Quick questions on Trotsky's struggle with Stalin: HSC Modern History Personality

Lenin suffered his first stroke on 25 May 1922 and his second on 16 December 1922. The third stroke on 9 March 1923 ended his political activity. He died on 21 January 1924. The succession question was therefore live for nearly two years before Lenin's death.

Lenin's "Letter to the Congress" (dictated 23-26 December 1922 with a postscript on 4 January 1923) is known as the Testament. It described the leading Bolsheviks individually. Of Trotsky: "Personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of the work." Of Stalin: "Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution."

Trotsky's New Course articles in Pravda (December 1923) attacked the inner-Party regime as bureaucratic. The troika orchestrated a Party-wide counter-attack at the Thirteenth Party Conference (January 1924) condemning Trotsky for "petty-bourgeois deviation."

Stalin advanced the doctrine of Socialism in One Country in October-December 1924 in the second edition of his Problems of Leninism. The doctrine held that socialism could be built within the boundaries of the Soviet Union without waiting for international revolution. The slogan condensed the new Soviet bureaucracy's preference for consolidation over international risk.

The Left Opposition was the Trotsky platform of 1923-1925. Its core demands were:

In April 1926 Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin and joined the Trotsky group to form the United Opposition. The fusion came too late: Stalin had already removed Zinoviev from the Leningrad organisation (January 1926) and from the Comintern (October 1926). The 1926 platform restated the Left Opposition demands.

The Trotskyist counter-demonstrations on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution (7 November 1927) were the public moment of defeat. Mounted militia broke up small Opposition columns in Moscow and Leningrad. The events were the pretext for expulsion.

Trotsky was deported on 17 January 1928 to Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in Kazakhstan, 4,000 km from Moscow. From Alma-Ata he wrote prolifically, including the 1928 manuscript The Permanent Revolution. The OGPU intercepted his correspondence but did not yet move to a tighter confinement.

Deutscher (The Prophet Unarmed, 1959) treats the defeat as the working out of structural forces (Lenin's death; the failure of the German revolution; the bureaucratisation of the Party; the Stalin General Secretaryship from 1922) within which Trotsky's tactical errors (the Testament passivity, the Lessons of October, the late United Opposition) were marginal. The book is the classic Trotskyist reading.

Lenin was critical of both Stalin and Trotsky; only Stalin was named for removal.

Stalin was General Secretary from 3 April 1922, six weeks before Lenin's first stroke. The post controlled appointments.

Party expulsion 14 November 1927; Alma-Ata exile 17 January 1928; expulsion from the Soviet Union 12 February 1929.