The Heirs of Lenin
A week after Vladimir Lenin's January 1924 death at age 53, New York Times Magazine profiled his three most likely successors. Joseph Stalin's name remains famous today, but who were Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev?
At the time of Lenin's death, the three men's official titles were:
Stalin = General Secretary of the Soviet Union's Communist Party, the head of the country's ruling (and essentially only) political party.
Kamenev = Deputy Chair of the Soviet Union's Council of People's Commissars, the country's executive administration authority. That was the council's #2 position, behind only the chair: Lenin himself.
Zinoviev = Chair of the Petrograd Soviet, the city council of Petrograd (now known as Saint Petersburg), the Russian capital at the time. He was also chair of Communist International, the global organization advocating for worldwide communism, run by the Soviet Union's Communist Party.
The article's anonymous author described each of the three men's personas.
Zinoviev:
Of the members of the triumvirate, he [Zinoviev] is undoubtedly the most "convenient" to his comrades... He always manages to go hand-in-hand with his colleagues and adjusts himself to their policies without friction.
Kamenev:
Kamenev is the most tractable and diplomatic member of the triumvirate... Undoubtedly he lacks strength of character. It is likely that he is in fact less double faced than submissive and fickle. He would like to please all, and he is lavish with promises which he is unable, and sometimes none too willing, to carry out.
Stalin:
Stalin... is less widely known than his comrades, but is undoubtedly their superior as far as strength of character is concerned. He is the most vivid personality in the triumvirate. Although less endowed with purely superficial accomplishments than his colleagues, he has advanced through persistence, firmness of purposes, and mental alertness.
Whenever the need arises for quietly preparing the ground within the party for a certain purpose, to create the desirable atmosphere, to help or to harm some particular individual, to undermine a reputation or enhance a person's prestige, to inaugurate and carry through within the ranks of the party a regular campaign against some particular tendency or faction — in all such undertakings Stalin is an expert hand.
After Lenin's death, Stalin was recognized as the country's leader. Indeed, the person who held Stalin's position, General Secretary of the Soviet Union's Communist Party, continued to be considered the country's leader until the USSR's dissolution in 1991.
Today, the country's leader is the president, the successor position for the now (officially) non-Communist Russia. Currently, that's Vladimir Putin.
Putin has praised Stalin, particularly in more recent years, as a personification of Russia's former greatness. One of Putin's first official actions after taking power in 2000 was to restore the Stalin-era national anthem.
The Heirs of Lenin
Published: Sunday, February 3, 1924