he great party of the working class, which gave me birth and taught me.” (Radzinsky, 262) Stalin did not care for the pleasant words. His concern was real power. Stalin also wanted to look good in the eyes of history. That is why all the history books were rewritten. Khrushchev also indicts him of fabricating cases against honest Bolsheviks. That is his major blame of Stalin. How could he destroy the party that brought him to power? Khrushchev gives Lenin as an example of a leader who forgave people even if they made mistakes (Revolutions, 81). However, it was Lenin who said that by the age of 50 revolutionaries should be sent to their ancestors (Radzinsky, 341). The honest Bolsheviks “murdered” by Stalin were Tukhachevsky, Blucher, Frinovsky, Yagoda, Kosior, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, and many others who were a part of Stalin’s 1934 Congress of the Victors. There are, however, sound reasons for Stalin’s destruction of the Party. Reason one: most of those leaders still dreamt of the World Revolution, which would “bring freedom and prosperity to the oppressed.” Instead of concerning themselves with the industrialization and planning of the economy, they wrote about the “World proletariat, which through the class struggle disrupts the imperialists’ intentions to conquer the Soviet Union…” (Tukhachevsky, 166) Reason two: they were not professionals in economics, military affairs, or anything but the party life. The quote above is from Tukhachevsky’s book on strategy. There is no strategic teaching in it; only political activity. In 1937 Malenkov, who was an engineer at the time gave a speech where he said that 70% of secretaries of obkoms and 80% of secretaries of raikoms have primary education (Radzinsky, 341). And those people were in charge of industrialization. Most of the old party members got to the top not through hard work but thr...
