Lenin’s health began to fail in 1921; it deteriorated further during the following year, when he suffered several strokes. Forced gradually to withdraw from day-to-day activity, he had the opportunity to survey his achievement. It did not please him. There is considerable evidence that if his health had allowed it he would have carried out major reforms in the political and economic structure of the Soviet state.

One cause for concern was the growing bureaucratization of both party and state. Under the terms of the strict discipline that Lenin imposed, the ruling party became increasingly centralized, with its directorate—headed by the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Central Committee—making decisions on its own authority without consulting the party cadres. Dissent from lower organs was ignored and punished if pressed. The local branches of the party lost the right to elect their officers; these were routinely appointed by the Secretariat. The result was ossification of the Communist Party and undue concentration of power in the hands of the Moscow apparatus. The latter was increasingly dominated by Joseph Stalin, on whom Lenin relied as an efficient administrator and whom he had agreed to promote in April 1922 to serve as the party’s general secretary. Stalin used his authority to appoint officials personally loyal to him and hostile to his archrival, Leon Trotsky.

The state apparatus grew by leaps and bounds, in part because the government assumed many responsibilities previously exercised by private interests, including the entire national economy, and in part because holding a government post gave access to scarce commodities. Short of communist personnel, Lenin was required to employ in managerial and technical positions many of the same experts who before the Revolution had served the tsarist regime and private enterprises. In some commissariats 80 percent or more of the officials were carryovers from the tsarist civil service. Lenin believed that they injected old bureaucratic habits into the Soviet government but he had no one with whom to replace them.

There were problems with the national minorities. Lenin insisted on the reconquered republics being deprived of all freedom, except of a purely formalistic kind. But he wanted the ethnic minorities treated with tact and deference in order to overcome their suspicion of Russians. He was dismayed to note the emergence in Communist Party ranks of “Great Russian chauvinism.” In the last months of his active life, the winter of 1922–23, he spent a great deal of time on this matter. He strenuously objected to the methods used by Stalin to crush the objections of his fellow Georgians to Georgia’s entry into the new Soviet Union as a member of the Transcaucasian Federation, rather than directly, as a sovereign Soviet republic. The dispute nearly caused Lenin to break personal relations with his protégé.

A sense of failure haunted him: except for holding onto power, he had succeeded in none of his plans.

The struggle for succession

Lenin’s growing incapacitation led in 1922 to a power struggle within the party: it would culminate five years later in Trotsky’s banishment and Stalin’s unchallenged dictatorship.

On the face of it, Trotsky was the natural heir to Lenin, since it was Trotsky who had organized the October coup and managed the Red Army in the Civil War. A superb orator and lively writer, he had an international reputation. His chances of succeeding Lenin, however, were more apparent than real. Trotsky had joined the Bolshevik party late (August 1917), having for many years subjected it to savage criticism; he thus never belonged to its “Old Guard.” He was personally unpopular for his arrogance and unwillingness to work as member of a team. His Jewishness was no asset in a country in which Jews were widely blamed for the devastations wrought by communism. Last but not least, bored by the routine of paperwork, he was a poor administrator.

Although far less known, Stalin was much better positioned to succeed Lenin. Intellectually unprepossessing, a dull speaker and lacklustre writer, he operated behind the scenes. Realizing early that the centralized system of government that Lenin had created vested extraordinary power in the party machine, he avoided the spotlight and instead concentrated on building up cadres loyal to himself. By 1922 he was in a unique position to manipulate policies to his own ends by virtue of the fact that he alone belonged to both the Politburo, which set policy, and the Secretariat, which managed personnel. To thwart Trotsky he entered into an alliance with Grigory Zinovyev and Lev Kamenev, forming with them a “triumvirate” that dominated the Politburo and isolated their common rival.

Aware that his followers were squabbling and deathly afraid that the party he had built on the principle of disciplined unity would fall apart after his death, Lenin tried to interfere, but he was unsuccessful. The triumvirate, ostensibly from concern over his health, ordered him to abstain from involvement in government affairs. From December 1922 onward Lenin lived under virtual house arrest.

On his death in January 1924 Lenin was embalmed and put on permanent display in a mausoleum in Red Square to provide superstitious peasants with a visible symbol of sainthood. By then power was in the hands of the triumvirate, which Stalin before long broke up to assume undisputed personal leadership. The party cadres, aware of the regime’s unpopularity, supported him, for he promised to provide continued strong leadership, repel all democratic challenges, and maintain the privileges they had gained since November 1917.