SUCH WERE THE PARADOXES of Stalin’s vertiginous ascent: he had “boundless power” early, from spring 1922, when appointed general secretary of the party and the next month Lenin suffered his first major stroke, but only one year later, in spring 1923, out popped a sheet of paper calling for Stalin’s removal. This supremacy-insecurity dyad defined his inner regime, and shaped his character. It also paralleled the Bolshevik dictatorship’s own fraught relationship to the outside world: the supposed global inevitability of the revolutionary cause amid perilous capitalist encirclement.
