THE DESPOT  
After Lenin's death Stalin joined in a troika with Grigory Zinovyev and Kamenev to lead the country. With these temporary allies, Stalin acted against his archrival Trotsky, the foremost candidate for Lenin's mantle. Once the threat of Trotsky was eliminated, however, Stalin reversed course, aligning himself with Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov against his former partners. Trotsky, Zinovyev, and Kamenev in turn challenged Stalin as the "left opposition". By skilful manipulation and clever publicity, but especially by interpreting Lenin's precepts to a new generation coming of age in the 1920s. By his 50th birthday (1929), he had cemented his position as Lenin's recognized successor and entrenched his power as sole leader of the Soviet Union.

Stalin reacted to lagging agricultural production in the late 1920s by a ruthless, personally supervised expropriation of grain from peasants in Siberia. When other crises threatened in late 1929, he expanded what had been a moderate collectivization programme into a nationwide offensive against the peasantry. Millions were displaced, and unknown thousands died in the massive collectivization. The industrialization campaigns over which Stalin presided in the 1930s were much more successful; these raised the backward Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the rank of the industrial powers.

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