7. power struggle

• Lenin dictated a series of fragmentary notes for the forthcoming Twelfth Party Congress which became known as his Testament

  23 December - 4 January
• Lenin ordered the notes to be kept secret but his secretaries showed them to Stalin
• Throughout these writings there is a sense of anxiety and perhaps despair at the way the revolution had turned out
• Three main problems Lenin's last notes were concerned with

  • The Georgian affair, the nationalities question and what sort of union treaty should be signed
  • To check the powers of the party's leading organs
  • The question of the succession
• Stalin's plans for the non-Russian republics

  They should join Russia as autonomous regions, effectively depriving them of the right to secede from the union, which Lenin wanted them to have as sovereign republics
• Stalin's plans were bitterly opposed by the Georgian Bolsheviks
• Lenin was outraged when he learned that Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the head of Moscow's Caucasian Bureau and Stalin's close ally, had beaten up a Georgian Bolshevik
• Lenin's proposal to democratize the Central Committee

  • Adding 50 to 100 new members from the lower party organs
  • Making the Politburo more accountable to the Central Committee
• Faults of party leaders pointed out by Lenin


  • Kamenev and Zinoviev were compromised by the stand against him in October 1917
  • Bukharin's theoretical views could only be classified as Marxist with reserve
  • Trotsky displayed excessive self-assurance
• Lenin's criticism of Stalin

  Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in dealings between Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. Lenin suggested the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from the post.
• Lenin became ill overnight after learning about an incident where Stalin had subjected Trotsky 'to a storm of coarse abuse' for communicating his congratulations to Trotsky after a debating victory against the triumvirate
• Three days later Lenin suffered his third major stroke which robbed him of speech until his death ten months later
• Trotsky was a finished as a major political force
• The Left Opposition was a noisy critic of the triumvirate but impotent against the Party apparatus, which was increasingly in Stalin's hands
• Lenin's Testament was read out to the Central Committee and other senior delegates at a meeting prior to Thirteenth Party Congress


  May 1924
• Stalin offered to resign but Zinoviev and Kamenev persuaded the meeting to disregard Lenin's advice to remove him from the post of General Secretary</b>
• The congress turned into a chorus of denunciation against Trotsky and calls for Party unity, against which Trotsky was unable to resist
• Trotsky was removed from ministerial office


  January 1925
• Trotsky was expelled from the Party after he has tried to organize an independent demonstration commemorating the tenth anniversary of the October seizure of power


  November 1927
• Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union


  1929
• Most of Trotsky's supporters were expelled from the Party on a resolution by the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 declaring 'opposition' views incompatible with Party membership
• Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had joined the Opposition against Stalin in 1926, were expelled as well, though both admitted their mistakes publicly and were readmitted in 1928
• Triumvirate


  Stalin, Kamanev and Zinoviev
• Triumvirate's actions

  1. Met before party meetings

  2. Agreed their strategy

  3. Instructed their followers on how to vote
• Lenin recovered from his stroke

  Russia was ruled by the triumvirate
• Lenin became suspicious of the triumvirate


  The triumvirate was acting like a ruling clique behind his back
• Lenin asked Trotsky to join him

  In a 'bloc against bureaucracy' (i.e. Stalin and his power base)
• Lenin suffered his second major stroke

  15 December
• Stalin's actions

  • Took charge of Lenin's doctors
  • Restricted visitors
  • Confined Lenin to his wheelchair
  • Allowed Lenin to dictate for only '5 to 10 minutes a day'
  • Lenin became Stalin's prisoner
  • Lenin's secretaries reported everything he said to Stalin
• Lenin had become Stalin's prisoner
• The Twelfth Party Congress finally convened


  April 1923
• Lenin's Testament was not read out to the delegates
• Trotsky posed as the champion of the rank and file against the 'police regime' of the leadership
• Trotsky addressed an Open Letter to the Central Committee accusing it of suppressing democracy in the party

  8 October
• Trotsky's stance was hypocritical given his own super-centralism in the civil war
• Support for Trotsky came from

  • A Group of 46 leading Bolsheviks
  • Their Declaration formed the basis of the Left Opposition against the triumvirate between 1923 and 1927
• The party leadership used the Declaration as evidence to accuse Trotsky of breaking Lenin's ban on factions passed in 1921
• Trotsky tried to defend himself against allegations of 'Bonapartism'


  1. Recounting how he had rejected Lenin's offer of high office - once in October 1917 (Commissar of the Interior) and again in 1922 (Deputy Chairman of Sovnarkom) - on the grounds that it was unwise to have a Jew in such a senior post

  2. Lenin had dismissed his objection on the first occasion but agreed on the second
• Trotsky's implication was obvious: opposition to him in the party - and Lenin had acknowledged this - stemmed from the fact that he was a Jew
• This made no impression on the delegates