Who would succeed?
Finding a successor to Lenin was never going to be easy. He had played a unique role in holding the party
together and giving it direction after the revolution. There was a real possibility that in-fighting and division could
pull the Communist party apart. For five years after 1924, a power struggle took place in the USSR. The person
who emerged as the victor of this struggle was Joseph Stalin. We need to examine how this happened and why
Stalin was able to defeat his opponents.
If one man was to dominate Russia on Lenin’s death, he would probably emerge from the members of the
Politburo in 1924. In retrospect, it is clear that the contest for the leadership of the Communist Party was really
between Trotsky and Stalin. But this was not apparent at the time. At first, Stalin was regarded as a minor player,
with the chief contenders being Trotsky on the one hand and Zinoviev and Kamenev on the other. Also, in the
early stages the power struggle was more about stopping others from getting to the top rather than trying to
come out on top oneself.
It is useful to place the contenders for party leadership in terms of their political position in the party of 1924.
There was a clear split between the radical left wing led by Trotsky and the right wing headed by Bukharin. The
majority of the party members lay somewhere in between. Stalin fell into this group.
ACTIVITY
Stage 1
From the List below, choose the six most important qualities/characteristics that you think would have been
advantageous for a leader in the USSR to have in 1924. You can add one other of your own choice not on the list.
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Good Marxist theoretician, who could take over Lenin’s mantle
Good orator
Capacity for organisation
Decisiveness
Capacity for action
Able to melt into the background
Boring and dull
Good at carrying out routine tasks
Good at doing paperwork, a good bureaucrat
Unwavering loyalty to the party
Clear vision of the way to socialism and prepared to take on party members that did not share this vision
An important player in the Revolution of 1917
Somebody everybody could accept because he did not have strong views
Good in discussion and debate
Popular with the party
Able to work with other leading party figures
Able to be ruthless
Good writer