Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark Page A

influence, buried beneath a veneer of accommodation and compromise, meant that he would seek to inherit the position of Lenin in the party, when the Bolshevik paragon was felled by a series of strokes, the first in May 1922, and eventually died in January 1924. Of all the leading Bolsheviks, Stalin seemed to work most closely with Lenin. Their views on the New Economic Policy and the national question were also closer than often asserted in the literature.17 It was there-46
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    fore not unrealistic of Stalin to expect to lead the party after Lenin’s death.
    In his “Testament” (December 23–26, 1922), Lenin famously reviewed the positive and negative characteristics of a number of Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, without indicating decisively who should succeed himself.
    However Lenin’s addendum to the Testament, January 4, 1923, written under the influence of Stalin’s bullying of the leaders of the Georgian party, made it apparent that the sick and dying Bolshevik leader worried about Stalin’s personal characteristics, his “rude” behavior and harsh dealings with the comrades. That Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, soon thereafter complained to her husband that Stalin was mean to her and kept her from seeing him only increased Lenin’s suspicions of Stalin’s ambitions.
    But it was too late; Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Stalin’s machinations surrounding Lenin’s death and funeral, and his ability to portray himself as Lenin’s most loyal pupil, demonstrated to those around him, especially his ostensible allies Zinoviev and Kamenev, that he sought supreme power. Lenin’s Testament, with the addendum, was read to the Central Committee only much later, in July 1926, after Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had more or less secured control of the party leadership and could write off Lenin’s remarks as the crotchety asides of an old and sick man.
    The struggle for power in the mid- and late 1920s has been so thoroughly documented in the literature that there is no need to review it here. The charismatic and brilliant Lev Davidovich Trotsky, whom many believed would the making of a genocidaire 47
    succeed Lenin as head of the party, increasingly isolated himself from the mainstream party leaders. His self-assurance, bordering on arrogance; his lack of attention to the party apparatus, something Stalin could never be accused of; and his frequent absences from the capital tarnished his reputation as a great leader of the Red Army during the Civil War and led many to doubt his ability to lead the Soviet state. The other major contestants for power, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, sought leading roles in the party and, like Stalin, wrote treatises on Leninism as a way to stake their claims. In the end, they all relied on Stalin to secure the party apparatus and deal with the mid-level party cadres.18
    Stalin’s ability to ally on the “left” with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky and then again with Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin on the “right” against Zinoviev and Kamenev, all the while appearing as a supremely dis-interested advocate of party unity, guaranteed his success in this struggle. At the same time, Stalin fostered the careers of a series of stolid and capable subordinates, among them Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Voroshilov, who would support his attacks against Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin at the end of the 1920s. The methods developed by Stalin in the struggle for power served him well a few years later, as he organized the judicial murders of his political rivals, all “Old Bolsheviks,” and instigated the genocidal campaigns that characterized the 1930s.
    He took his time to eliminate his rivals, and he plotted silently and well. “My greatest pleasure,” he is known to have admitted, “is to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s 48
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    plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.”19
    One learns a