Exercise 3: Durable Institutions Without a Settled Succession — Possible Solution
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This exercise is asking you to explain why building strong state
institutions and having a genuinely stable transfer of power at the top
are two separate real problems, not the same problem solved twice.

WHAT THE BOLSHEVIKS HAD ACTUALLY BUILT BY 1922
By the end of 1922, the Bolsheviks had real, functioning institutions
covering coercion (the Cheka), political control (a banned opposition,
both external and internal), the economy (a stabilizing NEP), and
formal statehood (the newly signed USSR treaty). These were genuine,
durable structures, not improvised wartime measures.

WHAT NONE OF THOSE INSTITUTIONS ACTUALLY DECIDED
Not one of them specified who should lead the party or the state once
Lenin himself was no longer able to. There was no real, agreed formal
process - no election, no fixed succession rule, no designated deputy -
determining who took over his own role. Lenin's personal authority had
functioned, in practice, as an informal but real glue holding senior
Bolshevik figures together, not something any institution had ever
codified.

WHY THIS GAP MATTERED ONCE HIS HEALTH DECLINED
A state can have extremely durable institutions for governing day to
day and still have no real answer to the specific question of who
holds ultimate authority within those institutions. Lenin's own
strokes exposed that gap directly - his Testament tried informally to
address it by warning against Stalin, but a personal recommendation
from an incapacitated leader carried no real, binding institutional
force the way a formal succession rule would have.

ANSWER: Durable institutions and a stable succession are genuinely
different problems - the Bolsheviks had built real, lasting structures
for governing the state day to day, but had never created any formal,
binding process for choosing who led those structures once Lenin
himself could no longer perform that role. His own declining health
exposed that specific gap, leaving the question of succession to be
settled through a real power struggle rather than any institutional
mechanism the state had already built.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It distinguishes the institutions that govern a state from the
separate, genuinely unresolved question of who holds ultimate authority
within them, explaining why building the former doesn't automatically
solve the latter.