How Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin Became Contested Figures

Welcome back to Origin Story: The Story of Socialism as we resume the story of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin in part two: Power.

It’s 1917. The Bolsheviks have seized control of Russia, the world’s first socialist state, but they’re a small party in a very big country, besieged by enemies at home and abroad. No sooner has it extricated itself from the First World War than Russia is plunged into an existentially perilous civil war between the Reds and the Tsarist Whites and, well, everybody else. 

The war accelerates Russia's transformation into a dictatorship, with one-party rule, a secret police force and a ruthless disregard for human life. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 confirms that the dictatorship of the proletariat will brook no dissent.

Meanwhile in Germany, revolutionary hopes are crushed with the murder of German communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. As other communist uprisings also fail, Trotsky’s dream of world revolution fades and Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country” prevails.

As Lenin’s health collapses, a succession battle between Stalin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks begins that will last for most of the decade. It ends in 1929 with Stalin triumphant, Trotsky in exile, the dead Lenin a kind of deity, and the USSR’s age of terror ready to begin.

Could the progress of the revolution have been different without the brutal chaos of the Civil War or was tyranny always part of the plan? How did Stalin outwit his rivals to take over from Lenin, and how did Trotsky blow it? Why didn’t communist revolutions succeed anywhere else but Russia? How was the new regime perceived by socialists around the world? And did Rosa Luxemburg, more than anyone, represent the humane, democratic socialism that might have been?

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Reading list

• Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (1938)

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (1954)

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 (1959)

• Ian Dunt, How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)

• Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988)

• Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

• Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2017)

• Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019)

• Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981)

• Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

• Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004)

• Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

• Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Study of Bolshevism (1939)

• Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: Against Kautsky (1920)

• Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994)

• H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (1920)

• Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1921)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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