Joseph Stalin's rise to power would be inexplicable if examined only on the surface. In the preface to his book on Stalin, Roman Brackman points out that he was just a "mousy" public servant whose success at taking over a government and perpetrating "a colossal mountain of horrors" seems inconceivable in retrospect, yet it happened. Because Stalin covered his tracks by destroying and falsifying public records and by murdering witnesses, his own lies and those of his propaganda machine served to distort and obscure what really happened during the years of his life and rule (Brackman, preface). What Edvard Radzinsky describes as "the constant and relentless purging of the archives" would obliterate all record of Stalin's enemies and hide what really happened, yet Stalin inadvertently left behind a trail of clues that could be pieced together to tell the story. This paper will describe how Stalin rose to power even though Trotsky was the leading man at the time, and identify who his allies and enemies were in the process.
The initial key to Stalin's eventual political success was his association with Lenin. In contrast to the usual political sham and false promises so prevalent in most nations' politics, Lenin's approach was one of truth and realism (Trotsky). For Stalin, a man given to relentless subterfuge, being identified with one noted for his honesty created the illusion of good character by association. Stalin's calculated political power play was so advantaged by his association with Lenin that even after Lenin's death, he was revered by the Russian people despite being a sociopathic murderer; the Russian people were never aware of that side of him, thanks to the way he diligently covered up his misdeeds through lies and falsification of documents. In his introduction to Trotsky's book Lenin, Max Schachtman states, "Lenin, with his profound revolutionary realism, exemplifies a political type which is the ...