Question by : How do you think Stalin came to power when it was so obvious that Trotsky was going to win?
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Answer by Obama is a Dolt
Stalin played a decisive role in engineering the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia, following which he adopted particularly hardline, centralist policies towards Soviet Georgia, which included the Georgian Affair of 1922 and other repressions.[17][18] This created a rift with Lenin, who believed that all the Soviet states should stand equal.
Lenin still considered Stalin to be a loyal ally, and when he got mired in squabbles with Trotsky and other politicians, he decided to give Stalin more power. With the help of Lev Kamenev, Lenin had Stalin appointed as General Secretary in 1922.[19] This post allowed Stalin to appoint many of his allies to government positions.
Lenin suffered a stroke in 1922, forcing him into semi-retirement in Gorki. Stalin visited him often, acting as his intermediary with the outside world.[19] The pair quarreled and their relationship deteriorated.[19] Lenin dictated increasingly disparaging notes on Stalin in what would become his testament. He criticized Stalin’s rude manners, excessive power, ambition and politics, and suggested that Stalin should be removed from the position of General Secretary.[19] During Lenin’s semi-retirement, Stalin forged an alliance with Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev against Leon Trotsky. These allies prevented Lenin’s Testament from being revealed to the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923.[19]
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Spellbound says
Trotsky, surprisingly, more or less ruled himself out of the leadership race because he was aware that a Jewish leader would have been unpopular. Even if he hadn’t, Trotsky was not as shrewd, not as ruthless in the pursuit of power as Stalin.
Here’s how Stalin gained power:
Once the bolsheviks had seized power Stalin was promoted to General Secretary of the Party. Lenin (the leader of the Bolsheviks) was very concerned that the brutal party bully who had been very useful to the party when they were an underground, illegal organisation, would prove to be a thuggish influence if given government office.
Stalin used the job of General Secretary to promote people loyal to him, to remove from the party people who were disloyal and to collect information on every party member. After Lenin’s death he waited, allowing other Politburo members to state their preferred policies – he then ganged up on groups of them, using his alliances and his party contacts to destroy the opposition. His did this twice in the 1920s, destroying Trotsky and his supporters and Zinoviev and Kamanev and their supporters. This left him as the undisputed ruler by about 1928.
Once he was the undisputed leader – the Vozhd (meaning Boss) he continued to use the position of General Secretary of the Communist Part to promote loyal supporters and demote, or expel from the party those who he could not be sure about. From the mid 1930s began to use show trials – public events where the accused had to follow a script, nearly always ending in a guilty verdict, and purges – expelling great numbers from the party and arresting people arbitrarily. Fear became one of the main weapons Stalin used against the Soviet people. No-one was safe – loyal Molotov was forced to divorce his wife when she was arrested, her crime? She was Jewish! Stalin also bugged the offices of the other members of the Politburo and collected information on them.
On his way to power he was cautious and did not cause the deaths of anyone – he waited until he could destroy people without any political opposition.
The Great Purge which happened after he gained total power consumed about 2.5 million people.
In the purge he had Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Rykov and Tomsky (all leading old Bolsheviks) all arrested, tried and executed. He had Trotsky assassinated in Mexico in 1940, this was the last of the important old Bolsheviks he had killed.
In a nutshell, he came to power by manipulating those around him, by exploiting the posts he held for maximum political effect, and by being utterly ruthless in his pursuit of power.
See:
The Road to Terror by J Arch Getty & Oleg Naumov
Stalin, A Biography – Robert Service
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSstalin.htm
Viki says
starlin had the better mustache