The struggle to succeed Lenin was a turning point of the Russian revolution. Lenin's death in 1924 gave way to a fierce struggle for power developed among the members of the Politburo (the ruling body of the Communist Party which decided its policies) who had to choose which of them should take his place. The main contestants for the leadership in this crisis were Stalin and Trotsky who developed an ideological and political clash that was about to change the direction of the Russian history. In this crisis it is a question whether it was Trotsky's poor political judgment or Stalin's superior grasp of practical politics that was decisive factor.
The Politburo in 1924 consisted of seven men. They were not a united body. Over the previous years they had split into two groups, the Rightists and the left Opposition. Lenin was the stabilizer between the two groups. He hoped there could be collective rule in order to prevent a split within the Party. Lenin's death seemed to be the starting point of the rise of factionalism within the party.
Lenin had doubts about both Right and Left. At the end of 1922 he wrote a letter to the Party congress, outlining his ideas and giving his opinions about the members of the Politburo. In this letter also known as his "Testament" Lenin wrote that the main danger facing them all was a split in the Party. He thought that Trotsky and Stalin were chiefly to blame for this.
The Rightists (Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov) believed that the government must continue Lenin's New Economic Policy for at least the next twenty years. Bukharin hoped that NEP would encourage the peasants to grow more food and that townspeople would get jobs in the factories. Gradually, both peasants and townspeople would become prosperous.
The Left Opposition, consisting of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, strongly opposed continuing the NEP. They believed that USSR must be turned into an industrial country as quickly as possible.