Word: lenin
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...aligned himself with the Social Democratic Party in 1898. He was astute enough to choose the Bolsheviks rather than the Mensheviks when the Party split in 1903. His first contact with revolutionary bigwigs came when he attended a Party powwow in Vienna. Leon Trotsky noticed him in passing; Nikolai Lenin, who had first met him in 1905 in Finland, set him to work writing an article on the Marxist theory of governing minorities. It was in signing this article that he first used the signature "J. Stalin." "We have here a wonderful Georgian," Lenin wrote of Stalin at that time...
...Tsaritsin there began one of the bitterest political enmities of modern times-the Stalin-Trotsky feud. Trotsky claimed that Stalin, a political commissar at that time, was insubordinate. He demanded and got from Lenin an order recalling him. Thereafter, Comrade Stalin patiently and calculatingly nursed his grudge against Comrade Trotsky...
...Lenin's favorite ideas was that if 130,000 landlords could rule Tsarist Russia, 240,000 determined revolutionists could rule a Soviet Russia. Lenin's efforts before the revolution were to build up a professional revolutionary machine experienced in organizing workers and able to dodge the police. Almost all the big revolutionists of necessity lived abroad; Stalin and Molotov were the only two who were able to brag in later years that they stuck it out for the most part inside. At World War I's start Stalin was in a prison camp just below the Arctic...
...Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, he was a relatively unimportant member of the Party's steering committee whose greatest service had been as exiled Lenin's go-between with colleagues in the 1913 Duma and as an assistant on the Petrograd Pravda. In numerous reorganizations of the governing structure which took place after the Bolsheviks came to power, Comrade Stalin always had a high post, but his work was also invariably overshadowed by the spectacular showings of Lenin, the Party's chairman, and Trotsky, the War Commissar...
...Stalin appointed the new secretaries of the expanding organization. Comrade Stalin could not directly punish a recalcitrant secretary, but one who showed too much independence could easily be shifted, without explanation, from a nice post in, say, the Crimea, to a cold outpost in Archangel. By the time of Lenin's death in 1924 Stalinist bureaucracy was already in the saddle...