The document discusses the power struggle in the Soviet Union following Lenin's death, focusing on Stalin and Trotsky's rivalry. It outlines how Stalin's actions, including manipulating Trotsky's absence at Lenin's funeral and consolidating his power, led to his rise as the supreme leader who perpetuated a violent regime. It also critiques Lenin's legacy, suggesting that his initial vision for a socialist utopia was marred by his and Stalin's brutality, ultimately portraying both leaders as architects of oppression rather than progress.

1. HISTORY CAMBRIDGE A2 (PAPER 4)
PRESENTATION 2
STALIN MODULE
1. LENIN’S LEGACY
LENIN’S LEGACY

2. POWERPOINT BASED ON
Lenin, Socialism and war, 1915
Lynch, Stalin’s Russia 1924-53
Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed

3. “War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created”
Lenin, Socialism and War (1915)

4. 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.

5. Stalin vs Trotsky
Trotsky had been traveling in the Caucasus when Lenin died, and Stalin
telegraphed him and said that because the funeral would be held
immediately, he would not be able to return to Moscow in time; he might
as well remain where he was.
Thus by forcing Trotsky's absence, Stalin created a situation of powerful
symbolism. Meanwhile, the cult of Lenin sprang up immediately; his
followers embalmed his body and placed it in Moscow's Red Square where
it quickly became a shrine. Stalin constituted the moving force behind this
"deification" of Lenin, despite the fact that the death threw his career into
crisis: Lenin's Testament, calling for Stalin's removal from office, was read
at the next Central Committee meeting.

6. Stalin’s fate
This meeting would decide Stalin's fate: if his rivals chose to obey the
testament and demand him ousted, Stalin would not have enough support
to retain his political power.
But Trotsky remained silent and Kamenev and Zinoviev came to Stalin's
defence – and so he kept his post as General Secretary.
The following year, 1924, marks the beginning of Stalin's rise to power.
By 1930, he would stand alone, as supreme leader of Russia; by 1940, at his
orders, all the other men on Lenin's Politburo would be dead.

7. Stalin’s regime
Stalin's regime would prove one of the bloodiest in recorded history,
famine and terror killed millions of people; millions more found themselves
consigned to imprisonment in the terrifying Siberian gulags.
Later, when the Soviet Union publicized Stalin's crimes, in the 1950s, the
officials would claim that he had perverted Leninism, had betrayed Lenin's
initial vision of a socialist utopia.

8. Lenin’s legacy
But these statements contained little truth: while Lenin turned his back on
Stalin at the end of his life, Stalin remained a fairly faithful disciple of the
Soviet Union's founder.
The terrors, murders, and famines of the 1930s merely served to build on
and intensify what Lenin had begun during the Revolution.
Both men brutally liquidated the peasantry; both imprisoned their political
enemies in concentration camps; both created large- scale famines.
Lenin had prepared a dark and bloody path to Stalin's subsequent terrors.

9. Criticising Lenin
In the decades after his death, the Soviet Union would hold up Lenin's
writings as works of philosophical genius, but this glorification constituted
nothing more than empty propaganda: Lenin was not a great intellectual.
Indeed, all of the Bolsheviks' claims to powerful intellectualism ultimately
rang false: no great mind could have embraced unquestioningly the
mishmash of contradictions and lies that was Marxism.
But Lenin made up for his average intelligence with a tireless energy, an
indomitable will, and a native political genius.

10. Lenin and the foundation of mother russia
These traits enabled him and his clique to exploit the events of 1917 in a
way that none of their contemporaries would have believed possible–and
to make themselves, against all odds, masters of Russia.
Lenin, more than anyone else, laid the foundations for a state so rugged
that it would endure for seventy years–and so powerful that it would
eventually challenge the United States for world supremacy.
It is this achievement that insures Lenin his place among the most
significant figures of the century.

11. Lenin’s vision
But significance does not equal greatness. Certainly, Lenin possessed, and
acted upon, a great vision: ever an idealist, he seems, more than Stalin, to
have truly believed in the necessity of the Revolution to cleanse Russia of
the evils of Tsardom and debilitating poverty.
Like his brother Alexander, whose death set him on the road to radicalism,
he perceived that his country, and the world as a whole, contained glaring
imperfections and injustices.
However, when it came to actually alleviating these flaws and building his
own utopia, Lenin willingly–even eagerly–turned to murder, terror, and
brutal repression.

12. Lenin’s legacy
Having abandoned religion as a young man, he quickly renounced all
notions of morality as well, calling it "bourgeois"; from his point of view,
and from that of all the Bolsheviks, the ends justified the means.
They were convinced that when Marx's "scientific" predictions of
revolution came true, their bloody actions would find vindication.
But history has not been so kind–to the Bolsheviks or their victims.