th in 1924. Cooperating with Kamenev and Zinoviev, two of the chief members of the Politburo, Stalin managed, by 1925, to oust Trotsky, who had been generally regarded as Lenin's successor, and then, by 1926, Kamenev and Zinoviev themselves. The civil war from 1918 to 1921 had had a traumatic effect on the new regime. It had led to comprehensive nationalization of the economy and, politically, to the establishment of virtual one-party rule, harsh repression of opponents of the regime, abolition of freedom of expression and association, and the growth of centralized party bureaucracy that dominated the formal organs of government--in short, to the entrenchment of policies and methods of rule contrasting starkly with the revolutionaries' own early aims and traditional egalitarian, Socialist principles. In 1921, Lenin and the party leadership suppressed criticism within the party against bureaucratization and party centralism, and ruthlessly crushed open revolt by the peasants, workers, and sailors, coupling these harsh measures in politics with a sweeping retreat on the economic and social front. The USSR's heroic revolutionary age was over, and from 1921 to 1928 the regime plunged into the more mundane task of running the country from day to day. Stalin rose to power because he embodied, perhaps more than any of his old colleagues, this new spirit. His colleagues, most notably the brilliant, individualistic Trotsky, who had thrived during the days of storm and stress, were unfitted for the office politics, the patient calculation, and the compromise required to operate a growing bureaucratic regime. Stalin, though unimpressive physically and a man of restless, emotional, vain, cynical, and often vindictive temperament, had internalized so profoundly the role of administrator that he projected everywhere in public (in imitation of Lenin) a humble air, simple dress, personal asceticism, calmness, efficiency, and fatherliness--qualities tha...
