Did Stalin win power by skill or his rivals’ errors?

The short answer

• The party had no rules for succession. Lenin’s personal authority held together a leadership with no office of party leader and no settled succession procedure. The Politburo made policy, while the Orgburo and Secretariat dealt with personnel. When illness removed Lenin from active leadership in 1922, his colleagues governed collectively and competed for influence. Control of committees could gradually convert that collective authority into personal power.
• The General Secretary controlled appointments. In April 1922 Stalin became General Secretary, a job his colleagues regarded as administrative. It gave him oversight of thousands of assignments and admissions, including the 1924 Lenin Enrolment. Provincial secretaries who owed him their positions selected congress delegates. Through these routine decisions he could gather a majority before his rivals recognized how formidable he had become.
• His rivals feared Trotsky more than Stalin. The Bolsheviks knew the French Revolution’s history: a general, Napoleon Bonaparte, had seized power after it. Trotsky, creator of the Red Army, seemed the obvious candidate for that role. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin each joined Stalin to block him. Their choice made sense in light of their fear, but it left the quiet organizer free to turn the apparatus against each of them.
• NEP’s grain problem made policy a weapon. Industrialization raised two connected questions: how fast should it proceed, and who should pay? The Left wanted resources taken from peasants for factories; the Right preferred the market and slower growth. The grain crisis of 1927–28 forced a choice. Having defended NEP against the Left, Stalin abandoned it and isolated the Right.

What it changed

A leader without rivals launched the Great Turn. Victory in 1927–29 left Stalin able to impose forced collectivization and rapid industrialization without an opposing faction to stop him. His choices for 1929–33 received the approval of a Politburo filled with allies, including Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. A leader who argued for slower change risked being called a “Rightist”. The succession had determined the pace of change as well as its author.

Defeated rivals became future defendants. The men defeated in the succession struggle later figured in the Great Terror. Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in August 1936 after the first Moscow show trial; Bukharin and Rykov were shot in March 1938. Tomsky killed himself in 1936 before arrest, and an NKVD agent murdered Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. The trials accused former oppositionists of plotting with foreign powers since the 1920s.

Loyalty replaced debate inside the party. Public argument had already been weakened by the 1921 ban on factions. Once the remaining open factions were defeated, opposition brought expulsion and later arrest. Officials learned to anticipate Stalin’s wishes. Ian Kershaw used the phrase “working towards the Führer” for a comparable habit in Hitler’s Germany; under Stalin, anticipation also made the cult and the Terror easier to organize.

“Socialism in one country” justified the plans. The slogan “socialism in one country” gave the later plans a rationale as well as helping Stalin win. If socialism had to be built in a Soviet Union surrounded by enemies, industrialization could be presented as essential to survival. The Five-Year Plans put that idea into practice, with defense as their deepest purpose. Their sacrifices could be justified by the prospect of fighting a war alone.