Slavoj Zizek, "
Repeating Lenin" (Lenin as a Listener of Schubert)
In the diaries of Georgi Dimitroff, which were recently published in German,28 we get a unique glimpse into how Stalin was fully aware what brought him to power, giving an unexpected twist to his well-known slogan that “people (cadres) are our greatest wealth.” When, at a diner in November 1937, Dimitroff praises the “great luck” of the international workers, that they had such a genius as their leader, Stalin, Stalin answers:
“... I do not agree with him. He even expressed himself in a non-Marxist way.
Decisive are the middle cadres."(7.11.37)
He puts it in an even clearer way a paragraph earlier:
“Why did we win over Trotsky and others? It is well known that, after Lenin, Trotsky was the most popular in our land.
But we had the support of the middle cadres, and they explained our grasp of the situation to the masses ... Trotsky did not pay any attention to these cadres.”
Here Stalin spells out the secret of his rise to power: as a rather anonymous General Secretary, he nominated tens of thousands of cadres who owed their rise to him... This is why Stalin did not yet want Lenin dead in the early 1922, rejecting his demand to be given poison to end his life after the debilitating stroke: if Lenin were to die already in early 1922, the question of succession would not yet be resolved in Stalin’s favor, since Stalin as the general secretary did not yet penetrate enough the Party apparatus with his appointees — he needed another year or two, so that, when Lenin effectively dies, he could count on the support of thousands of mid-level cadres nominated by him to win over the big old names of the Bolshevik “aristocracy.”
6 comments:
Interesting post. Stalin was brutal.
Evidently, he got his power from feeding the Deep State...
yet he was so insecure in his power that he had Trotsky assassinated in Mexico and removed Trotsky from photographs. Like burning an effigy. Lots of superstition there.
Trotsky outlived his usefulness to Stalin though. It was enough to be accused of being a Trotskyist (even if you weren't) to get killed under Stalin. Trotsky was Stalin's Baba Yaga.
There was a fundamental disagreement with Trotsky. Stalin had invented and implemented a Russian "National Communism". Trotsky was, and always would be a "Communist Internationalist" (COMINTERN). Stalin was smart enough to know that he couldn't fight the whole world... at least not "then", with Patton's 3rd Army sitting just across the iron curtain.
...and Patton knew it too ;)
Trotsky trolled Stalin mercilessly - his ideas, his personal appearance, even the way he spoke Russian (Stalin was a Georgian) along with all the intellectual differences on the implementation of Marxism. Plus, Trotsky was favored as a successor by Lenin. Stalin had every reason to hate Trotsky as a threat and for all the deeply personal insults Trotsky put into print. Stalin was comparatively illiterate when it came to academic highbrow insults.
Trotsky however had no witty retort for the pick axe in his skull.
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