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took away the power of speech. The writings of his last years reflect his growing
disillusionment with the bureaucratization of the party
(Better Fewer, but Better)
and the shortcomings of its main leaders (“Last Testament”), and most notably
the rude personal style of Stalin, the general secretary of the party. Lenin died on
January 21, 1924. In a bizarre final twist for a confirmed atheist, his remains
were embalmed and placed on Red Square in a specially designed mausoleum,
which became a place of state-sponsored pilgrimage during the remainder of the
Soviet period and still stands after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin consolidated his power
within the party bureaucracy, outmaneuvering his more intellectually nimble
but less politically astute colleagues by making full use of his considerable
administrative and political skills and patronage opportunities. He countered
Leon Trotsky's internationalist preferences with the slogan “socialism in one
country,” which appealed to the party's more nationalist rank and file. But he
also borrowed from Trotsky's program of rapid industrialization and abandoned
the more moderate program of the New Economic Policy advocated by the
Party's other leading theoretician, Nikolai Bukharin. In rapid succession Stalin
and his allies removed his main rivals—Trotsky, Grigorii Zinoviev, Lev
Kamenev, and Bukharin—from their respective power bases. Stalin emerged as
the leader of a devoted and ambitious group of younger Bolsheviks that included
Sergei Kirov, Grigorii Ordzhonikidze, Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and
Kliment Voroshilov. Together they helped Stalin ram through a program of rapid
industrialization and enforced collectivization of peasant villages—a Second Rev-
olution—that was arguably far more extensive in its impact than the original
October Revolution. Peasant resistance to what amounted to a “second enserf-
ment” was fierce and the government's enforcement of the policy brutal, leading
to the deaths of at least 10 million and the deportation of millions more.
In the late 1920s the Soviet Union underwent three sweeping changes that
together combined to form a “second” revolution, of perhaps greater long-term
impact than the ones in 1917. In industry, the government instituted a system
of five-year plans aimed at turning the Soviet Union into an advanced industrial
country in the shortest possible time. Agriculture was collectivized in a brutal
manner that ended a short period of peasant landownership. The Communist
Party spread its control into the lives of most citizens, a process that also saw the
steady growth of the country's internal security apparatus, the dimensions of
which would soon become apparent during the campaign of mass state terror
of the 1930s, an even more turbulent decade than the preceding one. Known
as the Great Purge, the campaign was first directed against the party and state
bureaucracy. The show trials of 1936-38 of prominent old Bolsheviks, which
drew international attention, were accompanied by an even more devastating
terror conducted across the various localities of the Soviet Union. A secret purge
of the army led to the execution of about half the officer corps. Although exact
numbers are difficult to obtain, one estimate holds that the Soviet Union suf-
fered about 29 million “excess deaths” from terror and famine in the 1930s.
In foreign policy, Soviet diplomacy became increasingly preoccupied with the
threat of German aggression after Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1934 the
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