Abstract
Lenin’s death in January 1924 produced a vacuum at the apex of the Bolshevik political structure. It not only deprived the new state and the party of its chief driving force, but it also highlighted the unique position Lenin had occupied in the Bolshevik movement and the special problems that this created for his successors. Lenin’s dominance over the movement which he led for almost a quarter of a century had not rested on his incumbency of any particular office in the party, but upon the force of his personality and his role in the growth of Bolshevism. This personalised basis of his leadership1 meant that in purely institutional terms his death created no problem; power and authority within the party lay with the formal party organs, the Politburo, the Central Committee and the party congress, just as they had during his lifetime. However, the personalised nature of Lenin’s authority created a significant practical problem for those with aspirations to personal dominance in the post-Lenin period. It meant that his would-be successors could not gain similar authority through the occupation of a specific leadership position within the party. Consequently, the Lenin succession struggle did not focus on capturing control of any such position.
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Notes
This is discussed in terms of charismatic authority in Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929 (London, 1974) ch. 2.
Many in the party believed this interpreter should be the collective leadership. See Bukharin’s remarks in 1925. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (London, 1974) p. 224.
J. V. Stalin, Works (Moscow, 1953 ) vol. VI, pp. 47–53.
For some details of the burgeoning Lenin cult, see E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926 (Harmondsworth, 1970 ) Vol. II, pp. 11–12.
Leon Trotsky, On Lenin: Notes Towards a Biography (London, 1971) pp. 85–6. For a discussion of the reaction to these books, see Carr, Socialism in One Country, pp. 13–14 and 17–40, and Tucker, Stalin, pp. 337–54.
Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (New York, 1958) p. 48.
On literacy levels in the party, see Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd edn (London, 1970) p. 315;
and Roger Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism (London, 1974) p. 156.
Speech to the 13th Congress of the party. Trinadtsatyi syezd Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (bol’shevikov). Mai 1924 goda: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1963) p. 158.
One historian speaks of a ‘religious, cultist attitude toward such concepts as the Party, the Soviet state, the Revolution, and the proletariat’ — Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (New York, 1971) p. 164.
All membership figures are from T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, NJ, 1968), p. 52. For a discussion of the problems in establishing the number of members in October 1917, see ibid., pp. 61–3. One recent article cites a figure of 350,000 members in October 1917. ‘KPSS v tsifrakh’, Partiinaya zhizn’, ( 1977, no. 21, p. 21 ).
The author has analysed fluctuations in the cult of Stalin in his unpublished MA thesis, ‘The Cult of Personality and the Search for Legitimacy: The Cases of Mao and Stalin’ (Monash University, 1973 ).
These criteria were reaffirmed in theoretical terms in K. Popov, ‘Partiya i roi’ vozhdya’, Partiinoe stroitel’stvo, 1930, no. 1, pp. 5–9.
One qualification should be added. Despite the overwhelming of the ‘Lenin as leader’ image by that of Stalin, the former did not disappear entirely. For example, it was claimed in 1950, ‘Comrade Stalin, guided by Lenin, came forward as Lenin’s closest disciple, his most faithful follower, as, after Lenin, our Party’s greatest theoretician, organizer, and Party builder’ — L. Beria, The Great Inspirer and Organizer of the Victories of Communism, (Moscow, 1950 ) p. 5.
The flavour of this theme of the cult is suggested by the following verse: ‘He remembers us/at every hour,/Works, builds,/lives for us./He loves each and every one,/like a kind father,/And in his heart he carries/millions of hearts’ — cited in T. H. Rigby, ‘Some Aspects of the Stalin Myth’, Melbourne University Magazine, 1949, p. 84. See also Gill, ‘The Cult of Personality’, pp. 185–92.
By 1939 8o per cent of party members still lacked any secondary-level education (Pethybridge, Social Prelude to Stalinism, p. 175). On traditional political culture and its image of authority, see Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 429; and Stephen White, ‘The USSR: Patterns of Autocracy and Industrialism’, in Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London, 1977) pp. 25–34.
A ‘commandist’ tendency in the party had been noted as early as 1923. See Leon Trotsky, The New Course (New York, 1965) p. 154.
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© 1980 Graeme Gill
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Gill, G. (1980). Political Myth and Stalin’s Quest for Authority in the Party. In: Rigby, T.H., Brown, A., Reddaway, P. (eds) Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04326-2_6
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