How did Stalin take power? - Full Lesson - AQA 2N Russia 1917-1953

This is a full lesson that takes students through Stalin’s rise to power and helps them to answer the enquiry question: How did Stalin take power?

I found that my students struggled to answer exam questions on this topic because the Oxford textbook doesn’t make clear enough the specific steps that Stalin has to take in order to end up in control of the Party, and how exactly he achieved each one. This lesson foregrounds this step by step process, looking at how he first managed to survive the 13th Party Congress still in post as General Secretary in spite of Lenin’s damning indictment of him in his Testament, then second how he maneuvered himself to make use of the support of the Right of the Party to remove the Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev from the Central Committee and the Politburo, and then finally how he positioned himself to outvote Bukharin and the Right to take overall control of the Politburo and Central Committee. it looks at how he used three specific tools to achieve this: political alliances; base building in his role as General Secretary; ideological flexibility.