History USSR 1922 to 1929 N C Gardner 22 April 2015

AQA History HIS1N
Totalitarian Ideologies
N C Gardner BA Hons, MA, PGCE
USSR 1922 to 1929 1

 “Explain why the New Economic Policy (NEP)
was ended by Stalin.” (12 marks)
 Students should include the following factors
in their answer:
 1 NEP was always a temporary expedient as it
was capitalist and an adaptation of Marxism.
USSR 1922 to 1929 7

 2 The Bolsheviks had seized power at a time
when 80% of the population were peasants.
 3 Ending NEP would finally create socialism.
 4 NEP was no longer working by 1927/28 as
grain procurements were falling.
USSR 1922 to 1929 8

 5 Rapid industrialisation could be adopted as a policy
as Trotsky and the United Opposition had been
defeated.
 6 Ending NEP allowed Stalin’s policies to create a
distinction between his policies and those of
Bukharin, and defeat the right in the power struggle.
 7 1927 War scare – Britain had broken off diplomatic
relations, France trade links and Japan threatened
war. Stalin believed rapid industrialisation was
needed to defend the USSR which influenced the
ending of NEP.
USSR 1922 to 1929 10

 To reach higher levels in the exam answer
you will need to:
 To show the inter-relationship of the reasons
given e.g. argue that ideologically
collectivisation and rapid industrialisation
were more consistent with socialism, but that
Stalin also recognised that ending NEP would
secure him the support of the majority of the
party, including left-wingers like Kirov and
Kaganovich.
USSR 1922 to 1929 11

 On 21st January 1924, Lenin died. The
towering political figure who had led the
October Revolution and created the Soviet
Union was no more.
 The great historian A J P Taylor wrote that the
history of modern Europe can be told in the
lives of three titans: Napoleon, Bismarck, and
Lenin.
USSR 1922 to 1929 18

 After his second stroke and part recovery in
December 1922, Lenin dictated a memorandum.
He had no hesitation in pointing to Stalin and
Trotsky as the chief antagonists, “the two most
able leaders of the present Central Committee”,
an opinion which surprised nearly all of Lenin’s
colleagues when they first heard it.
 Trotsky disdainfully looked down upon his rival;
and to his last days treated him as a ‘dull
mediocrity’. Other members of the Politburo also
felt their intellectual superiority to Stalin.
USSR 1922 to 1929 29

 Lenin’s last testament were critical of Trotsky
as well as of Stalin. Lenin said that Trotsky
displayed ‘too far-reaching a self-confidence
and a disposition to be too much attracted by
the purely administrative side of affairs’.
 Lenin also hinted at Trotsky’s inclination to
oppose himself to the Central Committee, a
grave fault in the leader of a party which was
bred in discipline, team-work, and was
suspicious of individualism.
USSR 1922 to 1929 31

 The central debate behind the power struggle
after Lenin’s death in January 1924 revolved
around the ‘Socialism in One Country’ policy
of Joseph Stalin versus ‘The Permanent
Revolution’ of Leon Trotsky.
 Stalin first formulated his ideas on socialism
in one country in autumn 1924 and belief in
his ideas were soon to become the supreme
test of loyalty to the Communist Party and the
Soviet State.
USSR 1922 to 1929 38

 Stalin’s immediate purpose in advocating
‘socialism in one country’ was to discredit
Trotsky and to prove that Trotsky was no
Leninist.
 Trotsky had borrowed his theory of permanent
revolution from Marx and applied it to the
Russian revolution. He foresaw that the
revolution would be driven by circumstances to
pass from its anti-feudal (bourgeois) to its anti-
capitalist (Socialist) phase.
USSR 1922 to 1929 43

 Contrary to the then accepted Marxist view,
not the advanced western European capitalist
countries but backward Russia would be the
first to set out along the road to socialism.
 But Russia alone would not be able to
advance far upon that road. The revolution
could not stop at her national frontiers. It
would have to pass from its national to its
international phase – thus ‘permanency’.
USSR 1922 to 1929 52

 Under the impact of Russia, Western Europe,
too, would become revolutionized. Only then
could socialism be established on a broad
international basis.
 The progress of mankind, so Trotsky argued,
was now hampered not only by the capitalist
mode of production but also by the existence
of nation-states. The final outcome of the
revolutionary transformation could only be
One World, one Socialist world.
USSR 1922 to 1929 53

 Stalin used ideological differences to defeat
his opponents – he challenged Trotsky’s view
of ‘Worldwide Revolution’ with ‘Socialism in
One Country’ which appealed to nationalists
within the party, claimed the left-wing
support of rapid industrialization was un-
Marxist and then turned on the NEP (when it
was failing) to defeat Bukharin.
USSR 1922 to 1929 56

 What would happen if the revolution failed to
spread from Russia into Western Europe?
 Trotsky’s answer was that the Russian
Revolution would then either succumb to a
conservative Europe or become corroded in
its economically and culturally primitive
Russian environment.
USSR 1922 to 1929 57

 The revolution passed from the anti-feudal to
the anti-capitalist phase. Lenin expected it also
to spread beyond Russia. Meanwhile they looked
upon their country as upon a besieged fortress,
spacious and powerful enough to hold out.
 Essentially Lenin thought of Socialist society in
international terms. Early in 1924 Stalin, too, was
still arguing that ‘for the final victory of
socialism, the efforts of one country, particularly
of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient’.
USSR 1922 to 1929 58

 However, by 1925 Stalin stated that the efforts of
Russia alone would suffice for the complete
organization of a Socialist economy.
 A Socialist economy was conceivable only as an
economy of plenty. Stalin pointed to Russia’s
great assets: her vast spaces and enormous
riches in raw materials.
 A Socialist government could, in his view,
through its control of industry and credit,
develop those resources and carry the building of
socialism to a successful conclusion.
USSR 1922 to 1929 59

 Stalin proclaimed after Lenin’s death the self-
sufficiency of the Russian revolution. He did not
seriously consider the argument that socialism
was possible only on the basis of the intensive
industrialization already achieved by the most
advanced western countries.
 According to Stalin’s critics, socialism could beat
capitalism only if it represented a higher
productivity of labour and higher standards of
living than had been attained under capitalism.
USSR 1922 to 1929 61

 The critics of Stalin deduced that if productivity
of labour and standards of living were to remain
lower in Russia than in the capitalist countries
then socialism would, in the long run, fail even in
Russia.
 This is, in fact, what happened albeit after 70
years, in the 1980s. The Soviet Union ended up
with lower productivity of labour and living
standards than the capitalist world and its
economy stagnated in the 1980s. Soviet people
wanted the prosperity and living standards of the
West and supported the demise of the
Communist system in the 1980s.
USSR 1922 to 1929 62

 Whatever the flaws in Stalin’s reasoning, his
formula was very effective. It contained a clear
and positive proposition: we are able to stand on
our own feet, to build and to complete the
building of socialism.
 It offered a plain alternative to Trotsky’s
conception. The debate between ‘socialism in
one country’ versus a ‘permanent revolution’ was
more than a simple clash of personal ambitions.
The debate became an issue of deadly earnest
for a whole Russian generation and determined
the outlook of a great nation for a quarter of a
century.
USSR 1922 to 1929 64

 Professor Robert Service on Trotsky: C-SPAN
on Youtube – a good discussion of his work
on Trotsky lasting 58 minutes.
 Robert Service and Christopher Hitchens on
Trotsky: Stanford University (Youtube) – a
discussion lasting 36 minutes.
USSR 1922 to 1929 66

 More important than the dogmatic intricacies of
‘socialism in one country’ versus ‘permanent
revolution’ was the fact that by 1924 – 25, a very
large section of the Communist Party, probably
its majority, felt the need for ideological
stocktaking. No revolutionary party can remain in
power for 7 or 8 years without profound changes
in its outlook.
 The Bolsheviks had by 1924 – 25 grown
accustomed to running an enormous state, ‘one-
sixth of the world’. They had gradually acquired
the self-confidence and sense of self-importance
that come from power.
USSR 1922 to 1929 67

 The Communist Party needed an idea or a slogan that
would fully express their newly won self-confidence.
‘Socialism in one country’ did it. It gave them the
soothing theoretical conviction that, barring war,
nothing could shake their mastery over Russia.
 The party and the working-classes had grown weary
of the expectation of international revolution which
had been the daily bread of Bolshevism.
 Stalin now became more than the General Secretary,
the administrative leader of the party: he was the
author of a new dogma as well.
USSR 1922 to 1929 68

 Socialism in one country held out the promise
of stability. On the other hand, the very name
of Trotsky’s theory, ‘permanent revolution’,
sounded like an ominous warning to a tired
generation that it should expect no Peace and
Quiet in its lifetime.
 In his argument against Trotsky, Stalin
appealed directly to the horror of risk and
uncertainty that had taken possession of
many Bolsheviks.
USSR 1922 to 1929 70

 The Bolsheviks were students of the French
Revolution, the great revolution which had initiated
the political ideas of socialism, nationalism and
liberty into the modern world. They feared the rise of
another Napoleon who would become a dictator and
convert the revolution into an empire.
 Trotsky fitted the bill: the outstanding military
commander and founder of the Red Army, leading it
to victory in the Civil War (1918 – 21); a brilliant
orator and intellectual; a figure only second to Lenin
in making the decisive contribution for the victory of
the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917.
USSR 1922 to 1929 71

 Stalin depicted Trotsky as an adventurer, habitually
playing at revolution. The charge was baseless. At all
the crucial moments – in 1905, 1917, and 1920 –
Trotsky had proved himself the most serious
strategist of the revolution, showing no proneness to
light-minded adventure.
 Trotsky firmly believed that western European
communism would win by its own intrinsic
momentum, in the ordinary course of class struggle.
 In weighing up the chances of communism in the
west, Stalin was more sceptical; and his scepticism
was to grow as the years passed by.
USSR 1922 to 1929 73

 Stalin’s sensibility to the psychological
undercurrents of the Communist Party
contributed to his victory in the power
struggle following Lenin’s death.
 Stalin also came to feel a real hatred for
Trotsky’s views. Stalin sensed which of his
arguments evoked the strongest response
from the mass of party officials and workers.
The mass of the party were unexpectedly
responsive to ‘socialism in one country’.
USSR 1922 to 1929 74

 In Stalin’s doctrine of socialism in one
country, Russia no longer figured as a mere
periphery of the civilised world.
 The old Bolshevik view (the view of Lenin and
Trotsky) was that Western Europe was the real
centre of modern civilisation; and in the old
Bolshevik view, it was there at the centre and
not on the periphery that the forms of a new
social life were eventually to be forged.
USSR 1922 to 1929 76

 For Stalin it was within her own boundaries that
the forms of a new society were to be found and
worked out.
 It is her destiny to become the centre of a new
civilisation, in all respects superior to that
capitalist civilisation that is defending itself, with
so much power of resistance, in western Europe.
 Exhausted and isolated, Bolshevik Russia was
withdrawing into her national shell to build
socialism in one country.
USSR 1922 to 1929 77

 Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky accepted Stalin’s
socialism in one country, while Zinoviev and
Kamenev denounced it. Bukharin may justly be
regarded as the co-author of the doctrine. He
supplied the theoretical arguments for it and he
gave it that scholarly polish which it lacked in
Stalin’s more or less crude version.
 Rykov and Tomsky were, like Stalin himself,
primarily administrators. Rykov was chairman of
the Council of People’s Commissars, the Soviet
Premier. Tomsky was leader of the trade unions.
USSR 1922 to 1929 87

 After Lenin’s first stroke in 1922 and until the mid-
1920s when Stalin became more firmly established at
the core of the Soviet leadership, Stalin was less
vicious in his attacks on the opposition to than the
other members of the ruling elite, Zinoviev and
Kamenev.
 In his speeches there was usually the tone of a good-
natured and soothing optimism which harmonized
well with the party’s growing complacency.
 In the Politburo, when matters of high policy were
under debate, Stalin never seemed to impose his
views on his colleagues.
USSR 1922 to 1929 89

 Zinoviev and Kamenev began to feel that
Stalin was tightening his grip on the party
machine and excluding them from control.
 Stalin was envious of their authority in
matters of doctrine.
 Shortly after the condemnation of Trotsky, he
made his first public attack, irrelevant in
content, on Kamenev’s doctrinal unreliability.
USSR 1922 to 1929 91

 Lev Kamenev was an eminent Bolshevik,
intellectual, literary editor, and talented
journalist, a man after Lenin’s own heart.
 Kamenev’s fatal lack of political ambition and
ruthlessness later led Stalin to exploit his
vulnerability as a pawn in the drive to rid himself
of Lenin’s Old Guard.
 Kamenev was one of the leading moderates
among the Bolsheviks and had urged co-
operation with Kerensky’s provisional
government and the Mensheviks in 1917.
USSR 1922 to 1929 93

 Stalin had to build support after Lenin’s death
and the climax came at the Fourteenth Congress
of the Communist Party in December 1925. The
opposition had already been outmanoeuvred, but
the pretence of free debate was still maintained.
 Kamenev, directly attacked Stalin: “I have come to
the conclusion that Comrade Stalin cannot fulfil
the role of unifier of the Bolshevik general staff
… we are against the doctrine of one-man rule,
we are against the creation of a Leader.”
USSR 1922 to 1929 95

 Kamenev appealed at the 1925 Party Congress,
possibly in despair, as if the Congress were a
genuine representative body, inviting support for
a rational argument, asking for a decision.
 But two years of manipulation by Stalin had
transformed the Congress. It was no longer a
forum for debate and decision: it had become an
instrument for the endorsement of the Leader by
ostensible mass support, and nothing more.
USSR 1922 to 1929 96

 1 Trotsky’s brilliance worked against him
 2 The other Politburo members
underestimated Stalin
 3 Stalin used his position cleverly
 4 Stalin used the disagreements to his own
advantage
USSR 1922 to 1929
10
1

 ∎ Trotsky’s brilliance aroused envy and
resentment among the other Politburo members.
 ∎ He was arrogant and condescending and many
resented the fact that he had only joined the
Bolsheviks shortly before the November 1917
Revolution.
 ∎ During Lenin’s illness, Trotsky was bitterly
critical of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin, who
were acting as a triumvirate, accusing them of
having no plan for the future and no vision.
USSR 1922 to 1929
10
2

 ∎ The others therefore decided to run the
country jointly: collective action was better
than a one-man show.
 ∎ They worked together, doing all they could
to prevent Trotsky from becoming leader. By
the end of 1924 almost all his support had
disappeared; he was even forced to resign as
Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs,
though he remained a member of the
Politburo.
USSR 1922 to 1929
10
3

 ∎ They saw Stalin as nothing more than a competent
administrator; they ignored Lenin’s advice about
removing him.
 ∎ They were so busy attacking Trotsky that they
failed to recognize the very real danger from Stalin
and they missed several chances to get rid of him.
 ∎ In fact Stalin had great political skill and intuition;
he had the ability to cut through the complexities of a
problem and focus on the essentials; and he was an
excellent judge of character, sensing people’s
weaknesses and exploiting them.
USSR 1922 to 1929
10
5

 ∎ Stalin knew that both Kamenev and
Zinoviev were good team members but lacked
leadership qualities and sound political
judgement.
 ∎ Stalin simply had to wait for disagreements
to arise among his colleagues in the
Politburo; then he would side with one faction
against another, eliminating his rivals one by
one until he was left supreme.
USSR 1922 to 1929
10
6

 ∎ As General Secretary of the Communist Party, a position he
had held since April 1922, Stalin had full powers of
appointment and promotion to important jobs such as
secretaries of local Communist Party organizations.
 ∎ Stalin quietly filled these positions with his own supporters,
while at the same time removing the supporters of others to
distant parts of the country. The local organizations chose
the delegates to national Party Conferences, and so the Party
Conferences gradually filled with Stalin’s supporters.
 ∎ The Party Congresses elected the Communist Party Central
Committee and the Politburo; thus by 1928 all the top bodies
and congresses were packed with Stalinites, and he was
unassailable.

USSR 1922 to 1929
10
7

 ∙ Disagreement over policy arose in the
Politburo partly because Marx had never
described in detail exactly how the new
communist society should be organized.
 ∙ Even Lenin was vague about it, except that the
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would be
established – that is, workers would run the state
and the economy in their own interests.
USSR 1922 to 1929
10
9

 ∙ When all opposition had been crushed, the ultimate
goal of a classless society would be achieved, in which,
according to Marx, the ruling principle would be: ‘from
each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs’.
 ∙ With the New Economic Policy (NEP) Lenin had
departed from socialist principles, though
whether he intended this as a temporary measure
until the crisis passed is still open to debate.
Now the right-wing of the Party, led by Bukharin,
and the left, whose views were most strongly put
by Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, fell out about
what to do next.
USSR 1922 to 1929
11
1

 ∙ Bukharin thought it important to
consolidate Soviet power in Russia, based on
a prosperous peasantry and with a very
gradual industrialization; this policy became
known ‘socialism in one country’.
 ∙ Trotsky believed that they must work for
revolution outside Russia – permanent
revolution.
USSR 1922 to 1929
11
3

 ∙ When the permanent revolution had been
achieved, the industrialized states of western
Europe would help Russia with her
industrialization.
 ∙ Kamenev and Zinoviev supported Bukharin
in this, because it was a good pretext for
attacking Trotsky.
USSR 1922 to 1929
11
4

 Bukharin wanted to continue NEP, even
though it was causing an increase in the
number of kulaks (wealthy peasants), who
were thought to be the enemies of
communism.
 His opponents, who now included Kamenev
and Zinoviev, wanted to abandon NEP and
concentrate on rapid industrialization at the
expense of the peasants.
USSR 1922 to 1929
11
5

History USSR 1922 to 1929 N C Gardner 22 April 2015

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