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4. THE STALINIST SYSTEM
There was no clear answer to the question of who should succeed Lenin as dictator of the Soviet Union. Much more was involved than merely finding a capable politician. Though only one political party was allowed in Russia, within that party there were different groups who emphasized different items of policy. While Lenin lived, his enormous and unrivalled prestige had kept those differences within bounds, but no sooner was he removed than they showed themselves in the form of bitter feuds. In the main these corresponded to the different methods of achieving the Communist objective, and they centred around two men – Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky was the best known of all Lenin's lieutenants. By birth he was a Jew, his real name being Lev Bronstein. Under the Czars his political views had compelled him to move from place to place outside Russia, including spells in Paris and New York, and twice he had suffered exile in Siberia. After the 1917 Revolution he was Commissar for War, and the Red Army's victories in 1919 and 1920 were due largely to his organization and planning. Believing that Communist Russia could never be safe in a Capitalist world, his policy was to spread Communism through world-wide revolution. Within Russia he would have been uncompromising in enforcing a full Communist programme. He therefore did not agree with the N.E.P. and its concessions to the peasants. Stalin, though as uncompromising as Trotsky in his devotion to Communism, differed from him in his policy for achieving it. He believed that the first step must be to build a strong Communist Russia which should be sound economically and as nearly self-sufficing so possible, so as not to be dependent upon trade with Capitalist competitors. In the rivalry between the two men, it was Stalin's policy that accorded more nearly with the wishes of most of the Russian people and of the Communist leaders. Trotsky's aim of international Communism almost inevitably would have brought clashes with the Capitalist West, and Russia was tired of the bloodshed and devastation that revolutionary war had brought. The details of the clash between Stalin and Trotsky do not concern us. Indeed many of them have never been clear. The main facts are that Stalin, winning the support of most of the influential Communist leaders, gained office after office, as he climbed the political ladder, though not until 1929 was he in a position of complete supremacy. Parallel with this, Trotsky was being driven from position to position. In 1926 he lost his place on the Politburo – the small central committee which controlled official appointments and policy – and in 1927 he was expelled from the Party, and finally, in 1929, he was exiled from Russia. Thereafter he moved from country to country spending most of his time in writing, until at last, while in Mexico, he was murdered in August 1940.
The man on whom Lenin's mantle fell had been named Joseph Djugashvili. He came of peasant stock and was the son of a shoemaker in a small Georgian town in the Caucasus. Later he took the simpler name of Stalin which means 'steel'. He had joined Lenin's party as early as 1903 and thus was one of the Old Guard among Bolsheviks. Yet he differed from most of his associates in not being an intellectual and in having a viewpoint limited to Russia. His peasant background remained the moulding influence of his life. This is not to say that he was unintelligent or slow-witted. He could be a crafty schemer, but he lacked Lenin's general culture and, unlike Trotsky, he had no personal experience of western countries. He was a man of inflexible will, bitterly vindictive towards enemies, and so rough in his dealings with colleagues that Lenin considered him unfit to be the ruler of Russia. Stalin's succession to power was expected to assure the supremacy of the Old Guard to whom he belonged. In fact the reverse took place. Stalin could endure neither rivals nor equals, preferring to be surrounded by such as we have come to call 'Yes-men'. The result was a series of 'purges', especially in 1936–38, in which most of those who had been prominent Party leaders were either executed or sentenced to long imprisonments. To Western observers the strangest feature of the trials was the readiness, almost the eagerness, with which the accused men confessed themselves guilty of treason or of sabotaging the Government's industrial or agricultural projects, or the like. In addition to the prominent men who were executed after such trials, many thousands of others were disposed of without trial. The result of these 'purges' was that by the time that the Second World War broke out in 1939 Stalin remained undisputed dictator of the U.S.S.R., though he did not become Prime Minister until May 1941, previous to which he had been (since 1922) only the Secretary of the Communist Party. His methods of reaching this eminence differed little from those of Hitler and Mussolini. It was at a critical moment in Russian development that Stalin elbowed his way into supremacy. Lenin's regime had made the Revolution secure against any immediate danger of overthrow from enemies either inside or outside the country. But only slight beginnings had been made to reorganize the Russian nation on Communist principles, and even those beginnings had been modified by Lenin's N.E.P. of 1921. The supreme task, therefore, to which Stalin set himself was to transform Russia from a peasant society into a highly industrialized, self-sufficient nation. With ruthless, inflexible determination, heedless of the cost to masses of the population who would be involved, he pursued his course and so far succeeded that his work constituted a second revolution. By 1939 Russia had become the third nation in the world in industrial production (a position formerly held by Britain), the first two being the U.S.A. and Germany. This result was achieved by a double process: on the land and in the factories.
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