After the death of Lenin in January 1924, his aspiring successors to the leadership of the Communist Party and by extension Soviet Union entered a race for his succession. None of them questioned Marxist theory, while everyone was making sure to give prestige to their positions, referring to Lenin’s writings and seeking to be shown as followers of his work. The main protagonists in this succession race was the Lev (Leo) Trotskythe Lev Kamenevthe Zinoviev Grigarithe Nikolai Bukharin and the Joseph Stalinthe only one who held some crucial party axiom in 1924, being the Secretary General of the Central Committee.
Lenin’s most promising candidate was Trotsky, an excellent orator and intellectual of Marxism. Trotsky, however, failed to turn his enormous popularity among the ordinary members of the party into political power, nor to create a compact core of the party. It became evident gradually that his main opponent in claiming power was Joseph Jugasville, more widely known by Stalin’s nickname. Unlike cosmopolitan Trotsky and many of the Soviet elite executives, Stalin had truly proletarian ancestry, he was unaware of foreign languages, disliked the intellectuals and was not particularly loved among the party’s top executives. After his election to the post of Secretary -General in 1922, Stalin worked hard to establish himself in the party, often receiving the contempt for many top executives, who rejected him as spiritually inferior.
In 1929, it implemented the first five -year program of development of the Soviet Union, and in 1936 inaugurated the period of terrorism.
Stalin managed to politically neutralize Trotsky in 1927. Having eliminated almost every opposition voice, in 1929 he implemented the country’s first five -year development program, the goal of which was rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. In 1936 he inaugurated the period of terrorism in the country, during which they took place persecutions against leaders of the party, the administrative mechanism and the army, against people of the spirit and the arts, priests, scientists and ordinary citizensfor which they were suspicious, well -founded or not, that they were not fully in line with the Stalinist regime. The victims of Stalinism are estimated at several hundred thousand, and many more were displaced in camps and gulag.
THE World War II With the enormous human and material loss, there was a terrible test for the Soviet Union and for Stalin personally. Realizing the criticality of the situation, Stalin gathered all powers on his face, taking over the Ministry of War and the Red Army administration. Red Army victories caused the admiration of Soviet citizens, who began to call Stalin “wise leader” and “Patroulis”. The victory also gave the Soviet leader a high prestige internationally. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were Triandria, which defined the post -war system in Europe.
Stalin maintained his primacy in the party and the state until his death on March 5, 1953, which marked the end of an era for the Soviet Union. His close associates and aspiring successors survived to reshape the Soviet Union’s governance system by applying a form of collective leadership and separation of powers, which the deceased Soviet leader had gathered on his face. The Prime Minister’s position was taken over by Georgi Malenkov and the position of the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Party Nikita Khrushchev. Until February 1955, a struggle for power was unfolded between the two, which ended with the removal of Malenkov from the prime minister and his replacement by Nikolai Bulganin, a man of Khrushchev’s influence.
Column: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigoni-Despina Poumenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
