II. Discuss the following questions:

1. What measure helped to rid of many dissenters within the party?

2. What were the functions of GPU?

3. Why did Lenin choose Stalin for post of general secretary? How did the latter use the post?

4. What were “model” trials?

5. Why the results of the NEP’ efficient work were so controversial for the Bolsheviks?

6. Who were called “Nepmen”?

7. Why did the socialist “commanding heights” lag behind? What did the recovery under the NEP mean for the Bolsheviks?

III. Fill in the table comparing the advantages and the disadvantages of the NEP for the Bolsheviks and the country itself.

	ADVANTAGES	DISADVANTAGES
For the Bolsheviks
For Russia

Text 6 Lenin’s Last Struggle

I. Explain or paraphrase the words and phrases in bold, use them in the sentences of your own:

The issue of the NEP and where it was taking Soviet Russia did not emerge in time to become a major concern for Lenin. Rather, his concerns were personal and political, and they were interrelated. In mid-1922 Lenin suffered the first of three strokes that in fewer than two years would kill him. The first one disabled him for five months and during his forced inactivity Lenin began to take a critical look at his revolution. He did not like what he saw. The regime was becoming increasingly corrupt. Officials were using their positions for personal gain, treating ordinary citizens with contempt, and in general behaving much like officials had behaved under the hated czars.

Why Lenin suddenly noticed this is uncertain, but it should not have surprised him. Like czarist officials in Imperial Russia, Bolshevik officials in Soviet Russia were part of a dictatorship. They were not restrained by any independent outside force, such as a free press or rival political parties that could unseat them legally and peacefully. Lenin’s problem was that he did not understand that a socialist dictatorship, like any other kind of dictatorship, governs dictatorially. Its officials inevitably are imperious and very likely to be corrupt. Unwilling to consider any modification in the Bolshevik dictatorship – his lifelong goal – Lenin had no solution to the problems he saw, which he considered inconsistent with socialism.

The best Lenin could do was to focus on one official who seemed to be most closely identified with these undesirable developments, which Lenin called “bureaucratism.” That man was the recently appointed general secretary Joseph Stalin, a Bolshevik since the party’s earliest days and for many years one of Lenin’s most trusted aides and associates. Lenin seems to have feared Stalin’s motives and decided that his power had to be strictly limited.

After his second stroke in December 1922, when he knew he would never return to active political life, Lenin composed what is most commonly known as his political “Testament,” in which he evaluated each of his top lieutenants and possible successors. He found all wanting in one way or another, although it was clear that he considered Leon Trotsky the outstanding member of the group. Lenin strongly implied in the “Testament” that no one person should succeed him but that authority should lie with a collective leadership. In an explosive “Postscript” to the “Testament,” written in January 1923, Lenin urged that Stalin be removed from his position as general secretary, which Lenin understood was the key source of Stalin’s growing power. Both documents were kept secret from most party leaders until after Lenin’s death. Despite his weakness Lenin continued to try to undermine Stalin. In early March he urged Trotsky to take the offensive against Stalin at the upcoming 12th Party Congress that he himself was too ill to attend. For reasons that still remain a mystery, Trotsky declined to follow Lenin’s entreaties.

Lenin’s third stroke in March 1923 left him an invalid. He lingered, unable to influence events while his closest comrades-in-arms, among them Stalin, began to maneuver and position themselves for the expected power struggle. Vladimir Lenin died on January 21, 1924, leaving to those comrades the issues of who would succeed him and how the effort to build socialism in Soviet Russia would be continued.