Stalin and Lenin's Relationship?

[StoneFrog]

What was the relationship between them like? I mean there have been faked photo's etc.. with them together. And what about Lenin's writings someone told me that Stalin banned or rewrote some of Lenin's writings, any truth to that?

There's just so much propaganda i don't know whats, what...

[Muzk]

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People's Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.


Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.

Lenin also critized Stalin's views on the national question.

[ArrowLance]

From what I know, Stalin and Lenin had a good relationship during the revolution and for a nice while. But towards the end of Lenin's life Stalin did some things that upset Lenin, not necessarily politically, but personally.

So any photos of Lenin and Stalin together are most likely genuine, they were not strangers to each other. As for Lenin's last testament, Lenin called Stalin rude and unfit for his position as secretary general. In my opinion this was probably due to the degrading personal relationship between Lenin and Stalin.

[Kléber]

They got along for most of their political careers. During the Civil War, Trotsky tried to remove Stalin from his post for gross incompetence and disobedience of orders (at Tsaritsyn and later Poland), but Lenin tried to mediate between them and protected Stalin.

At the time Lenin died, they were on pretty bad terms, not because of the telephone dispute but Stalin's Great-Russian bullying of the Georgian comrades, in the dispute with which Sergo Ordzhonikidze actually punched one of them. On March 5, shortly before he received a crushing stroke, Lenin wrote:

To Comrade Stalin
highly secret, personal,
copies to Comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev

Very respectable Comrade Stalin,
You allowed yourself to be so ill-mannered as to call my wife on the telephone and to abuse her. She has agreed to forget what was said. Nevertheless, she has told Zinoviev and Kamenev about the incident. I have no intention of forgetting what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that what was done against my wife I also consider to have been directed against myself. Consequently, I must ask you to consider whether you would be inclined to withdraw what you said and to apologize, or whether you prefer to break off relations between us.

Respectfully yours,
LeninThe next day he commented on the Georgian affair thusly

To Comrades Mdivani, Makharadze and others:
(copy to Comrades Trotsky and Kamenev)

Esteemed Comrades:
I follow your affair with all my heart. I am outraged at the rudenss of Ordzhonikidze and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky. I am preparing for you notes and a speech.

With esteem,
LeninQuotes from Lenin's Last Struggle by Moshe Lewin.

[StoneFrog]

Thanks all

Also any truth behind that Stalin banned or rewrote some of Lenin's writings when he was in power?

[Zanthorus]

The first quote that Kléber posted can be read here (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/05.htm) on the Marxists Internet Archive. MIA also provides some background:


A reference to the following fact. After Lenin, with the permission of his doctors, had, on December 21, 1922, dictated a letter to Trotsky on the foreign trade monopoly (see this volume, Document 811), J. V. Stalin, whom a C.C. Plenum decision of December 18 had made personally responsible for the observance of the medical regimen ordered for Lenin, used offensive language against Nadezhda Krupskaya and threatened to take the case to the Control Commission for having taken down the said letter. On December 23, 1922, Krupskaya sent Kamenev a letter asking for protection from “the gross interference in my personal life, offensive language and threats”.

Nadezhda Krupskaya apparently told Lenin of this fact in early March 1923. Having learned about this Lenin dictated the document here published.

Maria Ulyanova later wrote in a letter to the presidium of the July (1926) Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the R.C.P.(B.), at which the question had been raised by G. Y. Zinoviev, one of the leaders of the “new opposition”, that Stalin had offered his apologies.

I think Muzk's talk about Lenin's criticising Stalin on the national question was in reference to this (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm):


It is quite natural that in such circumstances the "freedom to secede from the union" by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.

It is said in defence of this measure that the People's Commissariats directly concerned with national psychology and national education were set up as separate bodies. But there the question arises: can these People's Commissariats be made quite independent? and secondly: were we careful enough to take measures to provide the non-Russians with a real safeguard against the truly Russian bully? I do not think we took such measures although we could and should have done so.

I think that Stalin's haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious "nationalist-socialism", played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.

However for the most part we only seem to be able to draw upon petty personal disputes when examining the actual relations. A much more interesting question would be wether or not Stalin's policies after Lenin's death were a continuation of Leninism. But asking that here is sure to end up in another boring Trotsky vs Stalin so you'd probably be better off finding out for yourself.