Quotes About Power

Political power in the one-party system was vested in collective bodies such as the party congress, which met annually in the early years, and its elected interim surrogate, the Central Committee.

The point is that the powers on which he chiefly relied in exercising this forceful individual leadership were his powers of persuasion.

Without a third revolution to carry off, there could be no second Lenin.

Does the mass give the leaders the program and its argumentation, or do the leaders give it to the mass?[163]

hope in a dictatorship of the tsar, acting for the people and against the nobles.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a writer and critic who assumed intellectual leadership of the intelligentsia in the fifties, had in 1848 confided to his diary the thought that Russia needed an autocracy that would champion the interests of the lower classes in order to realize future equality. He added: "Peter the Great acted thus, in my opinion, but such a power must realize that it is temporary, that it is a means, not an end."[10]

What supplanted the notion of progressive autocracy, then, was the idea that a revolutionary seizure of power from below should be followed by the formation of a dictatorship of the revolutionary party, which would use political power for the purpose of carrying through from above a socialist transformation of Russian society.

Russian Jacobinism.

Djugashvili had a way of leaving places under a cloud after some ugly incident, brought on in part by his own tendency to become embroiled with others.

Stalin elaborated the Stalinist version of building socialism into a coherent ideological doctrine.

he advocated a strategy of pressing forward from the stage of democratic revolution represented in the Provisional Government to that of socialist revolution via the seizure of power and establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In an effort to validate this position ideologically, Lenin went back to his Marxist texts during an interval of forced inactivity during 1917 and wrote The State and Revolution, his principal work of political theory.

Consequently, it would be in no sense un-Marxist for the party to seize power and rule dictatorially in the interest of building a socialist society in Russia. This was the practical political conclusion implicit in every line of Lenin's seemingly scholastic theoretical treatise on Marxist views about the state.

Stalin was elected a member of the Secretariat and accorded the title "general secretary" in token of his seniority in a new secretarial trio whose two other members were Molotov and Kuibyshev. The base of operations was now securely in his possession.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

discrepancy between power and authority thus existed in early post-Lenin Bolshevism. Powerful though he had become in the party, Stalin was not yet widely perceived and accepted as Lenin's successor in the role of supreme leader of the party.