César Jerez

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) indeed called for the removal of Joseph Stalin from his position as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party. In December 1922 and January 1923, while recovering from strokes, Lenin dictated a series of notes and letters to his secretaries, which became known as Lenin’s Testament or the Letter to the Congress. Lenin warned that Stalin had accumulated "immeasurable power in his hands" and expressed doubt about whether Stalin "would always know how to use that power with sufficient caution." In a postscript added on January 4, 1923, Lenin explicitly wrote: "Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead..." Lenin wanted someone more tolerant, loyal, polite, and considerate toward comrades.... Behind the locked doors of a Kremlin committee chamber in late May 1924, a suffocating silence gripped the senior chieftains of the Bolshevik revolution. Lev Kamenev cleared his throat and began reading aloud from typed sheets bearing red wax seals. Four months after Vladimir Lenin’s death, the founder’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had delivered his political testament, demanding it be read before the delegates of the Thirteenth Party Congress. As Kamenev’s voice echoed across the room, the color drained from the faces of the listening delegates. Slouched in a corner, puffing nervously on his pipe, sat forty-five-year-old Joseph Stalin. Lenin had not left an ideological blessing for his comrades; he had left a political execution order aimed squarely at the party’s General Secretary. The document was born of panic and physical paralysis. Trapped in a wheelchair at his country estate in Gorki throughout late 1922 and early 1923, ravaged by strokes, Lenin watched in horror as the bureaucratic Leviathan he had built slipped into the hands of one man. As General Secretary, Stalin had quietly turned the party's personnel department into a personal patronage empire, appointing loyal provincial hacks to every key post. When Stalin learned that Krupskaya was transcribing Lenin's political notes against doctors' orders, the Georgian blew into a rage, telephoning Krupskaya to unleash a barrage of vulgar obscenities and threatening to bring her before a party disciplinary court. When a furious Lenin learned of the abuse, he drafted a final, devastating codicil on January 4, 1923. Dictating to his secretary, Lenin reviewed his successors with cold realism—criticizing Trotsky’s overweening self-confidence, Bukharin’s theoretical flaws, and the October vacillations of Zinoviev and Kamenev. But his verdict on Stalin was absolute: *"Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not sure that he will always manage to use this power with sufficient caution,"* Lenin dictated. He then urged the congress to take decisive action: "Stalin is too rude, and this defect... becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post." #archaeohistories