Lenin's Death and Stalin's Rise to Power I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1924 Part 1 of 1 - YouTube (1)
On January 21, 1924, after a long illness, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov dies at the age of 53.
He is better known under the pseudonym Lenin, and since 1917 he has been the leader of Bolshevik Russia.
Lenin's death sets off a struggle for power and consolidation in the newly founded Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR.
When that struggle is over, it will leave one man as dictator of the Soviet Union, he
is Joseph Stalin.
Welcome to “Between Two Wars”; a summary of the interwar years, from the uncertainty
and hedonism of the 1920's to humanity's descent into the darkness of the Second World War.
I'm Indy Neidell.
The son of a serf that rose to the lower nobility in imperial Russia, Lenin is already a convinced
socialist by his late teens, and as he studies law in his early twenties he develops into
a radical, revolutionary Marxist.
Around the turn of the century he is an activist writer for the Russian Social Democratic Labour
Party RSDLP, the main Marxist party of Russia.
Within the party he advocates insurrection, and the violent overthrow of the establishment.
Russia, at this point, is divided between a massive population of have nots and a tiny
group of entitled land owners and nobility.
There's a huge peasant class, many of which are subsistence farmers, and a small, but
growing working class.
The Tsarists rulers keep their grip on society by strictly policing all kinds of extremism.
As a result Lenin spends his early political career in and out of prison and mostly in exile.
Around 1901, he becomes one of the leaders of a party majority within the leadership
- the majoritarians for which the word is Bolsheviki in Russian - that want a highly
organised and structured party with military discipline.
They're opposed by a party leadership minority - the minoritarians, in Russian Menshiviki
- who want an open, less hierarchical, and more inclusive party.
The Bolsheviks are also the majority of contributors to the party publication Iskra, where Lenin
is one of the main writers.
There he gets to know Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, a name he supposedly
chose because it was the name of one of his jailors in Odessa prison and he thought it
sounded cool.
Lenin's name supposedly came from the River Lena.
Why all the pseudonyms?
Well, not- as some who claimed the Bolsheviks were a Jewish conspiracy- to hide Trotsky's
Jewish background.
It isn't a Jewish conspiracy- the Bolsheviks are pretty harshly anti-religious.
It's for the obvious reason that they keep on being jailed for what they write, so to
confuse the authorities they use names that are not on record - it doesn't really work
since the Tsarist secret police weren't quite that dumb, but this way they at least
get to choose catchy, cool names.
Trotsky was born into a wealthy farming family in Ukraine.
At boarding school he discovers Marxism through his girlfriend and future wife.
By the time he reaches adulthood he's multilingual, speaking French, English and German, as well
as his native Russian and Ukrainian.
He's also involved with union agitation and starts writing for the Socialist cause,
spends two years in prison, and then he's sentenced to four years of exile in Siberia.
In Siberia he starts developing his own theories on Marxism and Communism.
In 1902 he escapes exile, leaving his wife behind, and heads for London where he meets
Lenin, and joins the writing staff at Iskra.
Although he's an admirer of Lenin already before they meet, he defies him the next year
when he joins the Mensheviks, leading Lenin to call him out publicly as a “judas”
“scoundrel” and “swine”.
The schism will last until the Revolutions of 1917 - a time when Trotsky refers to himself
as a “non factional social democrat.”
Trotsky works tirelessly over the years to reconcile the party's warring factions,
ironically managing to make enemies in all camps and becoming seen as an uncooperative
troublemaker.
One of the people he crosses in this period is a dashing, charismatic, adventurous Bolshevik,
a violent criminal from Georgia; Ioseb Jughashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin, one of his
many code names based on the Russian word for steel, Stal- and with the suffix -in becomes
something vaguely like “man of steel”.
The son of an abusive alcoholic father, he grows up with his mother in the care of a
priest, who goes out of his way to give Stalin a proper education.
By his late teens, though, Josef starts to hang out with Socialist revolutionary gangs,
denounces God, and begins a wild existence on the road.
He takes a prominent role in the organization of strikes and violent demonstrations in his
hometown Tiflis, and by 1901 becomes a target of the secret police.
He goes underground, continuing to organise violent uprisings.
At 23 he's elected to the central committee of the Georgian branch of the RSDLP, but he's
finally caught and also sent into exile in Siberia.
In early 1904, he manages to escape and makes it back to Tiflis, where he promptly becomes
a supporter of the new Bolsheviks.
In January 1905 when an abortive revolution begins in Russia, Stalin is in Baku on the
Caspian Sea.
He forms a battle squad to fight the police, carry out robberies, raid government facilities,
and extort local businesses for protection money.
They also carry out attacks on cossacks and the tsarist militia in coordination with the
Menshevik militia.
He's arrested, exiled, escapes dressed as woman, arrested again, escapes again and so
on, all while he expands his criminal activities.
All that sounds pretty cool right?
Well it surely isn't for his victims.
His gang, now called ‘The Outfit', kill hundreds of people during their heists and attacks.
They even kidnap the children of wealthy citizens and hold them for ransom, and while they are
ostensibly doing this for the cause of the revolution they're also amassing wealth
for themselves.
That stands in stark contrast to Lenin, who lives an austere life, denying himself most
creature comforts and any luxury, even as the money from Stalin's operations roll
in to the party coffers.
In late 1905 the two finally meet during a party conference in Tampere, Finland which
was still part of the Russian empire.
Although Lenin has now managed to fill the central committee with only Bolsheviks, the
Mensheviks are in the majority among regular members and the assembly votes to discontinue
armed robberies and other criminal activities.
Lenin sees a great need, though, for more money to assure success.
The same evening as the vote is passed he meets in private with Stalin and they agree
to set up a clandestine, secret operation to continue the criminal schemes.
In 1907 that operation reaches a new low when Stalin and his gang pull a complex heist to
rob a money transport from the Imperial bank in Tiflis.
Armed with revolvers and grenades, the 20 man crew attacks the coach at Yerevan Square.
It's in the middle of the day and the square is full of people.
As they attack and the guards return fire, they start throwing their grenades.
In the chaos 40 people are killed, mainly innocent bystanders.
All 20 gang members get away with a bounty of 342,00 Rubles, more than 3.9 million US
Dollars in 2018.
Immediately after the heist though, both Stalin and Lenin will distance themselves from the
whole affair as its legitimacy becomes an issue of contention, even among the staunchest Bolsheviks.
Once the Bolsheviks are in power, though, it will be glorified as a highlight in the
revolutionary cause as part of ‘reappropriating' money from the Tsarist regime.
Stalin and Lenin are now brothers in crime and brothers in arms, and Stalin is invited
to join the Central Committee by Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev, Lenin's aide de camps, who
will be instrumental in Stalin's rise to power.
Stalin is also involved with the publishing of Pravda, the Bolshevik official newspaper.
Here he gets to know Lev Kamenev, Trotsky's brother in law, who will be the first Communist
Russian Head of State after the 1917 October Revolution.
Kamenev will be another central piece of what will become Stalin's initial power base.
In late 1917 and early 1918 all of these men take control of Russia.
I've covered it exhaustively on The Great War channel.
The Russian Civil War follows that, which we have covered in this series - you can find
links to all those videos in the description.
Throughout this period Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and a few other colorful
characters will find themselves at odds over a number of issues.
The relationship between Trotsky and Stalin will become especially contentious and will
deteriorate to public scorn after their falling out over the Red Army failure at the Battle
of Warsaw, but Lenin always manages to get them all back together to continue their reconquest
of the Russian imperial lands, and cement his version of Marxism- Leninism.
But in his final years, Leninism becomes increasingly opposed to Stalin's worldview.
Now, if you want to be really simple about it, Leninism is nothing else than a practical
approach to achieve a communist state.
As with all flavors of communism the ultimate goal is the overthrow of capitalism in favor
of a new order based on absolute equality, an abolition of social class, and an economic
system based on communal ownership.
While that might sound great on paper, it's very hard to imagine what that would be like
in actuality, and it certainly isn't the way human society has naturally developed.
However you achieve it, it would require a massive amount of planning and management.
The proposal by Karl Marx was that Socialism is an inevitable state of society that will
evolve as the oppressed working classes rise up.
Marx foresees a dictatorship of the proletariat that will follow the overthrow of the middle
and upper classes, which in turn will eventually lead to a Socialist society of harmonious equality.
Marx does not, though, advocate this as a political movement, nor does he propose any
solution as to how it could be made to happen - he just theorized that it would happen inevitably by itself.
In fact, Marx was never fond of the idea of Communism that grew out of his theories and
even distanced himself from being called a Communist when the term was coined during
his lifetime.
And in any case, Marx thought this will only happen when industrialization reaches a critical point.
A society still based largely on an agrarian economy, like Russia in 1917- is not really
ripe for Marx's Socialist Revolution
But Lenin and other Socialists that follow Marx' ideas, see it as their task to make
it practically possible, even accelerate this process and make it happen, without really
considering that last point regarding the level of industrialization.
Lenin thinks there must be a vanguard party to plan, initiate, and carry out the revolution
and then maintain the Socialist state - this leads to a one party system and justifies
the abolition and repression of all other political parties, which in turn leads to
a police state to enforce that ban.
The dictatorship of the proletariat must be forced to power through a violent uprising,
and for that the goals justify the means - in other words the persecution, oppression, incarceration,
and murder of anyone opposing the revolution is justified.
This directly leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people during the revolution
and the civil war, on top of the millions that die as casualties in the conflicts themselves.
Collectivism, or the joint ownership of all assets, leads to a nationalization of industry
and appropriation of all private goods.
This one fails catastrophically already during Lenin's life and he then introduces the
New Economic Plan in 1921, where private entrepreneurship is tolerated to a degree, though private venture
capital is not allowed, but is regulated through a system of national banks that decide where
to invest capital.
Foreign trade remains a state monopoly.
The dictatorship of the proletariat shall be upheld by centralized democracy through
