with opposition in factories and villages. Many of the Lenin-Trotsky measures antagonized even veteran Communists. At the start of 1921, outbreaks of unrest among Petrograd workers followed peasant revolts in Tambov and elsewhere; an influential group of Communists called the Workers' Opposition demanded factory self-management and an end to centralized militarization of the workers; finally, the sailors of Kronstadt naval base, who had carried Lenin to power in 1917, revolted and demanded democratic freedoms. At the 10th Communist Party Congress, meeting in March 1921, Lenin prescribed an economic carrot and a political stick: He proclaimed his New Economic Policy, which restored free trade in the villages and permitted free enterprise elsewhere, but crushed the Kronstadt rebellion and the Workers' Opposition. Kronstadt was physically annihilated under the command of Trotsky and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a former Tsarist officer who had turned Communist; the Workers' Opposition—and future Communist dissidents as well—were curbed by new decrees forbidding the formation of any groups critical of the general line of the Party Central Committee, and forbidding agitation against that general line even by leading Communists.
It was, then, in an established one-party dictatorship that Joseph Stalin began his rise to autocratic power when he became General Secretary of the Party in 1922. The next six years, in which the various Communist "collective leaders 55 maneuvered for supreme leadership, were years of economic recovery, relatively mild compared with what was to come, but they were years of dictatorship nonetheless. Only a Soviet citizen of the 1950s could regard them as the "good old days."
By the time Lenin died, after several previous strokes, in January 1924, a troika or triumvirate was ruling Russia, consisting of Stalin, Leo Kamenev, head of the Moscow Party organization, and Gregory Zinoviev, head of the Petrograd party and of the Communist International. Trotsky had already been successfully elbowed out of the way; his program of concentrated industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture seemed too radical and repressive for most party members. Consolidating his control of the Party apparatus, Stalin next defeated Zinoviev and Kamenev, who joined Trotsky in what became known as the "Left Opposition." Stalin was aided in this by Nikolai Bukharin, theoretician and editor of Pravda, Alexei Rykov, Lenin's successor as Soviet Premier, and Mikhail Tomsky, head of the Soviet trade unions; these men. who favored a cooperative approach to the peasantry and a parallel growth of light and heavy industry, became known as the "Right Opposition 55 when Stalin turned on them in 1928–29 and introduced Trotsky's old program as official Soviet policy.
In the collectivization, industrialization and famines of 1929–83, it is estimated that 5 to 10 million Russians died and another 10 million were sent to forced labor under Stalin's slogan of "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class."
