Quotes from Robert C. Tucker

The "humiliating regime" undoubtedly contributed something to the transformation of seminarian Djugashvili into a revolutionary. But other factors were also involved, among them the fact that rebellion had already become a tradition in the seminary.

Lenin added a postscript on January 4, 1923, recommending Stalin's removal from the post of general secretary.

There is no indication that he thought of himself as a "machine politician" in our sense of that phrase.

Expulsions on political grounds were numerous as early as the eighteen-seventies, when many of the students began applying their knowledge of Russian to the study of the populist literature coming from up north. Secret study and discussion groups flourished from that time on, and rebellious actions flared up on occasion.

This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle. But I think that from the point of view of preventing a split, and from the point of view of what I have written above about the relation between Stalin and Trotsky, this is no trifle, or it is a trifle that may take on decisive significance.

Russian nationalism was as alien to Lenin's makeup as it was congenial, deep down, to Stalin's.

In 1926, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev belatedly joined in what was called the "united opposition." A rearguard action by two crippled factions, it was doomed to the debacle that overtook it in late 1927 when Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, along with large numbers of their followers, were expelled from the party.

But institutionally authoritarian as it was, the Soviet party-state of the NEP years was a far cry from the dread bureaucratic leviathan conjured up by our image of a "totalitarian system."[490]

He became reflective and, somehow, withdrawn [zamknutym]. He gave up games but not books, and would go off in a corner and read assiduously."[127] Thus, young Djugashvili began to show the reticence and brooding aloofness from others that would characterize him in later years.

Private enterprise flourished in much of the economy. Intellectual life was far from completely regimented.[491] The secret police, albeit an object of fear for many, was not operating as the terror machine that it was later to become and was not yet one man's political instrument. Neither the population at large nor the tens of thousands composing the politically influential class could be described (in the language of the theory of totalitarianism) as an "atomized mass.

He also became known as one who was quick to take offense, even if spoken to in jest.

The party-state structure still showed considerable looseness in organization and mode of functioning.

Before long, however, Djugashvili was organizing one or more new study circles of which he himself was the mentor.[129] Again, a quality by which he was distinguished in later years—the urge for personal power—was finding expression in the seminary period.

In the NEP era Soviet society was not yet the tightly controlled organism that it would become during the Stalinist thirties as a result of the revolution from above that Stalin initiated in late 1929, when the power to do so was finally in his hands.

So was his intolerance of dissenting opinions.

Since, moreover, the Bolsheviks were by old habit an intensely argumentative party, given to debating their political issues in ideological terms, an aspiring leader had to be convincing theoretically as well as pragmatically. No matter how competent he might be as a technician of power, he had to prove himself as a political and ideological leader in the Lenin tradition. He had to engage in a contest not simply for power but also for the succession.

succession means legitimacy as well as power.

It involves the passage to the new leader of something of the authority possessed by his predecessor, the general recognition of him as rightful head of the political community.

In 1925 Stalin had said that there was latent "beat the kulak" sentiment in the party.

But the situation is very different—and the succession problem far more difficult—in a new state in which supreme authority is centered in the personality of the leader-founder, and in which no formal office of supreme leader has been created.

Stalin's program was bound to appeal to Bolsheviks who harbored such attitudes, and his argumentation shows how conscious of this he was. "We cannot live like gypsies without grain reserves,

Why Djugashvili became a revolutionary is a question posed above but not adequately answered. We noted, first, that he himself explained it in later life as a reaction against the Jesuitical regime in the seminary; and secondly, that revolt was a living tradition in the institution when he entered it. A further contributing factor was personality.

five days later, the Politburo heard his report on the situation in the Caucasus and decided "to pursue toward Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, and Persia a maximally conciliatory policy, that is, aimed primarily at avoiding war."[381]

Stalin's program was bound to appeal to Bolsheviks who harbored such attitudes, and his argumentation shows how conscious of this he was. "We cannot live like gypsies without grain reserves," he said in the speech of July 9, 1928. "Isn't it clear that a great state covering a sixth of the earth's surface can't get along without grain reserves for internal and external needs?