7 Joseph Stalin 7the party’s Central Committee, from 1922 until his death,
that provided the power base for his dictatorship. Besides
heading the secretariat, he was also member of the power-
ful Politburo. Because Stalin was unintellectual, his rivals
thought him unintelligent—a gross error, and one literally
fatal in their case.
Lenin’s Successor
From 1921 onward Stalin flouted the ailing Lenin’s wishes,
until, a year before his death, Lenin wrote a political “tes-
tament” calling for Stalin’s removal from the secretary
generalship. Coming from Lenin, this document was
potentially ruinous to Stalin’s career, but Stalin’s usual luck
and skill enabled him to have it discounted during his life-
time. After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin overcame his rivals,
including Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev,
Nikolay Bukharin, and Aleksey Rykov, and took control of
Soviet politics. Stalin expelled Trotsky, his main rival, from
the Soviet Union in 1929 and had him assassinated in
Mexico in 1940.
In 1928 Stalin inaugurated the five-year plans that
radically altered Soviet economic and social structures—
including intensive industrialization that forced
collectivization of agriculture and resulted in the deaths
of many millions. Among those who vainly sought to mod-
erate Stalin’s policies was his young second wife, Nadezhda
Alliluyeva, whom he had married in 1919. She committed
suicide in 1932.
In late 1934—just when the worst excesses of Stalinism
seemed to have spent themselves—Stalin launched a new
campaign of political terror against the very Communist
Party members who had brought him to power. Widespread
secret executions and persecution of not only party mem-
bers but also military leaders, industrial managers, a large