He constantly lost his temper, but when he set his mind to charming a man, he was irresistible. He was my only son." Statues and portraits of Stalin were removed from public places. However, soon after entering the building he was arrested. He was then injected with poison and died right there in the office. Orlov learnt of this letter from a close contact in France. At 9 p.m. The Smolny Institute became the headquarters of the revolution and was transformed into a fortress. Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. This was signed by Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Grigori Sokolnikov, the Commissar of Finance, and Nadezhda Krupskaya, the widow of Lenin. The German northern forces surrounded Leningrad while the centre group made steady progress towards Moscow. Week after week, the heads of Red Army Intelligence received updates on the Wehrmacht's preparations. We swear to you, comrade Lenin, that we will not spare our own lives in strengthening and broadening the union of labouring people of the whole world - the Communist International." To improve the living standards of all Soviet citizens. How could these old Bolsheviks who went through the jails and exiles of Czarism, who were the heroes of the civil war, the leaders of industry, the builders of the party, diplomats, turn out at the moment of "the complete victory of socialism" to be saboteurs, allies of fascism, organizer of espionage, agents of capitalist restoration? This is a mistake. However, they were not as popular as they believed and that Stalin was very popular with the ordinary Party member. Even there he never lost heart. (15), At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party held in London in 1903, there was a dispute between Lenin and Julius Martov over the future of the SDLP. On 6th January, 1928, Stalin sent out a secret directive threatening to sack local party leaders who failed to apply "tough punishments" to those guilty of "grain hoarding". Stalin's lack of smoothness, his anti-oratory, inspired trust. The three men became known as the "triumvirate". Stalin favoured what he called "socialism in one country" whereas Trotsky still supported the idea of world revolution. Stalin was insistent and on the 19th February, 1937, the newspapers announced the death of Sergo by heart attack. Prior to World War I, he organised and conducted robberies to fund the party’s activities. But this, too, was quite futile, as subsequent events soon proved." Tough-skinned, ruthless drill-sergeants from the ranks of the proletariat had displaced the argumentative intellectuals... By education, experience, and interests the group around Lenin had been cosmopolitan and internationalist; it was brilliant and cultured, at home in Europe and European languages; and it was middle-class in its origins. Orlov's men were given false papers that suggested the gold was being moved by the Bank of America: "If the anarchists intercepted my men, Russians with truckloads of Spanish gold, they would kill my men, and it would be a tremendous political scandal all over the world, and it might even create an internal revolution." Yezhov requested Georgy Malenkov but Stalin wanted to keep him in the Central Committee and sent him Lavrenty Beria instead. (129), The journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, discovered the existence of widespread famine in the Soviet Union in 1933. Lenin wrote, “Comrade Stalin has enormous power. I thought quickly. All major decisions made by his front-line commanders had to be cleared with Stalin first. ", "And now," I said, my embarrassment all too evident, "may I ask you some personal questions? The Red Guards, led by Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, now entered the Winter Palace. This included the threat to arrest and execute members of the prisoner's family if they did not confess. This appeared to give him more confidence and at meetings of the Politburo he sometimes questioned Stalin's decisions. (His sources are mainly in the Russian language, but many of them are brought to light for the first time.) "He sat outside the door of Lenin's office like a sentry," said Robbins, "watching everyone who went in and out, no less faithful than a sentry and, as far as we then knew, not much more important.' Stalin was fully aware that if Britain and the USA withdrew from the war, the Red Army would have great difficulty in dealing with Germany on its own. I felt that I was taking more of Stalin's time than I had any right to do, and that the talk would go on and on interminably if I did not call it off myself. Joseph Stalin told Nikolai Yezhov that he needed some help in running the NKVD and asked him to choose someone. Shortly after a decree was issued by the Central Soviet Executive ordering all officers of the old army within territories of the Republic to report on a certain day at certain places." Stalin also promised that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan three months after the war with Germany ended and in return would recover what Russia had lost at the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). Stalin, in contrast, was a crude Georgian of peasant stock. By the beginning of 1938, most of the intelligence officers serving abroad had been targeted for elimination had already returned to Moscow. At Yalta, the Allies had attempted to persuade Stalin to join in the war with Japan. If Moscow was cut off in this way, the defeat of the Soviet Union was virtually inevitable. Lenin wrote to Trotsky asking for his support. Browse. Soviet Communist dictatorship was just as alien to the American people as Nazi dictatorship. As the result of a Party leadership distorted by such narrow considerations, the Party is to a considerable extent ceasing to be that living independent collectivity which sensitively seizes living reality because it is bound to this reality with a thousand threads." He complained to Stalin but he replied that it was just a routine investigation. July 6, 2010. That is the main thing now. Stalin promised the crowd that the Soviet government would grant: "complete freedom for the Finnish people, and for other peoples of Russia, to arrange their own life!" He was capable of working extraordinarily long hours - sixteen a day. An elderly woman in a leather jacket, red kerchief on her head. In his acceptance speech he argued: "I went to the Baltic states viciously anti-Bolshevik. This essay will analyze Stalin’s rise to power through the study of four main elements, which can be denominated as situation in the USSR, Stalin’s personal strength, the weaknesses of Stalin’s enemies and the role of luck and opportunities. Immediately following his death, the Soviet government launched a peace offensive that resulted a few months later in the settlement of the Korean war. The two minutes had stretched to nearly two hours. (16), Although Martov won the vote 28-23 on the paragraph defining Party membership. (113), Joseph Stalin now had a problem of workers wanting to increase their wages. His is a warm, high-mettled nature with something impetuously boyish about it, a startling contrast to the deliberate, methodical, very earnest Stalin. According to Kaganovich, he was never the same man again. His every gesture was a rebuke to the thousand little bureaucrats who had inflicted their puny greatness upon me in these Russian years. Politically things are quite ripe for the change of power. (36), (If you are enjoying this article, please feel free to share. One of his fellow students wrote: "We felt like prisoners, forced to spend our young lives in this place although innocent." Only a strong, pro-Communist government in Poland would be able to guarantee the security of the Soviet Union. Three new members were designated: Kaganovich, Kirov, and Kossior. - have by the whole course of their lives proved their disinterested devotion to the Russian people and their struggle for liberation. Twenty-four per cent, nearly a quarter, of all Russian industrial workers worked in factories of that size. She also advocated that before the government attempts to "rid Soviet institutions of the bureaucracy that lurks within them, the Party must first rid itself of its own bureaucracy." The theoretical mistake of the ruling party remains inexplicable, however, only if you leave out of account the fact that all calculations at that time were based on the hope of an early victory of the revolution in the West." Essentially this condition still prevails. Elbrus alongside a heap of dung. (10), For several months after leaving the seminary Stalin was unemployed. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler." Another factor in this was the way that the German Army massacred the people of Minsk. The AST was used to remove all those who had knowledge of the conspiracy to destroy Stalin's rivals. According to Edvard Radzinsky, the author of Stalin (1996): "Factionalism became punishable by expulsion. (22), Stalin was now a committed Bolshevik. He demanded a 111% increase in coal production, 200% increase in iron production and 335% increase in electric power. (33), On 20th October, the Military Revolutionary Committee had its first meeting. Karl Radek and Grigori Sokolnikov were sentenced to ten years. Kirov also gained support from Stalin's old friend, Gregory Ordzhonikidze. Stalin wrote to Lenin: "I'm overdue with my letter, comrade. They were more like caged animals than human beings, not wild beasts but dumb cattle, patient with suffering eyes. His dilemma was that he was the leader of a Party with no Fiittrerprinzip but the ruler of a country accustomed to Tsarist autocracy. The building and this office were as unlike the usual, littered, chaotic Soviet institution as possible: quiet, orderly, unhurried but efficient. Stalin's nerves were already strained to the utmost. The penitence did not ring true! Here the criminal appeal to the non-Party masses was to be made, from the balcony of the former Paris hotel. The chief political story of the 1920s in Soviet Russia was the rise to supreme power of Joseph Stalin, and the related failure of Leon Trotsky. The former girls' convent school also housed the Petrograd Soviet. The main objective of Winston Churchill and Stalin was the capture of Berlin, the capital of Germany. This was reinforced by a speech Stalin made in Helsinki on November 16th, 1917. myers_clare PLUS. Soviet authorities estimated that in all, over twenty million of their people were killed during the Second World War. Women and children were also killed in large numbers. It was impossible, therefore, for him to forgive Trotsky's continuous criticism, which was further damned by his natural exasperation against this labourer who had been hired at the eleventh hour. Lenin was no longer able to speak or write and although he lived for another ten months, he ceased to exist as a power within the Soviet Union. When the future Marshal Zhukov first met him, he could not sleep afterwards: "The appearance of Joseph Stalin, his quiet voice, the concreteness and depth of his judgements, the attention with which he heard the report made a great impression on me." Stalin told Khrushchev: "Before Beria arrived, dinner meetings used to be relaxed, productive affairs. Click the button below to download this worksheet for use in the classroom or at home. After the revolution, Nadezhda worked as a confidential code clerk in Lenin's office. He claimed that many of the peasants had bodies swollen from hunger, and there was an "all-pervading sight and smell of death." Stalin's rise to power (1) by Michael Lynch. (164), He was followed by Gregory Zinoviev who also made a full confession. On 25th March 1933, the Manchester Guardian published Muggeridge's report: "I mean starving in its absolute sense; not undernourished as, for example, most Oriental peasants... and some unemployed workers in Europe, but having had for weeks next to nothing to eat." (76), With the decline of Trotsky, Joseph Stalin felt strong enough to stop sharing power with Lev Kamenev and Gregory Zinoviev. One of the most important figures in the history of the Soviet Union, Stalin and his policies are a matter of debate even today. The interrogation went on for several days and nights and eventually they became so exhausted and disoriented that they signed confessions agreeing that they had been attempting to overthrow the government. When Sorge's prediction that Germany would invade in May, 1941, did not take place, Stalin became even more convinced that the war would not start until 1942. He was-absolute master of political theory and practice. No one, not even someone as rash as Hitler, would invade the Soviet Union in the winter, he argued. It is not a cockroach but a thousand wild animals. Stalin smiled his assent and Voroshilov, having shaken hands with Charlie and myself, joined the group at the table. Churchill in particular, were afraid that Soviet involvement would lead to an increase in their influence over countries in the Far East. According to Mikhail Shpiegelglass he was called to Frinovsky's office and found him dead from a heart attack. Everywhere were found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless." Stalin first met Nadezhda two years earlier. Isaac Deutscher quoted Stalin as saying: "No comrades... the pace must not be slackened! The rise of Stalin ushered in the bloodiest period in Russia’s history. The blackjack - the zhgtrti - and the truncheon - the dubenka - were his favourite toys. But what transpired surpassed all my expectations of human baseness. It was claimed by Alexander Orlov that a trusted Reiss family friend, Gertrude Schildback, lured Reiss to a rendezvous, where the Mobile Group killed Reiss with machine-gun fire on the evening of 4th September 1937. Kirov argued against the death penalty being used. (77), Joseph Stalin now formed an alliance with Nikolay Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky and Alexei Rykov, on the right of the party, who wanted an expansion of the New Economic Policy that had been introduced several years earlier. If the worker's record was poor, he was accused of trying to sabotage the Five Year Plan and if found guilty could be shot or sent to work as forced labour on the Baltic Sea Canal or the Siberian Railway. They were advised that a conspiracy against Stalin and the Government had been uncovered and that it would be left to them to secure confessions. (161), The trial opened on 19th August 1936. Stalin's response to France's defeat was to send Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin for more discussions. (86), In September 1926 Stalin threatened the expulsion of Yuri Piatakov, Leon Trotsky, Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Mikhail Lashevich and Grigori Sokolnikov. In the struggle to destroy Stalin's dictatorship, we must in the main rely not on the old leaders but on new forces. Y. S. Agranov, the deputy commissar of the secret police, reported to Stalin he was not able to prove that they had been directly involved in the assassination. Lenin sought to stifle the very possibility of opposition. There were two types of collective farms introduced. The following day the Red Guards surrounded the Winter Palace. Stalin wrote an article for Pravda attacking officials for being over-zealous in their implementation of collectivisation. (57), A few days later Lenin added a postscript to his earlier testament: "Stalin is too rude, and this fault... becomes unbearable in the office of General Secretary. Stalins Rise To Power...Comrade General Secretary Joseph Stalin’s rise to power in the former Soviet Union was born in the midst of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Those farmers who expanded the size of their farms became known as kulaks. Such a front, if established in good heart, and with resolute and efficient military arrangements, combined with the strength of the Western Powers, may yet confront Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Goebbels and co. with forces the German people would be reluctant to challenge.". But I saw him stretch out his feet and lean back in leisurely fashion as though we had hours ahead of us. Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author of Stalin: The Count of the Red Tsar (2004): "Yezhov was called upon to kill his own NKVD appointees whom he had protected. Stalin possessed the dominant will among his magnates, but they also found his policies generally congenial. When he visited the countryside he saw starving young children that looked like "embryos out of alcohol bottles." He condemned Alexander Kerensky and Victor Chernov as counter-revolutionaries, and urged the peasants to takeover the land for themselves. And why is Stalin compelled to tie up the fate of his personal rule with these monstrous, impossible, nightmarish juridical trials? Publisher: Alpha History An estimated five million were deported to Central Asia or to the timber regions of Siberia, where they were used as forced labour. I was shocked by his sinister, two-faced, scheming hypocrisy. He also appointed his allies, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Gregory Ordzhonikidze, Lazar Kaganovich, Sergy Kirov, Semen Budenny and Andrei Andreev. The new law decreed that children of the age of twelve and over who were found guilty of crimes would be subjected to the same punishment as adults, up to and including the death penalty. He argued that people should be released from prison who had opposed the government's policy on collective farms and industrialization. •They argued amongst themselves. But then Stalin had been Stalin. Power stations also had to be built to supply the farms with electricity. Factors External Factors (Out of Stalin’s control) Lenin’s Testament Trotsky’s Unpopularity Stalin’s manipulations (within Stalin’s control) Pretended to be close to Lenin Used his role as General Secretary Took advantage of divisions within Party. Download Paper: 43. (35), Lenin insisted that the Bolsheviks should take action before the elections for the Constituent Assembly. The scorched earth policy and the formation of guerrilla units behind the German front lines, created severe problems for the German war machine which was trying to keep her three million soldiers supplied with the necessary food and ammunition. Before the Russian Revolution there had been 16 million farms in the country. But in the years that followed, with ample time to re assay my impressions, I did not change my mind about my essential reaction to Stalin's personality. Stalin insisted that it should be held at all costs. If this happened, western countries would take advantage of the situation and invade the Soviet Union. Trotsky was brilliant, proud, and independent. Towns, streets and parks named after him were changed. Citation information (99), In December, 1929, Stalin made a speech at the Communist Party Congress. Lenin ended his speech by telling the assembled crowd that they must "fight for the social revolution, fight to the end, till the complete victory of the proletariat". When territory was taken by the German Army, women, children and old men went into hiding and formed guerrilla units. (180), Major V. Dapishev of the Soviet General Staff has claimed that the plot "originated with Stalin" as he wanted to purge the leadership of the armed forces. They were only a pretext. It lies in the underestimation of the danger from the kulak - the rural capitalist. (52), Roy A. Medvedev, has argued in Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (1971) that on the surface it was a strange decision: "In 1922 Stalin was the least prominent figure in the Politburo. In December 1936 Beria arrested Papulia Ordzhonikidze, Sergo's elder brother, a railway official. The Plenum decided that Trotsky and Zinoviev had broken their promise to cease factional activity. General Demitry Pavlov, the man responsible for defending Minsk, and two of his senior generals were recalled to Moscow and were shot for incompetence. He was bitter in denunciation, often unfair, but never personally malicious. When he was in his 30s, he took the name Stalin, from the Russian for “man of steel.”Stalin grew up poor and an only child. Within six days, the German Army had captured Minsk. According to a friend, Joseph Iremashvili: "His marriage was a happy one. However, Stalin was still suspicious of the British and thought that Churchill was trying to trick him into declaring war on Germany. (18), As Lenin and Plekhanov won most of the votes, their group became known as the Bolsheviks (after bolshinstvo, the Russian word for majority), whereas Martov's group were dubbed Mensheviks (after menshinstvo, meaning minority). We complain because, in the absence of independent witnesses, there is no way of knowing. (140), Walter Duranty and Eugene Lyons were not the only journalists in the Soviet Union who attacked Gareth Jones for his account of the famine. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans, she was beaten by Turkish Beys, she was beaten by Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian Pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all - for her backwardness... We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. He went to Kuban where he saw well-fed troops being used to coerce peasant starving to death. (155), According to Alexander Orlov, who was Chief of the Economic Department for Foreign Trade who worked closely with Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD): "Stalin decided to arrange for the assassination of Kirov and to lay the crime at the door of the former leaders of the opposition and thus with one blow do away with Lenin's former comrades. Lavrenti Beria started plotting against Stalin's old friend, Gregory Ordzhonikidze. It is not clear how widely the Ryutin Platform was spread, nor do we know how many party members actually read it or even heard of it. He wrote to a friend: "I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia. Orlov later claimed that "the decision to perform an execution abroad, a rather risky affair, was up to Stalin personally. (124), Joseph Stalin interpreted Ryutin's manifesto as a call for his assassination. What is extremely important is who counts the votes and how they are recorded." (59), The funeral took place on 27th January, and Stalin was a pallbearer with Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev, Nickolai Bukharin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Alexander Schottmann and Maihail Tomsky. At the plenum of the Central Committee in October, Stalin pointed out that Trotsky was originally a Menshevik: "In the period between 1904 and the February 1917 Revolution Trotsky spent the whole time twirling around in the company of the Mensheviks and conducting a campaign against the party of Lenin. But this did not worry him a bit, for he was convinced that he was carrying out the will of history. Stalin's rise to power (1) by Michael Lynch Stalin's rise to power (2) by Michael Lynch Stalin's rise to power (SHP) Stalin's rise to power checklist This article is by a famous historian of Russian history, Robert Service: Stalin's rise to power. Stalin wore the familiar olive-drab jacket with stand-up collar, belted at the waist, and his trousers were tucked into high black boots. Stalin believed this policy would lead to increased production. He was arrested, but was at first recalcitrant. Then came a series of official reports vaguely linking Nikolayev with present and past followers of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and other dissident old Bolsheviks." Kamenev was the strategist of the group, its solid brain, trained in matters of doctrine, which were to play a paramount part in the contest for power. Little damage was done but the action persuaded most of those defending the building to surrender. This bibliography was generated on Cite This For Me on Thursday, May 4, 2017. "Your congratulations, I place to the credit of the great Party... which bore me and reared me in its own image and likeness.". Two weeks later Dora Kaplan shot and severely wounded Lenin. He also urged policies that would tempt the Mensheviks into forming an alliance. I interrupted to ask, "Did you propose a customs union for the five German states?" (162), Yuri Piatakov accepted the post of chief witness "with all my heart." They disliked Stalin's movement to a doctrine that socialism could be built in a single country - and they simmered with resentment at the unceasing accumulation of power by Stalin." Stalin let them get on with it. The Bolsheviks set up their headquarters in the Smolny Institute. Who was the anonymous "individual"? Later he became more hostile to her and claimed that "she did a very bad thing: she made a cripple out of me." By ten in the evening, when the city was just coming to life, the seminarists had said their prayers they were on their way to bed." The finial stage of Stalin's Rise to Power was the ordered assassination of Trotsky in 1940 in Mexico. On the contrary, we must quicken it as much as is within our powers and possibilities. When Harry S. Truman told Stalin that the USA had a new powerful bomb he appeared pleased and asked no further questions about it. (28). If he ordered it, a so-called mobile brigade was dispatched to carry it out. This they did, but with their supplies cut-off from the west, they were unable to take the city. Stalin and Trotsky - a comparison. While they watched him struggling for his life, he raised his left arm. A week after the interview Duranty was also granted an interview. Tiflis is almost completely in the hands of the Mensheviks. In reality, he was supporting those on the right. While he was ill, Stalin received a letter from a Dr. Lydia Timashuk claiming that a group of seven doctors, including his own physician, Dr. Vinogradov, were involved in a plot to murder Stalin and some of his close political associates. Over 300 political prisoners were ruthlessly interrogated and subjected to inordinate pressure in order to gain information against Zinoviev and Kamenev that could be used in court against the defendants. From his experiences at the seminary, he had come to the conclusion that men were intolerant, coarse, deceiving their flocks in order to hold them in obedience; that they intrigued, lied, and as a rule possessed numerous faults and very few virtues. For the whole period it's been necessary to travel around the Caucasus, speak in debates, encourage comrades, etc. Whereas, Stalin "nasty, suspicious, cruel, and power-hungry, Stalin could not abide brilliant and independent people around him." In other words, Stalin thought that the remark was extravagantly laudatory. But the irony, the cruellest tragedy of the post-war world is, that without a break the leadership of the over-centralised and politically dominant Bolshevik party passed from one of the highest representatives of European culture to another who, in every respect except singlemindedness of purpose, was the very antithesis of his predecessor. He was not expelled. Stalin had been expecting a tall, self-regarding person. (174), In January, 1937, Yuri Piatakov, Karl Radek, Grigori Sokolnikov, and fifteen other leading members of the Communist Party were put on trial. (26), Joseph Stalin returned to Russia and over the next eight years he was arrested four times but each time managed to escape. The State Department set up machinery for expediting Soviet orders and investigated means of payment." One of Stalin's favorite tricks was to provoke you into making a statement - or even agreeing with a statement - which showed your true feelings about someone else. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years hard labour, Kamenev to five. Lenin had designated him as such in the Testament. However, he disagreed with Molotov, who was calling for the immediate overthrow of Prince Georgi Lvov. They also disavowed the extremists in their ranks who were led by Alexander Shlyapnikov. We've been bequeathed this state. On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive Number 21, better known as Operation Barbarossa. ", Ryutin then went onto making a very personal attack on Stalin: "To place the name of Stalin alongside the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin means to mock at Marx, Engels and Lenin. The sovkhoz (land was owned by the state and the workers were hired like industrial workers) and the kolkhoz (small farms where the land was rented from the state but with an agreement to deliver a fixed quota of the harvest to the government). "But if I could get a Latin-script typewriter," I said, "I could write my story right here and now and show it to you immediately.". 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