Stalin's Rise to Power, 1924–28

A Succession Nobody Predicted

When Lenin died on 21 January 1924, almost no one inside the party expected Joseph Stalin to succeed him. Stalin held the dry administrative post of General Secretary, taken in April 1922 because no one else wanted it. The bigger names in the Politburo were Leon Trotsky, the architect of the October seizure of power and the Civil War victor; Lev Kamenev, head of the Moscow party; Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Leningrad party and chair of the Comintern; and Nikolai Bukharin, the leading party theorist and editor of Pravda. By January 1929 Trotsky was on a steamer to exile, Kamenev and Zinoviev had been expelled, and Bukharin had been broken. The General Secretary controlled the party.

Key Fact

Stalin defeated his rivals in three stages between 1924 and 1929: with Kamenev and Zinoviev he beat Trotsky’s Left Opposition (1925); with Bukharin and the right he beat Kamenev and Zinoviev’s United Opposition (1926–27); then he turned on Bukharin and the Right Opposition (1928–29). Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927 and exiled from the USSR in January 1929.

Lenin’s Testament and the Funeral

In December 1922 and January 1923 Lenin dictated a series of notes that became known as his Testament. He warned the Central Committee that Stalin had ‘concentrated unlimited authority in his hands’ and added a postscript recommending that the party ‘remove Stalin from that position’. He criticised Trotsky for ‘excessive self-confidence’, accused Kamenev and Zinoviev of cowardice during October 1917, and called Bukharin a ‘valuable theoretician’ whose Marxism was incomplete. Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, brought the document to the Politburo in May 1924. Kamenev and Zinoviev, frightened of Trotsky, persuaded the Central Committee to suppress it. Stalin offered to resign as General Secretary; the offer was rejected. The Testament was not read to the wider party.

Stalin then exploited the symbolism of Lenin’s funeral. He delivered a public oath to continue Lenin’s work and orchestrated a state ceremony that placed himself at the centre of the mourning. Trotsky, recovering from illness in the south, was told by Stalin that the funeral would take place a day earlier than it actually did, and so missed it altogether. Whether Stalin lied deliberately is contested, but the political cost to Trotsky was real: he was absent at the moment when Bolshevik authority was being publicly transferred. Through 1924 Stalin pushed the ‘Lenin cult’: the embalming of the body, the Lenin Mausoleum, the renaming of Petrograd to Leningrad, and quotation of Lenin in every speech. Each Stalin speech now opened with a Leninist text. The man who could quote Lenin most accurately could most easily claim to be his heir.

Students often write that Stalin was Lenin’s natural heir. The opposite is true. Lenin’s Testament explicitly recommended Stalin’s removal as General Secretary, and his postscript called Stalin ‘too rude’ for the role. The reason this misconception sticks is that Soviet propaganda from the 1930s onwards rewrote the 1920s as a smooth handover. Strong answers separate what Lenin actually wrote from what the regime later claimed, and credit Kamenev and Zinoviev’s 1924 decision to suppress the Testament as a turning point in the succession.

Stalin’s Strengths and His Rivals’ Weaknesses

Stalin’s real weapon was the General Secretaryship itself. The post controlled party appointments, congress agendas and membership records. Through the 1924 ‘Lenin Enrolment’ some 240,000 new members were admitted to the party — many young, working-class and personally loyal to the apparatus that had recruited them. Stalin used this power to pack delegations to party congresses with his supporters, ensuring votes went his way. He spoke a plain Russian that the new mass party understood, and he carefully avoided the polished theoretical style that made Trotsky and Bukharin sound like intellectuals lecturing the rank and file.

Trotsky’s strengths cut against him. His record in the Civil War as the founder of the Red Army gave him military prestige — but inside the Politburo this prestige read as Bonapartism, the danger that a charismatic general would replace the party with a personal dictatorship. He had only joined the Bolsheviks in August 1917; many old Bolsheviks remembered him as a Menshevik in the years before. He was a brilliant orator but a poor coalition-builder, often arrogant in committee, often absent from the party machine. Kamenev and Zinoviev had old credibility from the underground years but had been damaged by their public opposition to the October seizure of power. Bukharin, the most popular figure with the party’s younger generation, was a theorist rather than a manager, and his closeness to the NEP would prove fatal once Stalin turned against the policy.

Defeating the Left: Trotsky, 1923–25

The first phase of the succession was the Triumvirate — Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev — against Trotsky. The decisive ideological clash was over the future of the revolution. Trotsky argued for ‘Permanent Revolution’: Soviet Russia could not survive alone, and the regime had to push for revolution abroad, especially in industrialised Germany. Stalin and Bukharin replied with Socialism in One Country: with foreign revolutions clearly failing, the USSR had to build socialism inside its own borders. The Stalin–Bukharin position was practical, patriotic and reassuring; Trotsky’s sounded utopian and risky. At the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924 Trotsky was outvoted; in January 1925 he was forced to resign as Commissar for War.

Defeating the United Opposition, 1926–27

Once Trotsky was beaten, Stalin turned on his Triumvirate partners. Kamenev and Zinoviev, alarmed by the rising power of the General Secretariat and worried that the NEP was producing rural inequality, broke with Stalin in 1925 and proposed faster industrialisation. In 1926 they joined Trotsky to form the United Opposition. Stalin, allied now with Bukharin and the right of the party, used his control of party machinery to outvote and outmanoeuvre them. In November 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party. In January 1928 Trotsky was deported to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan; in January 1929 he was expelled from the USSR altogether.

Students often present 1924–28 as a debate about Permanent Revolution versus Socialism in One Country, decided on the merits. The argument mattered, but the votes did not turn on it. Stalin’s grip on the General Secretariat let him control who attended the congresses that took the decisions. Stalin’s apparent dullness was itself an advantage: every rival underestimated him because he sounded like a clerk. Strong answers explain that ideology framed the conflict but the party machine decided the outcome.

Defeating the Right: Bukharin, 1928–29

The third phase reversed the first. The 1927–28 grain procurement crisis — peasants withholding grain because state prices were too low — pushed Stalin towards forced collectivisation and rapid industrialisation. Bukharin, the architect of the NEP, called this an attack on the alliance with the peasantry and warned in 1928 of ‘military-feudal exploitation’ of the countryside. Stalin manoeuvred against him exactly as he had against the others: packing committees, controlling agendas, denouncing the ‘Right Opposition’ as enemies of socialism. In April 1929 Bukharin lost his Pravda editorship and his Comintern post; in November 1929 he was expelled from the Politburo. By the end of 1929 — ‘the year of the great breakthrough’ — Stalin’s 50th birthday was being celebrated as a national event, the cult of personality had begun, and the General Secretary was the undisputed leader of the USSR.