Word: leninization
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...young (33) terrorist visited Cracow, where Lenin, in exile, trying to build up a group of hard-core professional revolutionaries inside Russia, was delighted with him, wrote to Maxim Gorky about his "wonderful Georgian." In Vienna he met Trotsky, who paused to note "the glint of animosity" in "Stalin's yellow eyes." Stalin wrote in Pravda (which he had helped to found): "Trotsky's childish plan for the merging of the unmergeable [Bolsheviks and Mensheviks] has proved him ... a common, noisy champion with faked muscles." In St. Petersburg in 1913, police got wind of Stalin's presence...
Disappointing Eagle. But his pamphlets had caught the eye of Lenin. That year young Djugashvili met the famous Lenin at a party conference in Finland. At that point (as today), Lenin was a certified god in the world Pantheon of social progress, but hard-boiled Djugashvili was not impressed: "I had hoped to see the mountain eagle of our party," he wrote. "How great was my disappointment to see a most ordinary looking man, below average height, in no way distinguishable from ordinary mortals...
...listening to Lenin's cold, hard logic, Stalin became a devoted disciple. A cold and careful mind responded to a cold and brilliant mind. The party was flat broke and Koba became the appropriations member of the Caucasian Bolshevik Bureau, i.e., he directed "fighting squads" which robbed banks, public treasuries, steamships. His biggest haul: a quarter of a million rubles in a stickup in the main square of Tiflis. Among those arrested as a result of this raid was Litvinov, future Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who was trying to dispose of the loot in Paris. Koba, although...
...took small part in these momentous events. U.S. Journalist John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World. But Stalin, the Inside Man, emerged as one of the seven members of the party's political bureau and was appointed Commissar of Nationalities. Joked Lenin: "No intelligence is needed, that is why we've put Stalin there...
...Civil War, Lenin decided to remove hostile, corrupt and unreliable elements from his organization and created the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, called Rabkrin (to purge the administration), and the Orgburo (to purge the party). Joseph Stalin directed both. Soon he was running the party's day-to-day business. Early in 1922 the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee was created for him. The title suited him: it sounded innocuous. Stalin was ever contemptuous of trappings; the job could be made all powerful, and to Stalin, reality counted...