Stalin triumphant

Stalin survives

With Lenin dead, his Testament was the ‘smoking gun’. Would it destroy Stalin?

At the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924, Lenin's widow, Krupskaya presented the Central Committee with a sealed packed containing the Testament. It was a dangerous moment for Stalin, but Zinoviev and Kamenev were prepared to back him and Trotsky was afraid of appearing divisive - committing the supreme Soviet sin of 'factionalism'. Kamenev hinted that the Testament was a product of Lenin's senility.

Our dear Ilyich's sickness prevented him at times from being fair.

He thus helped save the man who was to destroy him.

The fall of Trotsky

In October 1924 Trotsky published Lessons of October, arguing for ‘permanent revolution’ and 'world revolution'. Stalin responded with the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’, the view that the Soviet Union could build socialism on its own without needing to export it. In the following year, Zinoviev and Kamenev once more unwittingly laid the foundations of their destruction. Having supported Stalin in 1924, they became uncomfortable with his apparent support for a market economy and came to believe that Trotsky's warnings were correct. In 1926 they allied with Trotsky and formed what was known as the 'Left Opposition'

But Stalin's years of building up a patronage network were now bearing fruit. By the end of 1928 all three 'Leftists' (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev) had been expelled from the party. In mid-January 1929 Trotsky was dispatched to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan on the Chinese frontier. In 1929 he was deported to Turkey. Just before his departure he called on Communists throughout the world to struggle against Stalin.

After this Trotsky was erased from the records. Photographs were doctored and Eisenstein was ordered to leave him out of his film October.

Lenin's speech. An image edited
after Stalin's rise to remove Trotsky.
Public domain.

Zinoviev and Kamenev had recanted and were now back in favour - apparently. But, apart from Stalin, the man of the moment seemed to be Nikolai Bukharin President of the Comintern from 1926. He was a supporter of Lenin’s New Economic Policy and his call to the kulaks to enrich themselves was a startling departure from Bolshevik orthodoxy.

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin
Stalin's friend until destroyed by Stalin.
Public domain.

In 1929 Stalin's birthday was celebrated throughout the Soviet Union. This was the start of what was to be one of the most extraordinary personality cults in history.

Private life

In December 1934, Stalin's wife Nadya (Nadezhda Alliluyeva) committed suicide by shooting herself. It was a devastating personal blow to Stalin, who was now left with two young children, Vasily and Svetlana.

Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife.
Public domain.

Unable to bear living any more in his old apartment, Stalin changed apartments with Bukharin and moved into the Yellow Palace, the Senate in tsarist times. His main residence was his dacha at Kuntsevo, nine miles from the Kremlin. (He was to die there in 1953.)

The new Soviet man

Once firmly established in power, Stalin brought the ideology of Bolshevism to its logical, and pitiless, conclusion. The past had to go, and a new type of human being created. This involved the deaths millions of people and the destruction of traditional ways of life – also of many buildings associated with the tsarist regime.

In 1931 the nineteenth-century Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was destroyed and replaced by the Palace of the Soviets.  (It has since been rebuilt by public subscription.)

The demolition of the Cathedral of
Christ the Saviour, 5 December 1931.
Public domain.

The Soviet modernisation project, symbolised in the 1920s by the electrification programme, can be seen the in creation of the Moscow Metro. In 1931 the Central Committee of the Communist Party ratified what had begun as a tsarist project and the first line was open to the public on 15 May 1935.

Sokolniki Station, opened in 1935, first phase.
Florstein (WikiPhotoSpace)

Both the demolition of the cathedral and the Metro were supervised by one of Stalin's most reliable henchmen, Lazar Kaganovich, who, astonishingly, not only survived the purges but lived until 1991. This lucky apparatchik also supervised the terrible Ukraine famine.

Conclusion

1. The magnificence of  Moscow metro symbolised Soviet triumphalism. It represented a new society and a new type of human being.
2. Stalin was at the height of his power, the centre of an unprecedented personality cult.
3. Industry and agriculture had been transformed, and millions had been killed or sent to labour camps.