The Tenth Party Congress of March 1921, which
saw the beginnings of NEP, also, as has been
noted, passed the resolutions against factions
within the party. The swollen Communist Party
itself was purged of some 200,000 members con-
sidered unreliable to the Bolshevik ideals. Lenin
warned that the revolutionary old guard must
hold together through all the transitional phases
of communism, even those like NEP which
marked a retreat from socialist objectives. How
temporary would the retreat have to be? That was
a fundamental and contentious issue. As long as
Lenin remained the indisputable leader, however
much debate and individual criticism took place
within the party, great changes of policy were still
possible without destroying the cohesion of the
party or without producing a savage fight, liter-
ally to the death, between Lenin’s lieutenants.
Lenin’s own premature death so early in the for-
mation of the state was therefore of enormous
significance.
The struggles of the revolution and war had
sapped Lenin’s strength. Towards the end of
1921 he fell seriously ill. In May 1922 at the age
of fifty-two he suffered a serious stroke which
paralysed his right side. By October he had recov-
ered sufficiently to resume a partial workload. In
December 1922 his health again deteriorated and
on 21 January 1924 he died. Of particular inter-
est during his last weeks of active work from the
end of 1922 to 4 January 1923 are the notes he
dictated which together comprise what was called
his ‘testament’. In these memoranda he stressed
the need to strengthen the unity of the Central
Party Committee, and characterised the strengths
and weaknesses of six leading members of the
party. The characterisation of Stalin, ‘who having
become the General Secretary has accumulated
enormous power in his hands and I am not sure
whether he will be able to use this power with
due care’, was especially important in view of the
question who should succeed Lenin. During his
illness he was outraged by Stalin’s attempt to cut
him off from influence in January 1923, a year
before his death. He urged Stalin’s dismissal and
replacement by a new general secretary ‘more tol-
erant, more loyal and less capricious’. It was too
late. Lenin was too ill to act as unquestioned
leader any longer. He had also criticised Trotsky,
though describing him as the other leading per-
sonality of the party, for ‘his too far-reaching self-
confidence’ and as too much attracted to pure
administration. What was the purpose of this
critical testament? Lenin was preoccupied by what
would happen after his death. He concluded that
no single one of the Bolshevik leadership could
be designated as his successor. By his frank criti-
cisms of all his lieutenants he was arguing for his
own solution to the succession. This was to
increase the Central Committee to fifty, even a
hundred persons, by adding industrial workers
and peasants close to the feeling of the rank and
file of the party and for this body to control and
supervise the collective leadership.
Following Lenin’s death no stable collective lead-
ership took over. Stalin, who had been appointed
general secretary with Lenin’s support in 1922 to
bring order to the organisation of the party, trans-
formed this important but secondary position
into a vehicle for the advancement of his personal
power. His work for the party before this eleva-
tion had shown him to be ruthless and a good
organiser. To these qualities he added cunning
and a sense of timing in political intrigue. Using
his powers to the full, he promoted to key posts
men who would follow him, and strengthened his
position further by removing others who sup-
ported rivals. Among the old guard, Trotsky was
widely disliked for his arrogance, intellectual bril-
liance and showmanship. Stalin aligned himself
with Zinoviev to undermine Trotsky’s influence.
In a little more than five years, he had ousted all
the prominent former leadership. But he was not
Lenin’s undisputed heir; nor did he enjoy the
veneration granted to the late leader. Stalin
encouraged a Lenin cult. He then kept himself at
the top by the ruthless liquidation of all real and
potential rivals who might conceivably challenge
his control. Not until the end of the Great Terror
in 1938 did any challenge to Stalin’s supreme
control become unthinkable. Yet his paranoid fear
of plots and conspiracies beset him to the end of
his life.
Lenin tolerated party discussion; Stalin could
not stifle it in the 1920s as the better-known,
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