On February 2, 1922, the notorious All-Russian Extraordinary Commission - abbreviated as ChK, or Cheka - was transformed into the State Political Directorate (GPU) under the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). “e did not demonstrate even elementary compassion or doubts in his policies." 'More Organized' Terror "Stalin was a sociopath," said Princeton University historian and Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin in a 2017 interview with RFE/RL. "This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail…but it is a detail that could assume decisive importance," he wrote. The call for Stalin's removal was the only concrete proposal in Lenin's entire testament. In the final weeks of 1922 and the early days of the new year, Lenin dictated a final testament in which he famously urged his comrades to "think about a way of removing Stalin" from his post. That month, Stalin took over personal control of Lenin's care and of who had access to him.
"Either we prove the opposite in the coming year or Soviet power will not be able to exist."īut in retrospect, the most portentous decision of the congress was the appointment of a new party general secretary: Josef Stalin, a 43-year-old former seminary student turned revolutionary.Īlready experiencing poor health in 1921, Lenin suffered a stroke in May 1922 and a second in December. "Over the past year we showed quite clearly that we cannot run the economy," Lenin conceded. "This is the first year that we have had the opportunity of devoting our efforts to the real, main, and fundamental tasks of socialist construction," revolutionary leader and Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin told the closing session of the 11th congress of the Bolshevik party in Moscow on April 2, 1922, in a speech focused on his economic plans. This year will see many centennial anniversaries that Russian President Vladimir Putin and others who argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a “geopolitical catastrophe” might prefer not to remember. In terms of politics, foreign affairs, and culture, events transpired and decisions were made that laid the rails for decades of institutionalized totalitarian oppression.
Russia entered 1922 with a shaky government ruling largely by martial law, a civil war still raging, a famine spreading across the Volga region, parts of the country still occupied by foreign intervention forces – and isolated as an international pariah.īut by the end of the year, the Bolsheviks had marked the fifth anniversary of the 1917 coup known as the October Revolution, had all but ended the civil war against so-called White monarchist and capitalist forces, largely pushed out the foreign troops, and signed their first peacetime international treaty - with Weimar Germany.Īnd on December 30, 1922, representatives of the Soviet governments of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Republic took to the stage of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater to proclaim the formation of a new country that within less than two generations would become a global superpower - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.īut with the 20/20 hindsight of a century's distance, 1922 emerges as a fateful year for the peoples of Russia and its neighborhood, a year in which the country broke decisively with its past.
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