ABSTRACT
Lenin's death left the Bolshevik Party politically orphaned. Replacing Lenin would have been extremely daunting under any circumstances. Devising coherent policies for dealing with the multiple forms of corruption in the party and the disturbing tendencies in the NEP would have been difficult even with Lenin at the helm. It certainly is indisputable that Stalin's methods of the 1930s, aside from their dreadful human costs, were extremely wasteful, and the Industrialization Debate of the 1920s suggests that far less violent and brutal methods might have achieved impressive results. Socialism required overcoming economic scarcity, and that in turn required a modern industrialized economy. Unfortunately, the capital essential to achieve this was not available. Soviet Russia's backward industry could not produce it. At the top of the rural social structure, the concessions to private peasant enterprise were producing a growing class of prosperous kulaks, whose development indicated to some nervous Bolsheviks that capitalism might overrun the countryside.
