---
title: '''Trotskyism or Leninism'':the press campaign that removed Trotsky from Soviet leadership (1924-1929)'
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/
description: Between Lenin's death in January 1924 and Trotsky's deportation in February 1929, the men who succeeded Lenin kept his letter criticising Stalin out of…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: an interwar radio-and-newsreel intelligence collage with a 1930s map of Europe and propaganda poster proofs.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-interwar.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# 'Trotskyism or Leninism':the press campaign that removed Trotsky from Soviet leadership (1924-1929)

At a glance

Between Lenin's death in January 1924 and Trotsky's deportation in February 1929, the men who succeeded Lenin kept his letter criticising Stalin out of print…

- **When:** January 21, 1924
- **Actor:** The 'Triumvirate' of Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev…
- **Target:** Leon Trotsky, People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and Politburo member…
- **Source:** Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/)
- **Regime:** [Soviet Union under Stalin](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/soviet-union/)

Full details

- **Actor:** The 'Triumvirate' of Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev (1923-25), then Stalin and his allies alone from 1926; the Communist Party Central Committee and Central Control Commission; Pravda, Izvestia and Bolshevik
- **Target:** Leon Trotsky, People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and Politburo member; his supporters in the Left Opposition and later the United Opposition, including Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev after they too broke with Stalin in 1926

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This page quotes denunciation language from the period ("petty-bourgeois deviation", "Trotskyism", "counter-revolutionary activity") and, in its modern comparison, a state broadcaster's description of a purged official as "despicable human scum, worse than a dog". It also describes a political crowd being fired on. The language is quoted as evidence of the method, not as this archive's description of anyone.

**In one line:** Between Lenin's death in January 1924 and Trotsky's deportation in February 1929, the men who succeeded Lenin kept his letter criticising Stalin out of print, ran a five-year press campaign that turned "Trotskyism" into a rejectable label, backed it with resolutions and vote counts presented as the party's own voice, and expelled, exiled and finally deported the man once seen as the revolution's second figure, while his image began to disappear from the published record.

![Diagram: Lenin's letter criticising Stalin is read to Congress delegations but not published; the Triumvirate runs the "Trotskyism or Leninism" press campaign; the United Opposition is isolated and expelled by lopsided votes; Trotsky is exiled to Alma-Ata and then deported, as his image starts to vanish from photographs and later party histories](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929-diagram.svg)

## What happened

**The Testament, suppressed**

- **23-25 December 1922, with a postscript on 4 January 1923.** Convalescing after a stroke, Lenin dictates a letter to the coming Party Congress. It assesses the leading Bolsheviks and warns that a split between Stalin and Trotsky, the party's "two most able" leaders, could threaten the party. On Stalin: "Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." The postscript goes further: "Stalin is too rude, and this defect... becomes intolerable in the office of General Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post." On Trotsky, the same letter calls him "personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee", but faults his "far-reaching self-confidence" and preoccupation with "the purely administrative side of the work" (V. I. Lenin, "Letter to the Congress", 23 December 1922 - 4 January 1923).
- **21 January 1924.** Lenin dies. His widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who had kept the letter under his instruction that it go to the next Party Congress, passes it to the Central Committee.
- **22 May 1924.** On the eve of the 13th Party Congress, a Central Committee plenum decides how to handle the letter: it will be read aloud, delegation by delegation, in closed sessions during the Congress, not to the assembled floor, with no note-taking, no open discussion and no place in the published stenographic record. Stalin reportedly offers to resign as General Secretary; Zinoviev and Kamenev, then allied with him against Trotsky, argue the offer is unnecessary and his "rudeness" is aimed only at factionalists. Trotsky, present at the Congress, does not press the matter (Deutscher, *The Prophet Unarmed*, 1959; Service, *Trotsky: A Biography*, 2009).

**Branding "Trotskyism"**

- **October 1923.** Trotsky writes to the Central Committee criticising bureaucratic control of the party and the suppression of inner-party discussion; days later, 46 prominent party members, mostly Trotsky's allies, sign a similar letter (the "Declaration of the 46"). The Central Committee condemns both as factional.
- **December 1923.** Trotsky's articles restating the case, collected as the pamphlet *The New Course*, argue for reviving inner-party democracy against a hardening "apparatus" (a term he uses for the paid party bureaucracy). The Triumvirate's press answers in what became known as the "Literary Discussion."
- **16-18 January 1924.** The 13th Party Conference, meeting days before Lenin's death, adopts a resolution, "On the Results of the Discussion and on the Petty-Bourgeois Deviation in the Party," naming Trotsky's positions "a petty-bourgeois deviation" and linking them to Menshevism. In the pre-Conference vote, party-cell meetings organised by an apparatus that answered to the Triumvirate returned lopsided majorities against the Opposition in Moscow and other major cities (Carr, *The Interregnum 1923-1924*, 1954).
- **February-May 1924.** The Central Committee launches the "Lenin enrollment" (Leninskii prizyv), a mass recruitment drive framed as a memorial to Lenin, part of the same wave that built [The Lenin cult after 1924: an embalmed body, a mausoleum and a doctrine called "Leninism"](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/lenin-cult-after-1924/) in these months. Historians estimate it brought in over 200,000 new members within months (Fitzpatrick, *Everyday Stalinism*, 1999; Service, *Stalin: A Biography*, 2004) — new members with no stake in the pre-1924 party debates and a personal stake in the leadership that had just enrolled them.
- **April 1924.** Stalin delivers a set of lectures at Sverdlov University, published as the pamphlet *The Foundations of Leninism*, positioning himself as the authoritative interpreter of "Leninism" ahead of the fuller campaign to come.
- **Autumn 1924.** Trotsky publishes "The Lessons of October" as the preface to a volume of his collected works, reviewing the events the archive's [Bolshevik agitprop, 1917-1921: soviets, decrees, agit-trains and the ROSTA windows](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/) page covers, and noting that Zinoviev and Kamenev had publicly opposed the October seizure of power at the time. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev answer with a wave of speeches and articles. Stalin's speech "Trotskyism or Leninism?" (19 November 1924) sets Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution" against the doctrine of "socialism in one country" that Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin advance from December 1924. The speeches are collected as the pamphlet *Leninism or Trotskyism?* (Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and others, 1925), reprinted by the Communist Party USA in English the same year.
- **January 1925.** Trotsky is removed as People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, replaced by Mikhail Frunze. He keeps his seat on the Politburo for the time being.
- **1925.** Max Eastman, an American writer close to Trotsky, publishes parts of Lenin's letter in *Since Lenin Died* (London, 1925), the first public disclosure of its contents outside the party. Under pressure from the Politburo, Trotsky writes a statement, published in the party's theoretical journal *Bolshevik* (July 1925), denying that the letter carried the political weight Eastman gave it — a denial historians treat as compelled, since Trotsky knew the document and its content were genuine (Deutscher, *The Prophet Unarmed*, 1959).

**Isolated, then expelled**

- **1925-26.** Zinoviev and Kamenev, alarmed at Stalin's growing power, break with him and merge their following with Trotsky's to form the United Opposition (also called the Joint Opposition). Zinoviev loses his seat on the Politburo and, in October 1926, his chairmanship of the Communist International, replaced by Bukharin. Trotsky and Kamenev are removed from the Politburo the same month.
- **September 1927.** Barred from the party press, the United Opposition circulates its programme as the "Platform of the Opposition," printed and distributed outside normal party channels.
- **7 November 1927.** On the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, opposition supporters try to march under their own banners in Moscow and Leningrad, some referencing Lenin's Testament. They are broken up by police and party loyalists; Trotsky's own car is fired on in Leningrad (Deutscher, *The Prophet Unarmed*, 1959; Trotsky, *My Life*, 1930).
- **14 November 1927.** A joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission expels Trotsky and Zinoviev from the party.
- **2-19 December 1927.** The 15th Party Congress ratifies the expulsions and extends them to dozens more of the Opposition's supporters — commonly cited at around 75 (Carr, *Foundations of a Planned Economy*, 1969) — by an overwhelming vote, at a point when most delegate slates had already excluded Opposition candidates. Zinoviev and Kamenev recant within weeks and are readmitted to the party in 1928; Trotsky does not recant.

**Exile and deportation**

- **17 January 1928.** OGPU agents remove Trotsky from his Moscow apartment, where supporters had gathered to block his eviction, and put him on a train to Alma-Ata (now Almaty), in Soviet Kazakhstan — internal exile, not yet expulsion from the country.
- **1928.** Underground presses continue to circulate the Testament and Opposition documents among party members; a leaflet reprint of the Testament, printed at an illegal press in Baku, survives in the Soviet archives and is now held by Wikimedia Commons (see Images, below).
- **Mid-to-late January 1929.** The Politburo orders Trotsky's deportation from the USSR, citing "counter-revolutionary activity."
- **12 February 1929.** Trotsky, his wife Natalia Sedova and their son Lev Sedov arrive in Constantinople (Istanbul) aboard a Soviet steamer from Odessa, named by Deutscher as the *Ilyich* — expelled from Soviet territory, though not yet formally stripped of Soviet citizenship, which follows by decree in February 1932.
- **By the late 1920s.** Party-approved accounts of October 1917 had begun to minimise the part Trotsky, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee, had played in organising the actual seizure of power — a rewriting completed a decade later in the 1938 "Short Course" history of the party, outside this page's scope. The archive's [Glavlit and the retouched photographic record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-glavlit-photo-retouching/) documents the clearest surviving instance of the parallel practice in images: a photograph of Lenin addressing troops in Sverdlov Square on 5 May 1920, with Trotsky and Lev Kamenev visible on the steps beside the platform, exists in a later published version with both men removed. That page cannot fix the exact year the retouched print first appeared, only that it followed Trotsky's 1927 fall; it is treated here as the earliest documented instance of the practice this page's later Soviet history repeated at a much larger scale.

![Lenin's "Testament" reprinted as an underground Left Opposition leaflet, printed at an illegal press in Baku, 1928](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/stps-lenin-testament-leaflet-baku-1928.jpg)

*Lenin's "Letter to the Congress" reproduced as an illegal Left Opposition leaflet, printed at an underground press in Baku in 1928 — four years after it was read to a closed session of the 13th Congress and kept out of print, and the way most party members outside the leadership actually encountered its text. From Soviet archive АПДУДПАР, Ф.12, Оп.2, Д.573, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (CC0 1.0).*

![Stalin, Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev photographed together in the Kremlin, April 1925](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/stps-triumvirate-1925.jpg)

*Joseph Stalin, Alexei Rykov, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev at the Kremlin, April 1925, published in* Krasnaya Niva *magazine. Photograph by Nikolai Petrov, public domain. Kamenev and Zinoviev, shown here allied with Stalin against Trotsky, would themselves be expelled from the party alongside him in December 1927.*

![Cover of the pamphlet Leninism or Trotskyism?, by Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and others, Communist Party USA edition, 1925](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/stps-leninism-or-trotskyism-cover-1925.jpg)

*Cover of* Leninism or Trotskyism?, *the Communist Party USA's 1925 English edition of speeches by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev from the 1924 campaign against Trotsky's "Lessons of October". The title itself states the binary framing described under [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) below. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*

![Politburo members at the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), December 1927](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/stps-15th-congress-1927.jpg)

*Politburo members at the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 2-19 December 1927, first published in* Prozhektor *magazine, 25 December 1927. This is the congress that ratified Trotsky's, Zinoviev's and dozens of other oppositionists' expulsion from the party. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*

## How it works

- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): Lenin's letter criticised Stalin by name and asked for his removal; it was read only to delegation heads, kept out of the Congress record and out of print for the rest of the decade, while the Triumvirate's own speeches, resolutions and the pamphlet *Leninism or Trotskyism?* filled the party press freely. When part of the letter reached the public anyway, through Eastman's 1925 book, the pressure ran the other way: Trotsky was made to disavow its significance in print rather than the document being published and debated on its merits.
- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): "Trotskyism" functioned as a verdict rather than a description from its first formal use. The 13th Conference's January 1924 resolution named Trotsky's position "a petty-bourgeois deviation" before any specific act was at issue, and the label was repeated in speech titles ("Trotskyism or Leninism?") and pamphlet titles across 1924-25, standing in for whatever the current disagreement happened to be.
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/): over four years, "Trotskyism" was made to carry blame for a widening set of unrelated problems — bureaucratic centralism, doubts about "socialism in one country," the tempo of industrialisation, party indiscipline — while the Triumvirate's own record, including Zinoviev's and Kamenev's public objection to the October 1917 seizure of power that Trotsky's "Lessons of October" had revived, drew comparatively little of the same treatment until they too crossed the leadership and were folded into the same label.
- [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/): the title "Trotskyism or Leninism?" offered only two positions, framing loyalty to Lenin's legacy and loyalty to the current leadership as the same thing. The 1921 "On Party Unity" resolution, originally aimed at organised factions inside a governing party still contesting policy in the open, was invoked from 1924 onward against ordinary policy disagreement; by 1927, organising a rival platform was treated as expulsion-worthy in itself, regardless of what the platform argued.
- [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/): ahead of the 15th Congress's vote, party cells, trade-union branches and Komsomol groups passed resolutions condemning the Opposition that the press published as the spontaneous verdict of the rank and file, a pattern the archive's [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) page documents again in the Soviet Union's later campaigns against Boris Pasternak (1958) and Andrei Sakharov (1973).
- [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/): lopsided vote totals, from the December 1923 party-cell discussion through the 15th Congress's near-unanimous expulsion vote, were presented in the press as proof of where "the party" stood, at each point after Opposition candidates had already been excluded from most of the meetings that produced the count.

## Then and now

North Korea's state media ran a compressed version of the same sequence against Kim Jong-un's uncle, Jang Song-thaek, in December 2013. KCNA's 9 December statement, read on state television, called Jang, once the country's second-ranking official, "despicable human scum, worse than a dog" and "a traitor for all ages", and announced his expulsion from the party days before a televised special tribunal and his execution on 12 December 2013 for "attempting to overthrow the state." Photographs and footage of Jang were subsequently edited out of North Korean state media, including footage that had shown him at earlier events.

The differences are large. North Korea's cycle, from denunciation to execution, ran about a week, carried out by a single state broadcaster with no independent press to answer it. Trotsky's took more than five years, ran through party conferences, congresses and a press that (in the 1920s) still printed rival pamphlets under named authors, and ended in exile and, eleven years later, assassination by a Soviet agent in Mexico — not immediate execution by the state that expelled him.

## Positions on the record

- **The Triumvirate's and Stalin's stated position.** The 13th Conference resolution and the pamphlet *Leninism or Trotskyism?* present the campaign as defending party unity and Lenin's line against a "petty-bourgeois deviation," not as a contest for personal power. Stalin's 1924 lectures, *The Foundations of Leninism*, frame the argument as a matter of doctrine to be settled by reference to Lenin's writings.
- **Trotsky's and critics' position.** Trotsky's *The New Course* (1923) and later *My Life* (1930) describe a bureaucratic apparatus using the discipline built for factional discipline in wartime to suppress ordinary inner-party debate and secure Stalin's personal power. Max Eastman's *Since Lenin Died* (1925) was the first account to put Lenin's letter before a Western readership as evidence that Lenin himself had wanted Stalin removed.
- **What is documented.** The text and dates of Lenin's letter; the decision to read it only to delegation heads at the 13th Congress; the 13th Conference's January 1924 resolution; the dates of Trotsky's removal as War Commissar (January 1925), his expulsion from the party (14 November 1927) and its ratification (December 1927), his internal exile to Alma-Ata (January 1928) and his deportation from the USSR (February 1929); the survival, in Soviet archives now on Wikimedia Commons, of an underground 1928 leaflet reprint of the Testament.
- **What is contested.** Whether Trotsky was deliberately given a wrong date for Lenin's funeral, causing him to miss it — Trotsky's own account in *My Life* alleges this; some historians treat it as a genuine miscommunication rather than a deliberate trick. Historians also disagree about how far Trotsky's own political choices, including his reluctance to challenge Stalin openly at the 1924 Congress, contributed to his defeat alongside the press campaign against him (Deutscher's trilogy reads sympathetically; Service's biography is more critical of Trotsky's judgement). The exact scale of the 1924 "Lenin enrollment" and of the 1927 expulsions varies somewhat between historians' figures, given here as estimates with attribution.
- **Not ruled on here.** Whether "socialism in one country" or "permanent revolution" was the better policy for the Soviet state, and the wider argument between Trotsky and Stalin over industrialisation and the peasantry. This page scores how the campaign against Trotsky was built and run, not the underlying policy dispute. It ends at Trotsky's 1929 deportation; the "Trotskyist" label it describes here was later revived at industrial scale against a far larger set of targets in the [The Moscow show trials: confession, spectacle and consent (1936-1938)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/moscow-show-trials-1936-1938/), which this page does not cover.

## Same-method test

The same techniques recur in successions inside other single parties, and in a democracy's internal party politics at a far smaller scale.

- **The Soviet Union, October 1964.** The Central Committee plenum that removed Nikita Khrushchev met in closed session on 14 October 1964; Mikhail Suslov's denunciation accused him of "subjectivism" and what is usually rendered in English as "hare-brained scheming" in economic and foreign policy. TASS announced the change publicly as a resignation "in connection with advanced age and poor health" (William Taubman, *Khrushchev: The Man and His Era*, 2003). [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) and [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) score the same way here as for Trotsky; the outcome was far milder — Khrushchev was pensioned off to a state dacha, not expelled, exiled or deported.
- **United States, 2021.** After Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) voted to impeach President Trump and testified against him, the Wyoming Republican Party voted unanimously in February 2021 to censure her, and the House Republican Conference voted on 12 May 2021 to remove her as its chair, replacing her with Elise Stefanik; language from state party resolutions and colleagues described her position as disloyalty to the party's leader. She lost the August 2022 Republican primary to Harriet Hageman. [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) and [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) (coordinated state-party resolutions ahead of a leadership vote) apply to the mechanism. The scale is not remotely comparable: no arrest, exile or violence, only the loss of an internal party post and, later, a primary election.

## How to spot it

- Ask what happened to a document that criticised the people now setting the party's line. If it was suppressed rather than published and debated, and the target was pressured to deny its significance once it leaked, that is the tell.
- Check whether a doctrinal label ("Trotskyism", "deviation", "revisionism") is doing the work of a specific charge, and whether the same standard was ever applied to the people applying the label.
- Look at who organised the meetings that produced a "unanimous" or lopsided vote, and who had already been excluded from the floor before the count was taken.
- Watch for a binary framing ("X or Leninism") that leaves no room for someone who supports the shared symbol (the party, the revolution, the leader) but disagrees on the specific question.
- When a photograph, party history or official record changes after a leader's fall, compare it against the earliest printed version.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from this page's sourced facts (`make_diagrams_rtp_stalintrotsky.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Lenin's "Testament" reprinted as an underground Left Opposition leaflet, printed at an illegal press in Baku, 1928 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%89%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_(%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%86%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B0_1928_%D0%B3.).jpg), from Soviet archive АПДУДПАР, Ф.12, Оп.2, Д.573 | Public domain (CC0 1.0; Lenin died in 1924, published before 1931) |
| Stalin, Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev at the Kremlin, April 1925 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stalin_Rykov_Kamenev_Zinoviev_1925.jpg), photograph by Nikolai Petrov, first published in *Krasnaya Niva* no. 17, 19 April 1925 | Public domain (photographer died before 1942; published before 1946; PD in Russia and the US) |
| Cover of *Leninism or Trotskyism?* (Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and others), Communist Party USA English edition, 1925 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leninism_or_Trotskyism_(cover).jpg) | Public domain (published before 1931) |
| Politburo members at the 15th Congress of the CPSU(b), first published in *Prozhektor* no. 24 (118), 25 December 1927 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:15th_Congress_of_the_All-Union_Communist_Party_(Bolsheviks).jpg) | Public domain (published before 1964 without copyright renewal; CC Public Domain Mark 1.0) |

### Image gaps

- **Leon Trotsky on the cover of *Time*, 21 November 1927** (a portrait by Yuri Annenkov, published a week after Trotsky's expulsion from the Central Committee), is on Wikimedia Commons and tagged public domain (published before 1931; artist died 1974). It was not hosted here: repeated attempts to fetch the file from this environment returned "too many requests" from the Wikimedia media servers, and the attempt was not repeated indefinitely to avoid disrupting Commons' service. It remains an easy addition if fetched separately.
- **Lenin's original typed or handwritten "Letter to the Congress".** No openly licensed scan of the original document, as opposed to the 1928 underground leaflet reprint used above, was found; Soviet-era originals held in RGASPI (the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History) are not known to be under an open licence.
- **The retouched 1920 Sverdlov Square photograph with Trotsky and Kamenev removed.** Already hosted and sourced on the archive's [Glavlit and the retouched photographic record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-glavlit-photo-retouching/) page; not duplicated here to avoid repeating the same file across two pages.
- **The 7 November 1927 opposition demonstrations and their suppression in Moscow and Leningrad.** No openly licensed photograph was found; contemporary press photographs of the clashes, where they survive, are held by Russian state or private archives without a clear open licence.
- **Trotsky's forced removal from his Moscow apartment (17 January 1928) and his deportation from Odessa (February 1929).** No openly licensed photograph of either event was found.

## Sources

- V. I. Lenin, "Letter to the Congress" ("Lenin's Testament"), dictated 23-25 December 1922 with a postscript of 4 January 1923; English translation widely reprinted, e.g. [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/).
- "On the Results of the Discussion and on the Petty-Bourgeois Deviation in the Party", resolution of the 13th Conference of the RCP(b), 16-18 January 1924.
- J. V. Stalin, *The Foundations of Leninism*, lectures delivered at Sverdlov University, April 1924, published in *Pravda*, April-May 1924; English translation [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/).
- L. D. Trotsky, "The Lessons of October", preface to *1917: The History of the Russian Revolution*, vol. 3, 1924.
- J. V. Stalin, "Trotskyism or Leninism?", speech of 19 November 1924, in *Works*, vol. 6; English translation [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/11/19.htm).
- J. Stalin, G. Zinoviev and L. Kamenev, *Leninism or Trotskyism?* (New York: Workers Party of America, 1925).
- L. D. Trotsky, *The New Course* (1923; English translation, New Park Publications, 1956).
- L. D. Trotsky, *My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography* (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930).
- Max Eastman, *Since Lenin Died* (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1925).
- Isaac Deutscher, *The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929* (Oxford University Press, 1959).
- Isaac Deutscher, *The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940* (Oxford University Press, 1963).
- Robert Service, *Trotsky: A Biography* (Harvard University Press, 2009).
- Robert Service, *Stalin: A Biography* (Harvard University Press, 2004).
- Robert Service, *Lenin: A Biography* (Harvard University Press, 2000).
- E. H. Carr, *The Interregnum, 1923-1924* (Macmillan, 1954).
- E. H. Carr, *Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929*, vol. 2 (Macmillan, 1969).
- Sheila Fitzpatrick, *Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s* (Oxford University Press, 1999).
- David King, *The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia* (Canongate/Metropolitan Books, 1997), for the retouched-photograph practice this page's later stages fed into (see [Glavlit and the retouched photographic record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-glavlit-photo-retouching/)).
- William Taubman, *Khrushchev: The Man and His Era* (W. W. Norton, 2003), for the same-method test.
- KCNA (Korean Central News Agency), statement announcing Jang Song-thaek's expulsion and prosecution, 9 December 2013 (reported by Reuters, BBC and other wire services, 9-13 December 2013), for the "Then and now" comparison.
- Wyoming Republican Party, resolution of censure against Representative Liz Cheney, 6 February 2021; House Republican Conference, vote to remove Cheney as Conference chair, 12 May 2021 (reported by the Associated Press and other wire services), for the same-method test.