As far as Lenin can be said to have any successor, Stalin inherits his place.
He is the man behind the scenes in Russian politics. He rarely speaks at public meetings, and in any large gathering his speeches fail of effect. For his voice is low, his style of delivery poor; he is hard to understand in a big meeting. But in more intimate party conferences he is a born fighter. He hurls at his critics a heavy blast that is withering and heartless. He lays bare their arguments; he denounces them as immature, as insignificant, as unworthy of being members of the party. Like Lenin before him, he takes no trouble to sugar-coat the pill that his defeated opponent must swallow. For his opponent, so far, is always defeated...
"If you hear Stalin at hand in a discussion," says a personal adherent, "step by step you are convinced. At last you are even interested, because what he says is so important. He is tiresome, but very wise." ....
"In all our political business," said Nogin, President of the Russian Textile Syndicate, to me, "the influence of Stalin is the largest." ...
Stalin confines his entire time to Communist Party members. He has no dealing with the actual details of industry or government; he never meets foreigners about concessions, or talks with non-Communist specialists and technical men about the conduct of business. It would be hard indeed for a non-Communist to see him, for he works all day and far into the night in the intimate details of party machinery and control.
It is easy for a Communist to see him, but if he came for an unimportant reason, he would certainly not get in a second time.
"When important Communists wish to see him," said Nogin to me, "he is more accessible than many other high officials. He keeps his time especially for such conferences with important Communists. Yet even so he is so busy that I have often had important business with Stalin when he wanted very much to see me, and the only time he could give me was two o'clock in the morning. He is overworked and not very healthy—like all the important makers in the Revolution."
Nogin interpreted for me still further the strength of Stalin, whom he has known for years, in the dangers of Siberian exile and escape, and throughout the Revolution. "He is a brave man, with a very strong will that fights down opposition rather than conciliates. It is not easy to get much information from him; he is very reticent. But he is a stronger personality in my opinion that any of his possible competitors, who all have their special strength and special weaknesses."
As a Georgian himself, he took an early interest in the problems of diverse nationalities, of which there are forty in Georgia alone. Even before the Revolution, he wrote much about these different nationalities. Later, as Commissar of Nationalities, he came to know the life of all parts of Russia. Very few know this as he knows it. Since Russia is composed of many national groups, this knowledge is important.
"He is neither of the right nor of the left wing," explained Nogin. "He is always of the center, as Lenin was, sometimes standing with propositions from the right and sometimes with views from the left. Stalin is not against foreign capital but he is not so anxious for it as Mr. Krassin is. In the recent Sinclair concessions in Baku and Grozny, Stalin was not against them." In fact, as Mr. Nogin failed to add, if Stalin had been against them, they would probably not have been adopted....
Even in those early days he was an organizer rather than a speaker. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party shortly after its organization in 1898, and in 1903, when the party split, he followed Lenin into the group of Bolsheviks. He organized workingmen in Batum, Tiflis and Baku, editing several illegal publications and one legal paper. In 1902 he was arrested and sent to Siberia on the first of many exiles....
Always, in the periods between imprisonments and flights to freedom, he busied himself with problems of organization, forming socialist societies all over Russia and the Caucasus. In 1913 he was elected a member of the central committee of the Communist Party, and the scope of his work and power broadened. He became editor of several workingmen's periodicals and later of the famous revolutionary newspapers which were secretly distributed among the Russian soldiers on the eastern front and which undermined their discipline and their loyalty to the Tsar. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin was already a member of the committee of five which engineered with Lenin the overthrow of the Kerenski régime and the establishment of the soviet state.
In this state he held at first various high offices. He was at one time chief of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, which investigated and exercised state control over corruption, inefficiency, sabotage and other departmental irregularities. His chief government task, which he held from the beginning of the soviet rule until last June, was the Commissar of Nationalities. Only when this Commissariat was dissolved in accordance with Stalin's own plan for the creation of a Council of Nationalities which should rank as second chamber in the government, did he cease to occupy a government post....
It was among the prominent Communists, drawn mostly from the old-time revolutionists, that he came to be accepted as the chief man next to Lenin...
In [the political bureau] it is Stalin, the secretary of the party, upon whom in the last two years without any formal action, the mantle of Lenin has fallen. Part of his power has been based on his own skill in handling organizations and part on the general belief that he represented and expressed the views of Lenin.
Now that the great leader is dead, the power of Stalin depending upon himself alone will be increasingly tested. No single voice is sure today of having the final word as Lenin had; but the voice which in recent conflict has been most decisive is Stalin's.