenth Party Congress and demanded that he be
removed from his post as General Secretary.
The response of delegates was overwhelming: ‘No way!’, ‘Nonsense!’,
‘We will not give you the commanding heights!’ Stalin was then given a
lengthy standing ovation.
Their support for Stalin was rooted in their shared interests. Of course
they shared other interests apart from an opposition to intra-Party
democracy.

24. Questioning support for stalin
Stalin remained attentive to the needs and desires of Party officialdom.
But in the early 1930s, Stalin’s relations with senior Party officials soured.
The industrialisation drive descended into crisis.
Collectivisation and punishing grain collections targets resulted in rural
chaos and famine.
Some historians speculate that Party officials began to question their
support for Stalin.
The Central Committee rarely met after the early 1930s. It is possible that
Stalin was concerned to face an organisation that was, according to Party
statutes, empowered to replace him.

25. HOMEWORK
Exam Style Essays:
1. To what extent was Stalin’s role within the Party the most important
factor in his rise to power?
2. Oppositionist ideas may have been ‘in the air’, but to what extent did
they pose a threat to Stalin’s ambition to take control of the Party?