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Why was Stalin so successful in becoming next leader of the USSR in 1924-1929?

At the beginning of the year 1924 Russia had already gone through a couple of stages in its development: The Revolution, which was lead by Bolshevik Party, the Comintern with Zinoviev as its President was founded and after all, Lenin had died. At this time Russia needed a new leader. The population of Russia needed someone who could bring the country forward to the stage of the western European countries. In order to achieve this, the politburo was founded with several politicians who wanted to become leaders of Russia, amongst others: Stalin. With his own ideas of how to rule Russia he, in the end, got the power. However why did Stalin manage to get the power, who were his opponents and what contribute did Lenin have to Stalin’s rise to power?

One of the reasons, why just Stalin got to the power was his strong personality. Joseph Stalin was born in 1879 into a poor family in Georgia. He was his mother’s fourth child and as the other three all died his mother feared that he was also died. That was the reason why his mother “was very protective towards him as a child” (John Simkin). Because of the poverty in his family Stalin experienced exactly what all poor peasants did. Later he joined the RSDLP and organised strikes, for which he even had to go to prison. After the Revolution he was made Commissar of Nationalities, which was not the best position for him because he had to deal with the “backward” people of the RSDLP. In 1919 he became head of Rabkrin which gave him powers to inspect all government departments. Three years later he became General Secretary of the Party and when he had his first stroke he was part of the unofficial “triumvirate”. As he had many posts, he was also nicknamed as the “Comrade Card Index”. After all you can say he was not a great proponent of Marxism, which separated him from other politicians. Furthermore the word “Stalin” means “man of steel” which also gave him a very special description. Because of his very particular character Stalin managed it to become the next leader of the USSR. However this wasn’t the only reason as the characters of the other politicians also contributed.

Another major reason why Stalin was so successful was the behaviour of his rivals. For example Trotsky, who was a well educated and widely travelled man. Although he had these extremely good characteristics, he was also quite arrogant, which is one reason why Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin voted him out of the Triumvirate, which Trotsky wanted to join. In addition to this, Trotsky made difficulties for himself, as he criticised the central committee, because it decided that Lenin’s testament should remain secret. By the time he lost more and more followers and was even accused for factionalism. Furthermore Trotsky failed to attend important events, which gave him a lack of political knowledge and he wasn’t up to date anymore. For these several reasons Stalin didn’t have to do a lot to remove Trotsky as a rival. Trotsky made it all by himself and alienated himself, which also led to the success of Stalin.

The Bolshevik party had a very special structure at the time of Stalin’s rise to power. Russia was a one-party state and the Bolshevik party therefore had the full power to rule the country. The government was composed by two principle components. First of all was the council of people’s commissar, in which only Bolshevik party members were. And second of all was the secretariat, the civil service, which was also staffed by Bolsheviks. The party was run by the Politburo, which was responsible for the Central Committee, which was responsible for the Party Congress. In this structure Stalin had the position as the General Secretary, which was a very powerful position. He appointed the Secretariat and controlled the whole membership of the party. Through a series of appointments he also gained the power of patronage over many parts of the party. In this respect Stalin had an extremely powerful position and was always well informed of what was going on in the party and who the members were. Therefore he had a pretty good starting point how he planned to eliminate others, like Trotsky, to become head of the USSR himself.

However, not only Stalin’s position in the party and the structure of the party but also the individual members of the party had an important effect on Stalin’s rise to power. Besides Trotsky, Stalin also had to defeat the left and the right of the party. Zinoviev and Kamenev (and Trotsky) were known as the left. They were expelled out from the party in 1926 and moved out from Moscow. When they were still in the party both attacked Stalin’s authority, so they were real opponents of Stalin. One very intelligent step of Stalin made Zinoviev and Kamenev even angrier: Stalin increased the size of the Politburo by adding close political allies of him. As a result Stalin had even more adherents and the left had less by percentage. Other opponents of Stalin were the ones from the right: Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov, who argued about continuing the NEP. Furthermore the grain crisis in 1927 contributed to their slow displacement of their positions, especially for Bukharin. The grain crisis occurred because they wanted to take new measures: therefore soldiers were sent to the countryside to requestion grain, all hoarded grain was confiscated and hoarding grain was made a crime. “From Bukharin's point of view, one of the main mistakes was establishing wrong” (www.russia.rin.ru), which isn’t really in excuse or effective opinion of him for the grain crisis. As it already happened with Trotsky, Stalin was very lucky, that his opponents did a lot themselves for their own destruction in politics. Therefore Stalin had almost no or only a few barriers now in his rise to power.

Apart from Trotsky, the left and the right, Stalin had another, very powerful, opponent: Lenin. He had very