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Why Were Stalin's Opponents Unable to Prevent Him from Becoming the Leader of the Ussr by 1929?

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Why were Stalin's opponents unable to prevent him from becoming the leader of the USSR by 1929?
Stalin and 4 other men ; Bukharin, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were competing to become leader of Russia after Lenin’s death in 1924. Since you couldn’t vote because it was democratic it was harder to choose become the leader of Russia.
One of the reasons that his opponents were unable to prevent him from becoming leader of the USSR was Stalin used the job of General Secretary to promote peoples loyalty to him, to remove from the party people who were disloyal and to collect information on every party member. After Lenin's death he waited, allowing other Politburo members to state their preferred policies - he then ganged up on groups of them, using his alliances and his party contacts to destroy the opposition. His did this twice in the 1920s, destroying Trotsky and his supporters and Zinoviev and Kamenev and their supporters. This left him as the ruler of Russia by about 1929.
Another reason is Lenin’s testament. The communist didn’t reveal what the testament said. In the testament Lenin said this about Stalin. "Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can

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