Stalin's Rise to Power

Chapter 6 closed on a real, genuine gap — durable Soviet institutions with no agreed process for choosing who led them. Lenin died on 21 January 1924, and the five years that followed answered that question through a real power struggle, not an election or a fixed rule.

Lenin's Death & the Triumvirate

The alliance that shaped the struggle's early outcome had actually formed before Lenin died. As early as May 1922, Stalin built a real Triumvirate with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, united by one shared, practical goal: keeping Trotsky — widely seen as the most likely and most dangerous rival — from succeeding Lenin.

Lenin's own Testament, dictated during his final illness and warning explicitly against Stalin's growing power, was read aloud only to the heads of provincial delegations at the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924 — not to the full Congress. Kamenev and Zinoviev, still needing Stalin's own support against Trotsky, argued successfully that the Testament should not be made public. Stalin himself remained General Secretary.

The General Secretary's Real, Unglamorous Power

Stalin had held the post of General Secretary since April 1922 — a position his own rivals initially regarded as bureaucratic and unglamorous compared to Trotsky's real revolutionary prestige as the Red Army's own founder. In practice, it gave Stalin direct, personal control over party membership and appointments, letting him place loyalists in key regional and institutional posts years before the succession struggle came to a head.

Socialism in One Country vs. Permanent Revolution

In 1924, Stalin introduced a real, specific doctrine — "Socialism in One Country" — arguing the USSR could and should build socialism on its own, without waiting on revolution elsewhere. Trotsky's own rival theory, Permanent Revolution, held that socialism could never be secure in one backward country without genuine revolution spreading abroad, and warned that Stalin's own nationalist framing would distort the project. The dispute was a real ideological fight, but it was also a real proxy for the underlying question of who actually led the party.

The United Opposition & Trotsky's Real Fall (1926-1929)

Once Trotsky's own influence was sufficiently reduced, Stalin turned on his former Triumvirate partners. Feeling genuinely sidelined, Zinoviev and Kamenev switched sides in 1926, joining Trotsky in a real United Opposition against Stalin — an alliance between former enemies that never held together well.

Stalin expelled Trotsky and his allies from the party at the Fifteenth Congress in December 1927. Trotsky was sent into internal exile at Alma-Ata in January 1928, and formally expelled from the Soviet Union itself in February 1929 — the final, real end of his own capacity to challenge Stalin from inside the country.

Stalin's Real Ideological Reversal: Defeating the Right

With the Left Opposition defeated, Stalin's own remaining rival was Nikolai Bukharin's Right Opposition, which had allied with Stalin against Trotsky and Zinoviev while defending the NEP's own continuation and a gradual, peasant-friendly path to industrialization.

A real grain-procurement crisis in early 1928 gave Stalin his opening. Rather than defending the NEP alongside Bukharin, Stalin abruptly reversed his own previous position and adopted the rapid, forced industrialization program the defeated Left had originally proposed. Bukharin, along with Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky, opposed emergency grain requisitioning as a real betrayal of NEP principles — and were denounced at the Central Committee's January 1929 plenum. Bukharin was removed from the Politburo, the Comintern, and the editorship of Pravda that same year.

By the end of 1929, Stalin held real, undisputed power over the Soviet state. Chapter 8 covers what he did with it — the real, forced collectivization of agriculture and the first Five-Year Plans, and the devastating famine that followed.

Hands-On Exercises