The typical Bolshevik leader of the Leninist era was, as a rule, a Marxist theorist, a political strategist, a fluent writer, and an effective orator, in addition to being some sort of Organizer. Stalin did not count at all as a theorist.[7]
He was to the end a political tactician rather than a strategist: he showed his mastery in short-term manoeuvre rather than in long-term conception, although his genius for tactics did more than compensate his weakness as a strategist. He was cumbersome and ineffective as a writer and speaker. Only as an exceptionally gifted organizer had he made his mark in Lenin's lifetime. His contemporaries and rivals had reason therefore to think that he was unfit to be Lenin's successor.
Their mistake lay in the assumption that Bolshevik Russia after Lenin needed the type of leadership which Lenin had provided and which Lenin's dosest associates might have provided collectively or individually. They misjudged the changing circumstances and the new need of the time; and so they failed to see that the man who might not have been qualified to act as the leader in one phase of the revolution might be eminently suited for that role in the subsequent phase.
We know that among those changing circumstances Bolshevik Russia's political isolation in the world and mental self-isolation from it were the most important. The isolation was not of Stalin's making — it was a consequence of events preceding his ascendancy. He merely took the situation as it was. He was reconciled to it and inwardly free to act within its framework; and therefore he thrived on it. Most of his rivals were unreconciled to Russia's isolation, incapable of overcoming their internationalist habits of thought, and not disposed to frame policies consistently within the context of isolation. They were at odds with the root fact of the new time; and they were undone by it.
The same is true of Stalin's as against his rivals' attitude in the dilemma of proletarian democracy versus autocracy, the other crucial issue in the transition from Leninism to Stalinism. It was not Stalin who had destroyed the proletarian democracy of the early phase of the revolution. It had withered even before 1923-4; at most, Stalin delivered the coup de grace.
His rivals, however, could not shed their democratic habits. They were not inwardly reconciled to the fact that, struggling for the preservation of its revolution, Bolshevism had deprived the working classes of freedom of political expression. They were entangled in their own regrets, scruples, and second thoughts. They looked back longingly to the democratic origins of the revolution. Stalin did nothing of the sort. They were therefore not fitted to act effectively within the new, undemocratic framework of the Bolshevik State. He was. They were crushed by that framework, while he proceeded to build around it his autocratic System of government.[8]
The trend of the time found in Stalin its ‘organ’. If it hadn't been Stalin it would have been another.
A similar view when expressed about other historical figures may seem implausible; but it is exceptionally convincing in the case of Stalin.
When it is said that the general trend of the Renaissance would not have been different without Leonardo da Vinci and that at the most some of its ‘individual features’ would have been different, one immediately thinks of the ‘Last Supper’ and ‘Mona Lisa’, and one wonders: Would the trend really not have been different? Was the contribution of Leonardo (or of Michelangelo) merely one of its ‘individual features’?
When one is told that another French general of the period of the Directory could have filled the place of Napoleon, one cannot help thinking about Napoleon's elan, intellectual brilliance, and romantic appeal; and one wonders just how much Napoleon's individual characteristics counted in the general course of events.