In 1922 the leader of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union (CPSU), Vladimir Lenin, appointed Joseph Stalin as the General Secretary of the CPSU, which was a job that at the time no person with power wanted, so a not so well-known Georgian was given the position. In that same year, Lenin suffered a stroke and began a long physical and mental break down, in which the powerful Communist even started to have doubts about the things that he and his party stood for.
Stalin had in fact been given a position that he very cleverly manipulated to increase his chances of achieving his aim, which was to be the successor to Lenin as the leader of the CPSU. The party was set over many stages, the first and lowest ranking stage being the Party Cells, where people were chosen by other members to join the party and be loyal to Lenin.
The two major economic policy makers of the USSR, ...
Chinese Stamp, 1950. Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong ...
Stalin, Lenin and Kalinin in the VIII Congress of ...The next stage was the District meeting where there was a larger amount of people and had power over the people in the CPSU in the district.
The stage up from the District meetings was the Region which controlled the District meetings in the region and was more important than the levels below it. If a member was this high up in the ranking then the next target to reach was of the Congress which was held in Moscow and included the top 1,500 Communist Party members. The penultimate stage was the Central Committee which had only a small number of members, around 120, and the people in the section of the party did not need to have a normal job. The highest part of the party was called the Politburo and had the head figures of the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky,