September 25, 1919: Lenin killed by Anarchist/Left SR Terrorists

"The authors are well aware that their book is defective in many ways; it was written fragmentarily, and in scant intervals of leisure. Communists have to pursue their literary labours under conditions that can hardly be described as normal. The present work affords an interesting example of this, for the manuscript (to say nothing of both its authors) narrowly escaped destruction in the explosion at the Moscow Committee Rooms..." N.I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* preface). https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/preface.htm

After reading up a little bit on this event https://libcom.org/forums/history-c...sts-1919-bombing-bolshevik-moscow-hq-09082009 I at first wondered what the consequences would have been of Bukharin and Preobrazhensky dying in the explosion, and concluded they wouldn't be too momentous. Bukharin would be a useful ideologist for Stalin in the mid-1920's but there never really had been the Stalin-Bukharin "duumvirate" (in the sense of two leaders with equal powers) of which the Left Opposition complained (some of them even talked about Stalin as Bukharin's "prisoner"!) and when Stalin and Bukharin split, it is doubtful that Bukharin ever had a chance to prevail. In any event, of course, he didn't. As for Preobrazhensky, the chief economist of the Left Opposition in the 1920's, the only case I can see for his early death making a difference is the argument that Stalin "appropriated" some of his ideas about "primitive socialist appropriation" from 1928-29 on. But I think Stalin would have made the same decisions about a return to grain requisitioning and later the adoption of mass collectivization and industrialization if Preobrazhensky had never written anything. So far as Stalin was concerned, NEP had reached a dead end.

However, on further reading, it seems the explosion might have claimed a far more important target than Bukharin or Preobazhensky: "They [the "underground Anarchists" and some Left SR's] aimed to dynamite the Cheka headquarters in Moscow followed by the Kremlin; the explosives were ready when a golden opportunity presented itself: A regional assembly was scheduled to meet on September 25, 1919 at the Moscow committee's headquarters in Leontiev Lane and the main Bolshevik leaders would be present. Lenin himself was due to attend. One of the terrorists, the left SR Cherepanov was quite conversant with the place and on his instructions Piotr Sobolev threw a high-explosive bomb just as the meeting was getting underway but before Lenin had shown up. Twelve Bolsheviks including the secretary of the Moscow committee, Zagursky, were killed and another 28 wounded including Bukharin, Pokrovsky, Steklov, Yaroslavsky, Shliapnikov, Olminsky, etc...." Alexandre Skirda, *Nestor Makhno--Anarchy's Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 1917-1921*, p. 324. https://books.google.com/books?id=pMji9s9WOlwC&pg=PA324 What if Lenin had shown up early--and died in the explosion?...
 

abc123

Banned
I don't hink that anything majorr would happened, Stalin will just become leader few years before than OTL.
 
I don't hink that anything majorr would happened, Stalin will just become leader few years before than OTL.

Why? He wasn't General Secretary yet--indeed, that powerful post had not yet been created. He was just one member of the Politburo and People's Commissar of Nationalities--a significant office to be sure but nothing like Trotsky's position as People's Commissar of War.
 
It's really wide open. Lenin's death leaves a power vacuum, and everything depends on who ends up filling it. If Stalin still comes out on top it might not be that different from OTL. If anyone else does - which is more likely just because there are a lot of competitors out there - then Soviet history is gigantically different in every respect. Stalin was a big deal.

To write a more detailed timeline you'd have to pick someone to be the new leader and proceed based on their idiosyncrasies.
 

abc123

Banned
Why? He wasn't General Secretary yet--indeed, that powerful post had not yet been created. He was just one member of the Politburo and People's Commissar of Nationalities--a significant office to be sure but nothing like Trotsky's position as People's Commissar of War.


Just kidding a bit, to provoke more response to this interesting thread.

Agreed. He was also out of Petrograd at the time, in Poland together with Trotsky. So, who? Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev?
 
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