Stalin ordered the execution of more Communists than Hitler; however, where Hitler proclaimed himself the enemy of Communism, Stalin purported to be both leader and protector of the international movement. While Stalin’s neuroses influenced the creation of his vast and violent police state, the groundwork for his purge was laid by his predecessor, Vladimir Illych Ulvanov, otherwise known as Lenin. Lenin’s belief in centralized governance, along with the use of violence as a means to legitimacy, culminated in Stalin’s personalist rule; his reign was further aided by the Lenin-era institution of an autonomous secret police, the suppression of civil society, and the cultivation of an ideal system focused on reforming not only the Russian state, but indeed the very nature of the Russian individual.

The 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov provided impetus for Stalin’s Great Purge. By blaming Kirov’s death on an extensive conspiracy of high-ranking Communist officials, Stalin was able to consolidate power and root out opposition. Staging “Show Trials” to convict the multitudes allegedly responsible for Kirov’s death, Stalin eradicated the Communist Old Guard, i.e. all those present for Lenin’s 1917 revolution, thus providing him ultimate seniority, and, ergo, legitimacy, in the Politburo. Stalin did not stop with his high-ranking comrades, though; in July 1937, his Politburo passed the resolution “Concerning Anti-Soviet Elements”, followed by the NKVD’s Order No. 00447, which authorized the arrest of “enemies of state” and even included arrest and execution quotas for local officials (Kort, 241). Such an apparatus cared nothing for truth, but rather forced party members to “denounce each other… in order to demonstrate their loyalty.” (Kort, 242) Through such measures, Stalin systematically rooted out political enemies within the governing class, consolidating control by forcing all to swear loyalty to him through blood sacrifice. Stalin additionally used the purge to promulgate the facade of a completely unified population, thus initiating top-down social change. Through the myriad tendrils of his terror, Stalin was able to exert his influence throughout civil society to render repression omnipresent, and dissidence obsolete.

The creation of a society conducive to Stalin’s coercion of the Russian populace began with the deconstruction of social mores, taking root during the first World War. The desertion of troops, the murder of Rasputin, and the absence of Tsar Nicholas weakened the monarchy and left Russia void of nationalistic sentiment. Lenin built upon this momentum through the 1917 revolutions and Civil War with his Collectivization policies and industrial drive. These tumultuous social upheavals, as Professor Kort writes, tore the people from their “traditional social moorings and morality,” later enabling Stalin’s reign of terror to be staffed not just by criminals, but by the common Soviet citizen (Kort, 237). Thus, Lenin’s part in building a society conducive to staffing Stalin’s Great Terror proved implicit as well as explicit; his stifling of Russian society obliterated the Russian shared sense of morality.

Violence held a fundamental role in Lenin’s revolutionary framework. In The State and Revolution, Lenin writes “we must suppress… to free humanity… resistance must be crushed by force.” (Lenin, “State and Revolution,” 21). Lenin’s emphasis on violence proved all encompassing, as he thought the revolution to necessitate such brutality. In the words of Michael Kort: “[Lenin’s] total commitment to the revolution left no room for qualms about human suffering that might be necessary to achieve it.” (Kort, 58). While deeply rooted in pre-Leninist Revolutionary thought, set in the writings of Chernyshevsky and the actions of nihilists such as Sergei Nechayev, Lenin refined the integral role of violence in revolution; Stalin, in accordance with such precedent, institutionalized it. Stalin’s use of force was the very essence which “held [the] various component parts [of the revolution]—in industry, agriculture, and so on—together” (Kort, 234). Lenin’s elevation of force rendered it inextricable from Soviet Communism itself, a fundamental relationship that Stalin would recognize and bolster throughout his reign.

After using force to establish the Communist party as sole legitimate power in Russia, Lenin continued to craft a culture of absolute unity under himself within the party. Lenin did so primarily by centralizing power in his “Vanguard,” thus prohibiting factions from diluting the hegemony of the Communist Party; Stalin would later reprise Lenin’s model, taking it to altogether unfathomable extremes. In What is to be Done, Lenin writes that centralized rule among a small group of political elite enhances, rather than reduces, the potential for widespread political organization of revolutionists, stating that “the centralization of the more secret functions… [will] increase the extent and the quality of the activity of a large number of other organizations” (Lenin, “What is to be Done,” 16). To quickly effect change, Lenin writes, a body with centralized political power is critical, arguing that such a “vanguard party” must be fundamentally suppressive. This “strong revolutionary organization,” writes Lenin, “is absolutely necessary… for the purpose of giving firmness to the movement.” (Lenin, 17). The essence of his vanguard party lies in the idea of revolution from above, or the instigation of a paradigm shift through an imposing minority of elites, or “professional revolutionists” (Lenin, 15).

Lenin worked openly as well as surreptitiously to eliminate the factionalism threatening to dilute his central authority. In 1920, Alexandra Kollontia published The Workers’ Opposition, alleging that the idealized “dictatorship of the proletariat” practically manifested as the rule of a single man. Lenin responded during the 10th Party Congress by passing the Resolution On Party Unity, , a policy which banned factions from forming within the party, thereby reducing internal dissent. Lenin’s belief in his own infallibility played a key role in his war on criticism, and proved central to his concentration of power beneath himself. (Kort, 58) Acting upon this conviction, Lenin “infused into Bolshevism … the steady narrowing of the party’s decision-making structure … it was possible once Lenin was gone that one of the leaders at the top might seize power from the others and impose his will on the party as a whole.” (Kort, 174) And, indeed, Stalin did just that. Stalin’s shift from a focus upon group-based dissent to individual dissent was a practical consequence of Lenin’s elimination of so-called “factions”; his further consolidation of power was a continuation of Lenin’s conviction in his own faultlessness.

Stalin maintained Lenin-era centralization and concentrated decision-making among party elites, but used force to mitigate potential risk to a far greater extent than his predecessor. Stalin employed harsh violence to pacify potential political opponents, the Russian military, and the general population through the Great Terror, resulting in the absolute dominance of the state. Stalin’s purge sought to quell potential sources of internal dissent, killing vast swaths of Communist party members, including those who sat on Lenin’s Central Committee. Stalin’s purge, “claimed 70 percent of his hand-picked Central Committee… the so-called ‘Congress of Victors,’ and 1,108 of its 1,966 delegates at large.” (Kort, 240) In so doing, Stalin completed Lenin’s initiative to quash internal dissent. Whereas Lenin sought to eliminate faction formation, Stalin sought to preempt internal dissent by individualizing repression.

Lenin paved the way for Stalin’s use of violence against political opposition through the October 27/November 9 creation of Communist Tribunals to punish opponents of the regime, which, shortly thereafter, were given the ability to charge dissidents with the death penalty. Moreover, in August 1918, Lenin began to use the Cheka to perpetrate large-scale arrests and executions of Communist Party opponents. Such use of violence to eliminate political dissent, through both governmental subcommittees and the Cheka, proved instrumental in producing Communist rule, and thus would prove essential in maintaining it under Stalin. (Kort, 134-137)

Frugal with trust and intensely neurotic, Stalin feared organized revolt led by Soviet military leadership, who criticized his purge and therefore posed a threat. Stalin quickly mitigated this risk with a purge that “engulfed 3 out of 5 Red Army marshals, 13 out of 15 army full generals, 8 of 9 navy admirals, and 154 out of 189 army divisional commanders.” (Kort, 240-41) In exterminating the vast majority of military leadership, Stalin preserved only those whom he knew to be loyal. Lenin, too, emphasized military loyalty through brutal hierarchies established by Trotsky in his Red Army; moreover, with the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, Lenin employed his secret police to control the army, a mechanism recapitulated under Stalin. Established from the framework of the conservative Okhrana, Lenin’s Cheka was responsible only to central authority, holding shocking autonomy (Kort, 135). Moreover, beginning in October 1918, the Cheka became responsible for the supervision of labor camps. Stalin’s NKVD built upon this precedent, swelling in size, but remaining a multifaceted institution; under Stalin, the NKVD “ran prisons, managed and guarded labor camps, controlled the regular police, guarded the borders, and had its agents planted virtually everywhere… to spy on and terrorize [citizens].” (Kort, 241) Both Lenin and Stalin employed the secret police to ensure absolute loyalty, but where Lenin mainly focused upon loyalty within institutions, Stalin sought loyalty on an individual level, thus necessitating the expansion of the NKVD.

The extent of violence in Stalin’s purge owes largely to his attempt to reform human nature rather than Russian institutions; where Lenin committed acts of violence in order to maintain loyalty among officials, Stalin attempted to guarantee individual loyalty to Communist society. However, this individualized reform, too, holds roots in Leninist doctrine: in The State and Revolution, Lenin speaks of the necessity to deconstruct the state to achieve the “Higher Phase” of Communism. The final step, he writes, is to eradicate the “bourgeois right,” – a belief in personal agency, personal property, and common individuality – which he perceived to “sanctify actual inequality”. (Lenin, “State and Revolution,” 23). By jailing and killing opponents of Communism on an individual, rather than collective, scale, Stalin’s purge attempted to accelerate the erosion of the state by rendering individuality and personal property nefarious, and defining any action outside of the party as not only illegitimate, but actively criminal.

The “revolution from above” which facilitated so much violence over the course of Leninist and Stalinist Communism proves deeply embedded within the history of monarchical Russia. From Ivan the Terrible’s creation of the first secret police to Alexander III’s establishment of a political police with relative autonomy, the partnership of violent political repression and state-engendered reform proves innate to Russia. However, Lenin alone designed the political structure conducive to—and ultimately necessitating rule by—a small, exceedingly centralized body. Moreover, he established the process by which such a party maintains hegemony by quashing dissent and restricting civil society. Although Stalin’s personality naturally rendered him susceptible to theories of conspiracy, manifested later with policy such as his “Doctor’s Plot”, his strength and suspicious nature also allowed for his rise to power under Lenin. Stalin’s emphasis on repression of individual criticism stemmed directly from Lenin’s ban on factionalism; while the employment of violence was common to both, Stalin’s industrialization of coercion by force proved a function of Lenin’s proposed eradication of the “Bourgeois Right.” Finally, the institutions through which Stalin enforced his terror, namely the relatively autonomous secret police and the intricate web of forced labor camps, were both revolutionized and actively expanded under Lenin. Therefore, Stalin’s utilization of the tools available to him could hardly be considered a departure from Lenin, but rather constitutes a continuation of Lenin’s parchment and practice.

Works Cited