Dizzy with Success - lenin and stalin

The first 200 words of this essay...

Lenin once observed that Stalin had a tendency to "make a rotten compromise in order then to deceive." In other words, he was willing to make tactical retreats in order to lull his rivals or his enemies into a false sense of security. These concessions were meant to be temporary- not, as he would have enemies believe, genuine changes of heart.

Nowhere was this propensity for deceit more clearly displayed than during his article of March 2, 1930, Dizzy With Success. Stalin, in addition to passing responsibility for his mistakes on to "some of our comrades," deliberately lied to the peasants by insisting that the organized terror and theft that had hitherto characterised the collectivisation was completely contrary to his wishes. This was a crucial tactical retreat in Stalin's attempts to crush and collectivise the Soviet peasantry.

A brief chronology of the preceding years is necessary to place all this in context. From 1918-20 the Bolsheviks were engaged in a bloody civil war. The ravaged state of the country at the end of this struggle, combined with foreign opposition and further internal unrest in 1921, illustrated that their grip on power was uncertain. Lenin, seeing the need