How Did Lenin Gain Power

The Russian Communist Party from 1921 despite having no titular leader held Lenin up as the sole party head having emerged from the civil war as the controlling power of the Russian empire. Following Lenin’s death in 1924 a six year struggle for power followed, Lenin having left no real guidance as to who should succeed him as leader. Stalin’s rise to power, in 1924 was far from inevitable as he was one of six politburo members and had only been appointed as General Secretary, viewed by structuralist historians such as E H Carr as the key to his rise to power, two years prior. While the other politburo members in 1924, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov and Tomsky all held important roles within the party and could just as foreseeably have become …show more content…
While Trotsky continues to paint a juvilie picture of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev as disagreeing with Trotsky for the sake of disagreement, “but as soon as they learned that Lenin shared my opinion they lapsed into silence.”, suggesting that Trotsky really did underestimate the manipulative powers of Stalin, which many regard as ultimately leading to Trotsky’s downfall, securing an unobtruded path to power for Stalin himself.
While it would be easy to attribute Stalin’s rise to power largely to Trotsky’s shortcomings, historian Robert Conquest would argue that Stalin’s personality, not only as a good organizer but as a ruthless, militaristic leader that lead to his eventual rise, saying, “From the start, Stalin was noted for an extraordinary capacity to enforce his will, as is also said of Hitler. This is a characteristic little studied, and doubtless hard to