In January, 1924, after a long illness, Lenin died, leaving open a struggle for power that was to last until the 1930’s.

The Russian dictator sensed, some time before his death, the evil influence of the man who had squirmed his way to the position of the Party’s General Secretary. Joseph Stalin, a cobbler’s son, had been an old-time Bolshevik. Born in 1879, he had attended a seminary at Tiflis, in the Caucasus, but in 1899 had been expelled. Already he was involved in revolutionary activities. From 1902 until 1913, according to the communists, he was arrested seven times, exiled six times, and escaped five times from exile.

Plodding by nature, Stalin lacked the brilliance of his chief rival, Leon Trotsky. However, his grasp of the Russian mentality was tremendous. Years as an agitator, prison inmate, and political schemer gave him an insight into communist intrigue that other Party leaders seemed to lack. Working silently but meticulously, he was quick to exploit any opportunity to increase his personal power.

Stalin liked to represent himself as the heir of Lenin, the man predestined to carry on the Bolshevik revolution. This claim is not borne out, however, by a “testament” prepared by Lenin shortly before his death. “Comrade Stalin,” wrote Lenin, on Christmas Day, 1922, “having become General Secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution.”

Then Lenin added a postscript dated January 4, 1923, a full year before he died:

However, the time for action had passed. Lenin was too sick to implement his testament. The result: a terrific struggle between Stalin and Trotsky for power.

Trotsky (real name Bronstein) was born in 1879 (two months earlier than Stalin). Early a revolutionary, he spent many years as an exile from Russia. After the Bolshevik revolution he served as Lenin’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs and later did much to organize the Red army.

Many differences separated Stalin and Trotsky, the chief one being Stalin’s idea that Russia should concentrate on making itself powerful first, before undertaking extensive revolutionary action abroad. Trotsky, on the other hand, believed that the Russian revolution could survive only if communist revolutions were promoted in other countries. Both desired world conquest. Their dispute, clouded by a personal hunger for power, centered on how to achieve it. Stalin was the winner. Trotsky was exiled by Stalin in 1929, eventually finding refuge in Mexico. He was assassinated in 1940, reportedly by a secret communist agent.

Joseph Stalin was the fourth “top leader” of communism, claiming “divine” ancestry from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Until his death in 1953, Stalin played a major role in the history of Russian and world communism, as a “continuer” of the work of Lenin. It was Stalin who, through murder, deceit, and brutality, gave communism power, firmly establishing Bolshevik control in Russia and spreading communism to other countries. However, he also was to become the first of the “Big Four” to be denounced by the communists and to have his name blackened by successors.

In carrying on the revolution Stalin became the interpreter of Marxism-Leninism. Under his rule the state, which Marx had visualized as “withering away,” became even stronger, an agent of sheer oppression. The army, navy, secret police, and all political structures of the state grew ever more powerful and permanent. Slave labor camps multiplied. Soviet society became ironclad, more rigid than under the most autocratic Czar. Army officials, Party henchmen, industrial managers, all emerged as classes, each jealous of the other. The “workingman,” whom Marx had extolled, was now an inferior class, exploited and downtrodden.

Stalin carried to the extreme Lenin’s concepts of the Party as a fanatical, disciplined group. To Stalin the Party was not only a tool to seize and maintain power but also a method of liquidating all personal opposition and a means of educating the masses in the communist way of life.

The Party, for this reason, was kept “pure,” meaning completely loyal, disciplined, and blindly obedient. Party schools, cadre training, and regimented discipline were needed to saturate the members in communism. Weaklings were purged, expelled and exiled to Siberia, or executed. In Soviet Russia, and all her satellites, the Party was constantly “Bolshevized”—made “more perfect in communism.”

One result of this insistent demand for discipline under Stalin was the increasing crystallization of Marxism-Leninism—already a harsh and regimented code—into an even more rigid, static, and often sterile body of doctrine. Like a shrinking garment, communist doctrine pressed ever more tightly on communists everywhere. Every action now had to be “justified” by theory. If the theory didn’t fit, then it had to be reinterpreted. To deviate was to court disaster. Stalin, though not so good a theorist as Lenin, liked to pose as Marxism-Leninism’s “expert” interpreter.

This ossification of communist doctrine, under which the individual was afraid to take any initiative, contributed largely to the violent reaction against Stalin after his death. His successors realized that some breathing room was absolutely essential, although during Stalin’s reign they were content to serve, without protest so far as the record shows, as the executors of his policies.

Stalin also identified communism with nationalism and imperialism: Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism.

To him, communism seemed an ideal vehicle for Russian world conquest, and so, once communism was firmly entrenched in Russia, he embarked on a policy curiously similar to that of Czarist imperialists like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

Aided by disturbed world conditions between 1939 and 1953, Stalin started the Soviet chariot of conquest. He directly annexed a number of areas, such as eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, part of Finland, eastern Czechoslovakia, part of Roumania. Then, using communism as an ideological adhesive, Stalin created a Soviet orbit: Yugoslavia, China, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, North Korea, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, East Germany, Albania, Tibet, Outer Mongolia, and North Indochina (where bloody fighting was in progress at the time of his death). No wonder William Z. Foster in February, 1956, could boast that seventeen countries were “actually building Socialism or are definitely orientating in that direction,” having a total population of 900,000,000! He adds: “They constitute the beginning of the new Socialist world.” Note the use of the word “beginning.”

Native communist parties, aided by Moscow, were often the instruments of subjugation, Trojan horses of the twentieth century. At other times Russian military power paved the way. Peoples with long traditions of freedom were betrayed into slavery. Significantly, no entire country has ever gone communist and become a satellite by the free choice of election.

This grandiose conquest was abetted by Stalin’s inheritance of the tools of Marxism-Leninism, a way of life that is imperialistic, overbearing, and dictatorial. Some individuals may accuse Stalin, alone of the communist “Big Four,” of being responsible for the terror of modern-day communism. Marx, Engels, and Lenin, however, are also fully accountable, and so are Stalin’s henchmen, who still rule in the Soviet Union. Stalin may have been the active agent of conquest in our generation, but his knives were sharpened on the diabolical teachings of his communist predecessors.

Even in Stalin’s time cracks had begun to appear in the communist empire. In 1948 a terrific fissure, the break with Tito’s Yugoslavia, rocked Moscow. Currents of discontent, leading to national communism, spread through the European satellite nations. (National communism holds that nations can find their own way to communism and need not slavishly copy Moscow, yet also implies full confidence in the aims and doctrines of Marxism-Leninism, whose application will result in world communism.) “Treason trials” sprouted in many places: Vladimir Clementis and Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia; Laszlo Rajk in Hungary; Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria. These high Party officials, all old-time communists, along with others, were executed. In Poland, Wladyslaw Gomulka, a deputy premier, was expelled from the Party and imprisoned. Stalin’s tyranny became even more strongly entrenched.

Few observers, even in Russia, however, could have guessed the intensity of hatred that lay under Russian tyranny. Less than four years after Stalin’s death the power of freedom was to erupt in Hungary. Poland swayed on the verge of revolt; unrest swept other satellites. Ironically, Gomulka, expelled as a traitor, now became Party boss of Poland; Rajk, along with others, was “rehabilitated.” The “sorrowing” communists even dug up his body, staged a giant funeral, and buried him again, this time with honors. Stalin left a precarious legacy for his successors.

But in barely a generation Russia had moved swiftly forward in its campaign of world conquest. In the name of Karl Marx (who, in his day, had roundly denounced the imperialism of the Czars) and by the application of his doctrines, Stalin had created a dictatorial empire far beyond the dreams of any Czar. Such a dictatorial empire grows out of the very nature of Marxist thought and is inevitable wherever it is applied. In the Kremlin the dream of world conquest still persists. It threatens free peoples everywhere.

This Russian conquest was made possible, in large measure, by the tremendous strengthening of the Soviet state. In 1928 the first of a series of Five Year Plans, designed to strengthen heavy industry and collectivize agriculture, was launched. Step by step the New Economic Policy, adopted by Lenin in 1921, disappeared.

The government now undertook to control everything. Production quotas, which had to be met, were set. Compulsory labor increased. Private trade disappeared. A system of rationing was introduced. Consumer goods virtually disappeared.

In rural areas small farms were abolished. Peasants were compelled to live in giant cooperatives. Many of the more well-to-do farmers, called kulaks, were dispossessed and shipped to Siberia. Entire families were liquidated. The secret police became more active.

As under Lenin’s “war communism,” the Five Year Plan brought untold human misery. The forced collectivization of agriculture caused a shortage of food. Transportation broke down in many areas. In the Ukraine, the food basket of Russia, famine reappeared. Millions of people died. Disease stalked the land.

But Stalin held firm. Heavy industry must be expanded—steel mills, automobile and tractor factories, railroads. Coal mines must be operated. Armaments must be expedited. Stalin was preparing the base for world conquest. The price in human suffering and privation was incalculable, and unimportant.

At the same time Stalin was furthering a communist society. Art, literature, education, and the press were harnessed to the struggle. A new generation dedicated to following Stalin’s will was being created. No opposition was tolerated. In 1936 Stalin brought forth a Soviet constitution, a document glittering with supposed “rights” for the people but actually a mask for ever-increasing tyranny.

From 1934 to 1938 was a period of great purges. The world witnessed the spectacle of gigantic public trials of old Bolsheviks such as Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin, both former presidents of the Communist International, and A. I. Rykov, a former Premier, all accused of treason. Even Yagoda, former head of the secret police, was brought to court. Many, as comrades of Lenin, had fought to create the Bolshevik revolution. Now they were denounced as arch traitors. Nobody knows how many thousands were killed in these blood purges. But one thing was obvious: Stalin was liquidating all possible opposition.

Inevitably Stalin became, in communist eyes, a virtual god on earth. He was pictured as the world’s greatest military genius, scientist, author, critic, statesman, popular hero, thinker and engineer.

Here are some of the accolades:

On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. The communist world went into mourning. His funeral was a state spectacle. His body, like Lenin’s, was entombed in Moscow. Speeches extolled his “greatness.”

The whole world wondered, What next? First a triumvirate, Malenkov, Molotov, and Beria, assumed control. Less than a year later Beria, head of the secret police, was executed as a “traitor.” Then Malenkov, generally regarded as the Number One leader, was deposed as Premier. Later, Molotov, the old-time Bolshevik, was ousted from the Foreign Ministry, as was his successor, Dmitri T. Shepilov, former editor of Pravda. All three were denounced in 1957 as “enemies” of the Party. (Still later, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Red Army hero, was ousted as Soviet Defense Minister.)

Gradually new faces began to appear, especially that of Nikita S. Khrushchev, a Politburo member, who became First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a powerful position. N. A. Bulganin, one of Stalin’s “political” generals, assumed the job of Premier. These two, referred to as “B and K,” became the most prominently known leaders.

Significant changes, both in foreign and domestic policies, appeared. But underneath, as the suppression of the Hungarian revolt was to prove, lay the ruthless policies of Stalin. Under Malenkov, attempts were made to encourage the production of consumer items, but with his fall, stress reverted to the old Stalinist emphasis on heavy industry. In the foreign field, “B and K” made a widely heralded trip to Yugoslavia, there to woo Tito back into the Moscow camp. The “Big Smile” was radiant at the Geneva Conference of July, 1955, attended by heads of state of France, England, the United States, and Russia, and during highly publicized visits of “B and K” to India and Great Britain.

The cult of Stalin, which had reached nauseating proportions, was toned down. Emphasis was laid on collective leadership. Then, on the night of February 24-25, 1956, came the bombshell that shook and shocked communists around the world—the bitter denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party. It was as devastating a speech as was ever delivered by one man against another. Copies of the speech, not made public in Russia, found their way to the West and in June, 1956, were released by our own Department of State.

Khrushchev denounced Stalin, the “great Stalin” who had been idolized by all communists as a man who could do no wrong, as a murderer, pathological liar, and perverter of Marxism-Leninism. In fiery language and with specific names and dates, Khrushchev accused Stalin of mass terror, deporting whole populations, forging false evidence against alleged enemies, being a coward during World War II, and possessing a vanity that led him to believe he was a god. Khrushchev in his systematic destruction of Stalin dealt with such matters as:

1. Mass terror:

2. Suspicion and distrust:

3. Illegal arrests:

4. Abuse of power:

5. Isolation from people:

6. Love of self:

Khrushchev, telling how Stalin, in his own hand, wrote flattering statements about himself for his own biography, said: “This book is an expression of the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, ‘the greatest leader,’ ‘sublime strategist of all times and nations.’ Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens.”

And then Khrushchev says, Stalin even had the audacity to add, again with his own pen, “... Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.”

No mention was made by Khrushchev of any anti-Semitic crimes committed by Stalin. However, on April 4, 1956, an article entitled “Our Pain and Our Solace” appeared in the Warsaw Yiddish-language newspaper Folks-Shtimme, which charged that Jewish culture had been largely liquidated under Stalin and many Jewish leaders executed. To date these allegations have never been denied by the Kremlin and American communists have reluctantly accepted them as true. On April 13, 1956, the East Coast communist paper, the Daily Worker, in an editorial entitled “Grievous Deeds,” made mention of the earlier Polish “disclosures ... that a large number of Jewish writers and other Jewish leaders were framed up and executed and that Jewish culture was virtually wiped out” in the Soviet Union. These monstrous deeds of anti-Semitism in Russia have had profound repercussions among communists in the United States.

No single event in Party history so unnerved communists abroad—and inside Russia too—as did the Khrushchev attack. Where did it leave communist leaders who year after year had fawned upon Stalin as the greatest of all leaders? Weren’t they also responsible for such terrible perversions? What was this system called communism, represented as noble, when its chief exponent was a murderer, falsifier, and bigot?

History alone can tell the reasons for, and the ultimate effects of, this violent denunciation. We know about the growing unrest within Russia and the eagerness of the government to appease demands for a higher standard of living. We know how communists like to find scapegoats on whom they can place the people’s hate and distrust, especially if the scapegoat is dead. We know of the jealous jockeying for power that is inevitable in any communist hierarchy.

Moreover, there also appeared to be an effort to rid communism of the growing “dead hand” of Stalin who, in his old age, had become capriciously tyrannical and personally maniacal. His successors saw how this crust of sludge, through fear, terror, and ossification of communist doctrine, was crushing initiative.

But the essential elements of Stalinism, brutality, illegality, ruthlessness, remain. In October, 1956, the Hungarians revolted against their puppet government, only to be violently attacked by Soviet tanks and troops. Nothing could illustrate better the unrepentant Soviet heart. Moscow still firmly controls her satellite empire. Nowhere in a communist country have truly free elections been held. Communist subversion against the free world continues. Atheism remains a dominant doctrine. Unremitting support for Moscow is still demanded of communists everywhere. Speaking before the East German Parliament, Khrushchev made this point clear by stressing the “holy duty” of every communist to help strengthen the communist world.

Apparently realizing he had gone too far in criticizing Stalin, Khrushchev backed up and started to praise the late dictator, showing that in actual fact Khrushchevism was actually Stalinism in a different dress. At a diplomatic reception in Moscow in early 1957, Khrushchev commented boldly:

What can we expect in the future? Let Khrushchev himself answer: “Those who expect us to abandon communism will have to wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.”

“What will the [Soviet] policy be like?... We will do the same, but with more emphasis.”

This is the enemy we face today.