Lenin’s death in January 1924 had a mixed impact. Publicly, it signalled the beginning of a cult of Lenin: thousands viewed the open coffin, Petrograd became Leningrad, and quasi-religious symbolism of Russian Orthodoxy crept into the funeral. And over the objections of Krupskaia, the Central Committee placed the embalmed body on permanent display in Red Square. Behind the scenes, however, Lenin’s death—long anticipated—did not interrupt adversarial high politics. In February 1924 the Central Committee launched a recruitment campaign, the Lenin Enrolment, to ‘proletarianize’ the party by admitting more actual industrial workers. Although this step would ultimately erode the meaning and significance of party membership, in the short term it added primarily to the numerical strength of Stalin’s supporters. By the time the Thirteenth Party Congress opened at the end of May 1924, over 128,000 new candidates had joined. That number would soon surpass 240,000, thus increasing the size of the party by more than half. The triumvirate also fortified itself in other ways. Krupskaia pressed the leadership to make public the criticisms in Lenin’s testament, which had been kept secret (even from the party members for over a year), but was rebuffed. When Trotsky attacked Zinoviev and Kamenev in his
With Trotsky weakened, the struggle entered a second phase in early 1925 when the triumvirs turned against one another. In 1924 Stalin had already begun to use his appointment powers as General Secretary to replace followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev with his own. This rivalry now intensified, just as the character of NEP itself became the central public issue. Indeed, 1925 would prove to be the apogee of private economic initiative during NEP. Zinoviev, ostensibly alarmed at capitalist ‘excesses’ in a socialist state, went on the attack. That impelled Bukharin, NEP’s strongest advocate in the top leadership, to join forces with Stalin. Ultimately however, this phase of the struggle was decided more along factional than policy lines. At the Central Committee meeting of October 1925 and again at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December, the more numerous Stalin–Bukharin bloc simply ran roughshod over the Zinoviev–Kamenev group.
The third phase of the succession produced an unlikely alliance: the ‘united opposition’ of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev in 1926–7. Seeking to offset the support for Stalin (and, to a lesser degree, Bukharin) in the rank and file, these former foes resorted to direct action to achieve what they had been unable to gain in internal party politics. This strategy unravelled even before it was implemented. When one of the opposition’s conspiratorial meetings was easily uncovered in mid-1926, the Central Committee charged Zinoviev with violating the party ban on factions and removed him from the Politburo. In late September, the ‘united opposition’ took their case directly to the factories by staging public demonstrations, but without success. As the party press mobilized its full wrath against them, in early October 1926 the trio capitulated and publicly recanted. Trotsky was removed from the Politburo, and Kamenev lost his place as candidate member. After further machinations and conflicts, in October 1927 the trio was dropped from the Central Committee, followed by the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the party itself in November. One month later, the Fifteenth Congress revoked the party membership of Kamenev. Zinoviev and Kamenev would be readmitted in 1928 following a humiliating recantation, but Trotsky was first exiled and then forcibly deported in 1929.
