Triumvirate (ruling troika)

Formation

Lenin's first stroke in May 1922 unsettled the party leadership. Stalin, General Secretary since April of that year, held the apparatus and its appointments; Zinoviev led the Comintern and the Petrograd organization; Kamenev chaired the Politburo in Lenin's absence. What bound the three was not a programme but a shared rival, Trotsky, the builder of the Red Army.

How it worked

The three met before Politburo sessions to settle agendas and votes in advance, while the Secretariat placed their supporters in provincial posts. When Trotsky and the Declaration of 46 attacked bureaucratization in autumn 1923, the bloc branded the critique factionalism. Before the 13th Congress in May 1924, Kamenev and Zinoviev steered the leadership away from reading Lenin's Testament, with its call to remove Stalin, to the congress. In the "literary discussion" that followed, all three turned on Trotsky's Lessons of October.

Dissolution

With Trotsky sidelined, the bloc lost its reason to exist. In 1925 Stalin aligned with Bukharin's NEP course; Zinoviev and Kamenev formed the New Opposition and lost at the 14th Congress, then joined their old enemy Trotsky in the United Opposition in 1926, which was crushed in turn. Both were sentenced to death at the first Moscow trial in 1936. In retrospect the triumvirate served as Stalin's bridge to sole power.

The word

Troika originally names the Russian three-horse carriage; in Soviet politics it became the standing word for a three-man leadership bloc, applied again to Malenkov, Beria and Molotov after Stalin's death and to the Andropov, Ustinov and Gromyko trio that decided the Afghan intervention in late Brezhnev years. The NKVD troika of the Great Terror, a summary sentencing board, is a separate institution that shares only the name.