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He left a party deeply divided over the New Economic Policy, which Trotsky and others criticized as a return to capitalism, and over its whole future. Many considered Trotsky the natural heir. But Lenin unfortunately left the party machinery in the hands of a General Secretary even more ruthless than he had been. Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who had adopted the nom de guerre of Stalin (meaning steel), was a Georgian, a onetime seminarian. He had made himself particularly useful by staging several armed robberies to replenish the Bolshevik party treasury. He was smart, tough and a master of intrigue.
In his political testament, Lenin had urged his heirs to "remove Stalin" on the grounds that he was rude and abused his power. Stalin shrewdly formed an alliance with two of Lenin's oldest comrades, Gregori Zinoviev, who was then chief of the non-Russian Communist parties assembled in the Comintern, and Lev Kamenev, a Politburo member. This triumvirate controlled enough votes to block Trotsky and keep Stalin at the party helm.
After defeating Trotsky, Stalin broke with his allies and joined forces with the more conservative leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov. In the late 1920s he drove Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev out of the party, then turned against Bukharin and Rykov too. By 1929, without ever having held any government post, he was master of all he surveyed. He ordered a relentless program of forced industrialization and collective farming, a program that cost millions of lives. Trotsky fled into exile.
In 1936, as the uncrowned Czar of all the Russias, Stalin drew up a new constitution that described the Communist Party, which always remained an elite, never enrolling more than 10% of the adult population, as "the leading core of all organizations . . . both public and state." Between 1939 and 1952, however, Stalin held no party congresses. He preferred to run things by himself, as demonstrated in the great purge trials of 1936-38.
Lenin believed in purges, but he had never attempted anything on this scale. Before a fascinated and rather horrified world, one broken old Bolshevik after another stood up in court and confessed to myriad forms of treason, corruption and sabotage. Almost 50 of them were sentenced to death, including Zinoviev, Rykov and Secret Police Chief G.G. Yagoda. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the heroes of the civil war, was sent to a firing squad, along with seven other generals. Many others died in secret. And as a kind of horrid climax to the purge, a Soviet agent befriended Trotsky in Mexico City, then hacked him to death in 1940 with a steel-bladed alpenstock.
Despite such crimes, this was a period of great growth and strength for the Communist Party all around the world. In a time of global depression and the sinister rise of fascism, many people regarded both capitalism and democracy as doomed and Communism as the wave of the future. Precisely because it was militant and authoritarian and claimed to have all the answers, Communism attracted people as diverse as Andre Malraux, Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht. Their allegiance took a severe beating when Stalin negotiated an alliance with Hitler that enabled the Nazis to start World War II in 1939. But when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, the Soviets suddenly became admired members of the Western alliance.