The Power Struggle to Succeed Lenin

When Lenin died in January 1924, no one believed Joseph Stalin would replace him. The Bolshevik leadership treated him as a dull bureaucrat — a ‘grey blur’ in Sukhanov’s phrase. Five years later he had isolated and defeated every rival. The struggle was won not at mass rallies but inside party committees, through control of appointments and the suppression of Lenin’s last warnings.

Lenin’s Death and Suppressed Testament

Lenin had a series of strokes from May 1922 and died on 21 January 1924. Before he became fully incapacitated, he dictated a document that became known as Lenin’s Testament. It assessed each of the leading Bolsheviks. Trotsky was ‘the most able man in the present Central Committee’ but ‘too self-confident’. Stalin was ‘too rude’, had ‘concentrated unlimited authority’ in his hands as General Secretary, and should be removed from the post.

Trotsky chose not to fight on the Testament. Zinoviev and Kamenev, who at that point saw Trotsky as the bigger threat, agreed with Stalin to suppress the document at the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924. The party rank and file never read it. Stalin survived a moment that could have ended his career.

Key Fact

In May 1924, Zinoviev and Kamenev sided with Stalin to suppress Lenin’s Testament because they feared Trotsky more. The decision saved Stalin’s career and shows that the power struggle was decided by tactical alliances among rivals, not Lenin’s wishes.

The Contenders

By 1924 there were five plausible heirs:

Leon Trotsky — founder of the Red Army, brilliant orator, intellectual force of the revolution. Many in 1924 expected him to inherit. His Jewish background, late conversion to Bolshevism (1917), and reputation for arrogance worked against him.
Joseph Stalin — General Secretary from April 1922. Controlled who got into the party, who chaired local committees, who sat at congresses. Often dismissed as a ‘mediocrity’.
Grigori Zinoviev — head of the Petrograd party and the Comintern.
Lev Kamenev — head of the Moscow party and Lenin’s former editor.
Nikolai Bukharin — the party’s leading economist and editor of Pravda; main intellectual defender of the NEP.

Stalin lacked the obvious assets of his rivals. He was not a brilliant theorist like Bukharin, a great orator like Trotsky or a famous revolutionary leader like Zinoviev. He spoke Russian with a heavy Georgian accent and rarely engaged in the polished debate culture of the Moscow intelligentsia. To Bolshevik insiders he looked like a competent administrator at best. The Menshevik writer Sukhanov dismissed him as ‘a grey blur’. The underestimation was strategic luck for Stalin: while his rivals fought each other in the limelight, he quietly built the network of appointments that decided Politburo and Congress votes. By the time the others realised the danger, the levers had already changed hands.

Permanent Revolution vs Socialism in One Country

The succession was fought partly through ideology. Trotsky argued for Permanent Revolution — that Soviet Russia could not survive long term unless revolution spread internationally. With Western workers’ movements failing in the early 1920s, this position looked increasingly bleak.

Stalin offered the alternative of Socialism in One Country. The USSR, Stalin claimed, could build socialism inside its own borders. The argument flattered Russian patriotism, fitted the mood of a country exhausted by world war, and let exhausted Bolsheviks focus on practical problems at home. Stalin’s slogan won the argument among the rank and file even before it won the Politburo.

The Triumvirate Against Trotsky, 1924-1925

From 1924 to 1925, Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed a triumvirate against Trotsky. Trotsky published Lessons of October (1924), accusing Zinoviev and Kamenev of opposing the October Revolution; they replied by accusing him of underestimating the peasantry. Stalin stayed largely above the fight, presenting himself as the moderate centre. By January 1925 Trotsky was forced to resign as War Commissar — the last lever he had on the Red Army was gone.

As General Secretary, Stalin controlled the appointment of party officials at every level — gorkom secretaries, factory cell chairs, provincial committee chairs. By the time of the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925, the delegates had largely been put there by Stalin’s machine. The Lenin Enrolment of 1924 brought in roughly 240,000 new members, mostly chosen with Stalin’s approval. They were loyal not to Trotsky’s reputation but to the men who promoted them. Trotsky later wrote: ‘Stalin did not create the apparatus. The apparatus created Stalin.’

The United Opposition and the Right, 1925-1929

In 1925 Stalin turned on his triumvirate partners. Allying with Bukharin, Stalin attacked Zinoviev and Kamenev for ‘underestimating the peasantry’. They lost their Petrograd and Moscow bases. In a panic they joined Trotsky to form the ‘United Opposition’ in 1926, calling for faster industrialisation and an end to the NEP. Stalin’s control of the apparatus crushed them: in November 1927 they were expelled from the party. Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata in January 1928, then deported from the USSR in 1929.

With Trotsky gone, Stalin then turned on Bukharin and the ‘Right Deviation’. Stalin abandoned the NEP for forced collectivisation, calling Bukharin’s defence of peasant prosperity a betrayal. Bukharin was removed from Pravda and the Politburo by November 1929. By the end of that year, no rival remained at the top of the party. Stalin had taken five years to do what Lenin’s Testament had warned could happen if he was not removed.