Trotsky and his associates were absolutely correct. The appointment system was Stalin's most effective instrument in conquering power. Although he did not invent it, he perfected it. Boris Souvarine, in his analysis of the structure of the state, singled out the two chief concentrations of central power—the Secretariat, which worked in close association with the Org- buro; and the Central Control Commission, with its local control commissions, introduced in 1920 to register all complaints against officialdom but very quickly transformed into a weapon for combatting all criticism and maintaining the strictest discipline.
The importance of the Secretariat was that it handled all questions relating to personnel assignments and leadership posts in local organizations. In 1920 a Department of Records and Assignments, the Uchraspred, was established within the Secretariat, with the initial task of organizing emergency mobilizations of party members. It set the mobilization quotas for each local organization. After the civil war, when major mobilizations of party members ended, the Uchraspred took over the job of assigning personnel to party posts. Under the party's rules, members were always totally at the disposal of the Central Committee. After the civil war this meant at the disposal of the Uchraspred. By the beginning of 1923 all party posts down to the district level came under its jurisdiction. At the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 the report on the work of the Uchraspred stated that during 1922 it had assigned "more than 10,000 party members, about half of whom were 'responsible officials.'"144
The party congress elected the Central Committee, which in turn elected the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat. The Secretariat, through the Uchraspred, chose all the regional and district secretaries of party committees. They in turn selected the delegates to the congress, which elected the Secretariat. By 1923 this system, in which the Secretariat in effect elected itself, had been perfected. Stalin had the party machinery in his hands.
Trotsky and his associates justly criticized the system of appointments from above, but they were criticizing a system that Lenin had created and were thereby violating Lenin's precepts. More importantly, they were criticizing a system created with their consent and participation. They voiced their opposition to the system after the Twelfth Congress, when it began to turn against them. Despite the sharp polemics between the supporters of Trotsky and Stalin, they agreed on one decisive point: the party should run the entire life of the country, not only its political life, but social, economic, and cultural matters as well. Their agreement on this point showed that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky was in the last analysis only a struggle for power.
Lenin had often stressed the all-encompassing role of the party. In 1918 the non-Communist specialist S. Liberman discovered intolerable practices among those in charge of the lumber industry. Lenin listened to Liberman's complaints, agreed with him, then warned: "The rectification of our errors must always come from above, not from specialists. That is why if you have any proposals, you should call me on the phone, and I myself will make the necessary changes."145 At the end of his life Lenin was to say: "We must know and remember that the entire constitution of the Soviet Republic, both in legal terms and practical matters, is based on the fact that the party does everything, planning, building, and straightening out errors, according to one single principle."146 That principle was the autocratic rule of the party.
In the early 1920s Gabriel Myasnikov and the Workers' Group, which he organized among industrial workers in Petrograd and the Urals, put forward some slogans that were quite unusual for Communists. After the Tenth Party Congress, Myasnikov sent a letter to the Central Committee with the following proposaclass="underline" "Now that we have smashed the resistance of the exploiters and constituted ourselves the sole power in the land, we must proclaim freedom of speech and the press of a kind that no one in the world has had before—for everyone, from the monarchists to the anarchists." Myasnikov was expelled from the party and arrested. After escaping from the Soviet Union in 1928, he acknowledged that he had remained alive thanks only to his "heroic past"—the murder of Grand Duke Mikhail Romanov.
On January 16, 1924, five days before Lenin died, the Thirteenth Party Conference decided to make public the entire resolution on party unity passed on Lenin's urging by the Tenth Party Congress in 1921. The conference reminded all who criticized the "Politburo majority" that they were fighting against Leninist ideas. In May 1924 at the Thirteenth Party Congress, the first after Lenin's death, Trotsky made clear once again that his entire past and future opposition to Stalin was nothing more than a struggle for power: "I have never recognized freedom for groupings inside the party, nor do I now recognize it, because under the present historical conditions groupings are merely another name for factions." Then Trotsky uttered words that in effect constituted a death sentence for all who criticized Stalin from the point of view of "true Leninism":
In the last analysis, the party is always right, because the party is the sole historical instrument the working class possesses for the solution of its fundamental tasks. ... I know that no one can be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the party and through it since history has not created any other way to determine the correct position.147
If the party is always right, if one cannot oppose it, if there can be no doubt that it alone will carry out the mission assigned to it by history, the only alternative is to try to seize power within the party.
On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. Stalin organized the funeral in his own manner. Despite the protests of many Old Bolsheviks and of Lenin's widow, Lenin's corpse was embalmed and placed in a glass coffin inside a mausoleum built of wood upon Red Square. On January 30, Krupskaya asked in Pravda that Lenin not be mourned with "public worship of him." She asked that statues of him not be erected nor cities named after him. "If you wish to honor Vladimir Ilyich's name, build child care centers, kindergartens, houses, schools, and so on." The opposite was done. Gigantic funeral ceremonies were organized, as were pilgrimages to the mausoleum. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Cities like Lenino, Leninsk, and Ulyanovsk appeared on the map.
The deification of Lenin was particularly necessary for his heirs, each of whom tried to tear off a piece of his halo. They felt themselves to be lesser deities. Along with Leningrad other new names for towns and cities appeared: Zinovievsk, Trotsk, and Stalingrad. And all the while Stalin was operating for the most part in the background, pushing Zinoviev to the fore. On January 26, Stalin spoke very modestly in the Hall of Columns at the Central Trade Union Building in Moscow. His modest speech, which Soviet schoolchildren would later be required to learn by heart for decades thereafter, was entitled "A Pledge." Pravda published only short excerpts.
The spectacular funeral for Lenin showed convincingly that Stalin was Lenin's most outstanding disciple. The Politburo, after placing Lenin's body in the mausoleum, thus encasing the relics of the new saint, at the same time submitted their teacher's brain to scientific examination. A German professor by the name of Vogt undertook the task and soon discovered "important peculiarities in the structure of the so-called pyramidal cells of the third layer." The journalists of the time reported that these special characteristics of Lenin's brain were "the reason for his ingenious ideas and the ingenious tactics that Lenin devised at the most difficult stages of the revolution when many others felt the ground slip from under their feet and lost all perspective."148 The deification of the leader proceeded, fully in accordance with the doctrine of Marx: the mausoleum represented the cultural-ideological superstructure; the pyramidal cells, the material base.