Quotes from Robert C. Tucker

To neither of his two commissariats did he give the sustained and imaginative direction that agencies so innovative in design especially called for. The notion of the worker-peasant inspectorate as essentially a public force against "bureaucratism" came from Lenin, and Stalin never seems to have felt at home with

whereas Lenin had envisaged the new Central Committee members as workers, for the most part, Stalin wanted to enlarge the Central Committee with well-disposed apparatchiki so as to increase his own influence within it.

Stalin was not temperamentally well constituted for success as an organizer and administrator.

Cards had been prepared on twenty-six thousand of these full-time party functionaries, and the information on the seven thousand working at the province level had been set aside for detailed further study by Central Committee officials, with a view to defining a still smaller category of more important figures.[371]

He was deficient in such qualities as patience, even temper, cooperativeness, and the capacity to subordinate oneself, in small ways and large, to the needs of an institution.

Stalin found a party machine in being. Where he differed from his predecessors in the secretaryship was in turning the position to his own political advantage. He set about building up a personal machine as an informal political reality within the official one, a Stalin empire in the party-state.

the Central Committee expanded from a size of twenty-seven members and nineteen candidates in 1922 to sixty-three members and forty-three candidates in 1925, and many of the newcomers were Stalin supporters.

He soon recovered sufficiently to resume work, but suffered further strokes on December 13 and 22, after which he had to submit to a regime of greatly reduced activity.

Leninism was in part a revival of Russian Jacobinism within Marxism.

During 1922 events moved swiftly toward a crisis in Lenin's relations with Stalin, who by this time felt sufficiently secure in his power base to assert views and persist in them even if they occasionally ran counter to Lenin's.

The Orgburo was shifting leading personnel around in implementing policy decisions taken in the Politburo. Lower-level personnel decisions were within the jurisdiction of the Secretariat, and the latter, through Uchraspred, was able to effect appointments and transfers in the system of party organizations throughout the country. Here was a boundless field of opportunity for empire-building by a man of Stalin's ambitions and aptitudes.

that the Tenth Party Congress passed a resolution on unity, drafted by Lenin, which banned factions in the party. Reflecting the competition of "platforms" on the trade union issue, which had divided the party in the pre-congress period, it defined factionalism as "the emergence of groups with special platforms and a certain striving to close ranks and create their own group discipline."[485

Basic Soviet strategy in foreign affairs, under which the Comintern and the Foreign Commissariat operated as two arms of a dual policy, one working to overthrow capitalist governments while the other tried to conduct business with them, was essentially Lenin's creation, as was the notion of a Soviet diplomacy designed to reduce the insecurity of the revolutionary state by aggravating the discords between its enemies.

The one kind of organizing activity that really engaged his interest and aroused his effort was "organizational work" in the special Bolshevik sense of personnel placement.

Stalin recalled in 1931—by way of explaining to the German author Emil Ludwig why he became a Marxist revolutionary—it was a "humiliating regime" based on "Jesuitical methods.

But the Stalin school of organizational work differed from the Sverdlov in one fundamental aspect that Stalin did not mention: it applied a self-serving test in selecting candidates for advancement in the party hierarchy. No longer did it suffice to give good indication that one was a person of ability, energy, and devotion to the Bolshevik cause.

When Ludwig asked if he saw no good points in the Jesuits, he replied: "Yes, they are systematic and persistent in the pursuit of bad ends. But their chief method is surveillance, spying, invasion of the inner life, the violation of people's feelings, and what can be positive in that?

Not only did such an ideology legitimize the young man's resentment against the various forms of established authority, it identified his enemies as history's, bestowed higher meaning on his urge to live a life of combat against forces of evil, and sanctified his quest for vindictive triumphs along the way.

Man's nature, he postulated, was to be a "free conscious producer," but so far he had not been able to express himself freely in productive activity. He had been driven to produce by need and greed, by a passion for accumulation which in the modern bourgeois age becomes accumulation of capital. His productive activity had always, therefore, been involuntary; it had been "labour.

While operating in the background—as was his habit—and letting others do the open fighting, he was himself a principal protagonist in the conflict.

One must, in addition, evince a favorable disposition toward the party regime of the general secretary, usefulness to the Stalin organization.

At the time of Lenin's death there were in the party four different factional groupings with representation on the Politburo.

Stalin, as many in the party soon began to perceive, was acting in the manner of a political boss. But we should take care not to assume that he saw himself in this light.

The maneuvers by which Stalin steered his faction to a conclusive victory over the other three are testimony to his extraordinary skill as a political strategist; they have been cited as a textbook example of the art of coalition strategy.