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Stalin versus Trotsky
The Soviet Union was the first totalitarian state to establish itself after World War I. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin seized power in the Russian Revolution and established a single-party dictatorship under the Bolsheviks. However, after his death on January 21, 1924, he left no clear successor. The obvious choice, to many, was Leon Trotsky, a high-ranking party member who had headed the Military Revolutionary Committee and was considered by many to be the Communist Party’s foremost Marxist theorist. Trotsky’s main competition for power was Joseph Stalin, who had been involved in the Communist Party since before the Revolution. He served under Lenin as commissar for nationalities, and in 1923 became general secretary of the party, a position that allowed him to manipulate the party structure, placing his supporters in crucial positions throughout the party and ultimately ensuring his victory.
During their struggle for power, an ideological rift opened between Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky advocated “permanent world revolution,” claiming that the Soviet Union should strive continuously to encourage proletarian revolutions throughout the world. Stalin contrasted Trotsky’s view with a “socialism in one country” message, stressing the need to consolidate the communist regime and concentrate on domestic developments and improvements before looking to world revolution. This rift, combined with Stalin's rise to power as party leader, sealed Trotsky’s fate. By 1927, Trotsky had lost his position on the Central Committee, and was expelled from the party. He fled to Turkey, and eventually to Mexico, where he was killed in 1940 by a Stalinist agent.
Stalin’s Reign of Terror
His main opposition gone, Stalin consolidated power. In 1928, he abandoned Lenin’s economic policy and installed a system of central planning, which dictated everything from where factories should be built to how farmers should plant their crops. Under this system, he promoted heavy industrial development at the expense of consumer products, believing that heavy industry would be the foundation of the profitable state. Simultaneously, he introduced a policy of collectivization, which created government-owned and operated farms from peasant land. The more well-off peasant class, the kulaks, rebelled against collectivization. Stalin would accept no resistance and initiated a reign of terror from 1929 to 1930, during which as many as 3 million were killed.
During the 1930s, Stalin continued to eliminate barriers to his complete and total exercise of power. In 1933, he created the Central Purge Commission, which publicly investigated and tried members of the Communist Party for treason, with more than a million members being expelled in the first two years alone. Thousands more were arrested or executed after expulsion, including about 25 percent of the army officer corps and many longstanding and prominent party members. In all cases, the defendants were forced to confess publicly, and then were shot.
Reasons for Stalin’s Victory
Historians disagree over whether or not totalitarianism is an inherent aspect of Marxist-Leninist theory, or whether Joseph Stalin, as many claim, deviated from the true tenets of Marxism-Leninism in constructing his government. Most can agree, however, that the Marxist idea of "dictatorship of the proletariat" enabled the rise of the totalitarian state. Whether or not there was an aspect of totalitarianism inherent in Lenin's philosophy, he never consolidated power to the same extent as Stalin did. Despite this, Lenin’s rule no doubt set the stage for Stalin's complete totalitarianism. Though his publicly stated philosophy was government by local councils, called soviets, true power rested securely in the hands of the Central Committee alone. The party controlled the police (official and secret), the army, and the bureaucracy. Stalin capitalized on this power to a much greater extent after coming to power.
The success of Stalin’s “communism in one country” philosophy was both the result of, and a cause for, the spirit of nationalism. Though Stalin would have been hard-pressed to convince the Soviet people that he could lead communism in the eradication of all the problems of the world, he did a fair job of convincing them that under his leadership, communism could address the problems of his country, which when it had grown in strength, could then effect global change. This type of moral argument for nationalism was typical of the political leaders of the inter-war period. This nationalism translated easily into many facets of totalitarianism, including the elimination of dissent, the demand for uniformity, and the destruction of individualism as the individual was overshadowed by the united nation.
