> Trotsky later claimed that Stalin amassed power as a bureaucratic mediocrity, but it was actually Yakov Sverdlov, assisted by Elena Stasova, who ran the Party machine. Stalin was not a born bureaucrat at all. He was a hard worker utterly dedicated to politics; indeed everything with Stalin was political, but he worked in an eccentric, structureless, unbureaucratic, almost bohemian, style that would not have succeeded in any other government, then or now. Lenin’s trust was won in the bank robberies and intrigues of the early years and, later, on the battlefields of the Civil War: Stalin was hardly in his office before 1920.

Young Stalin