Joseph Stalin: The Tyrant Of Manipulation

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Stalin: The Tyrant of Manipulation When Lenin had left the political scene due to his sickness, the Russian Communist Party began to see a great power struggle ensuing in response to the party’s need for a new leader and a necessity to close a gaping hole during this period of interregnum. When Lenin died, his successors in the seats of authority began to grow anxious about political changes and had presented themselves as faithful disciples and imitators of Lenin (Carr). At this time, potential successors such as Stalin and Trotsky began to prepare themselves in order to seize power and thus great tension began to arise between these political powers. Through all this chaos and confusion, Josef Stalin was able to successfully take power of…show more content…
Lenin's associates were not capable of running a state, of dealing with the mountains of paperwork, of giving instructions to the scattered party cells, of appointing low-level officials — they saw such routine as incredibly tedious (Pipes 74). Stalin was the only high-ranking Bolshevik who cared about such matters and showed a talent for them, which was a critical factor in his rise to power (Pipes 74). The fact that Lenin was the only member who was able and willing to do all these tedious tasks gave him the image of a loyal, highly capable, party member. With this image, Stalin had grown in popularity among the party and was now a stronger candidate in succeeding Lenin. Trotsky was seen as gruff and arrogant. The archives contain the results of the election to the Central Committee held at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, which occurred before Stalin assumed the post of General Secretary (Pipes 81). They indicate that Trotsky came in tenth, far below Stalin, and even after Molotov (Pipes 81). The fact that Trotsky was seen as an arrogant person began to make him unpopular with the people while Stalin’s loyal image had made him wildly popular. The gap between members in favor of Trotsky versus those in favor of Stalin had started to widen greatly in favor of the latter. Stalin’s…show more content…
He was brilliant at using self-advancement to climb his way up the ranks in his party. Stalin realized early that he could create a paramount bureaucratic structure loyal to him personally by means of material rewards (Pipes 75). Stalin’s idea was to build up his own following that he could easily dictate and the way he did this was by working hard to claim his position as the General Secretary. His new position was a new weapon in his arsenal, which he could use to remove members that he thought were troublesome and keep his loyal group in his proximity. Stalin also began to ‘lavish favours on the top bureaucracy of the Communist Party, headquartered in Moscow’ using his position, which conveys the extent of manipulation that Stalin was capable of (Pipes 75). By the time Lenin had to start withdrawing from the management of the party and state, Soviet Russia had party officials numbering between fifteen and twenty-five thousand, most of them appointed by Stalin himself (Pipes 75). This articulates the effect that Stalin possessed over the Russian Communist Party, being the one in charge of decision-making and managing the internal workings of the party. The fact that Stalin was able to get all of his men into the committee was a large factor in why he was able to have such a large backing for all the decisions that he
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