Lenin

One assumes that you are asking this as a school assignment, in which case, try to get the English language correct:

"When Lenin wrote his testament in December, 1922, why were his views disregarded?

The Russian Revolution in March, 1917 (known to them as the February revolution, because they still used the Julian calendar) was made by the women in the munitions factories at Petrograd (St. Petersburg)--it caught the Bolshevik organizers in the factories completely flat-footed. Not only did they have no control of events, they had forbidden any demonstrations. But the women marched to the heart of the city along the Nevsky Prospekt demanding bread (a common cry in European uprisings), and when the "Pharoahs," the secret police, called upon the Cossacks to intervene, they did nothing. The police got the Hell out of Dodge then, because they knew their lives weren't worth a plugged-nickel at that point.

The most successfully active Bolsheviks had been those in the Army and the Navy. Petrograd was originally ruled by the Soldiers and Sailors Soviet (soviet is simply a Russian term for a kind of committee), and even when a provisional government was formed under Kerensky, the Petrograd Soviet continued to sit, and it ignored the Provisional Government when it didn't approve of its actions. The western allies pressured Russian to continue the war, and as Kerensky had replied upon a center-right party, known as the Cadets, to form his government, he gave in. The Tsarist government had gotten rid of known Bolsheviks in the factories by shipping them to the front, which enabled them to organize the Army as they had already done in the Navy. Events closed in on Kerensky, and when General Kornilov's attempt at a coup d'etat failed, his days were numbered.

Leon Trotsky was already in Petrograd, but had been told by Lenin to keep a low profile. The Germans had decided to destabilize their enemy if possible, and shipped Lenin from Switzerland to the Baltic coast, from which he took ship for Finnland--this was in April, 1917. He accused people such as Stalin and Trotsky of betraying socialism. He then arrived in Petrograd at a time when discontent was high. Because of his association with the Cadets, it was easy to convince the people with propaganda suggesting that Kerensky had had a hand in Kornilov's attempt to overthrow the government to re-install the Tsar. He was already immensely unpopular for continuing the war--people wanted out of the war, and didn't give a tinker's damn for the western allies.

The stage was therefore set for the October Revolution (November, 1917--but recall that they still used a different calendar), which was the Bolshevik Revolution. With Lenin now in Petrograd, using the apparatus set up by Trotsky, it was actually a rather quick and simple action, accompanied by very little violence. Stalin and Trotsky were eager to redeem themselves in Lenin's eyes by their obdience to his dictates, and it was all over in about a week.

But this left Petrograd in the control of the Petrograd Soviet. The Moscow Soviet had largely supported Kornilov, not because they were necessarily Tsarist, but because there was more than two centuries of burning resentment against Petrograd (St. Petersburg before the war, the Emperor Petr Alexeevitch had founded the city, and transferred the governemnt there from Moscow in 1703--he hated Moscow and its people, for reasons which i won't go into here). The Bolsheviks were just one wing of the Social Democratic Labor Party, and they were not the only revolutionary party on the scene. Fanya Kaplan (also known as Dora Kaplan) was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party--which had allied itself to the Peasant Party, and agreed to a redistribution of land--and was sufficiently dissatisfied with the Bolshevik attempt to control Russia that she shot Lenin in 1918.

Lenin survived the gunshot wound, but he was easily tired by his daily work thereafter, and he had become disillusioned with many of his lieutenants. In the Petrograd Soviet, people like Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Maxim Litvinov had gained sufficient authority that they saw little reason to kowtow to Lenin or Stalin, or the Moscow Soviet. The ease with which Lenin had used the charge of a lack of socialist orthodoxy to whip the Bolsheviks in Petrograd who were not on the Soviet in 1917 into line was a lesson not lost on Stalin.

Marx had denied that the true socialist revolution could take place in Russia. This was parly because of a snotty attitude toward Russians by Germans, and partly based on his ideology, which claimed that the worker's paradise could only be founded in a fully industrial state. Lenin had become discouraged during and after the civil war with the lack of progress in establishing the proletariate state, and had envisioned the New Economic Program, which would allow contacts with foreign capitalists and some internal, private capitalist enterprise. He decided that Russia would have to become a fully industrial society before genuine Marxism could be implemented.

Stalin was far less of a theorist. He was, however, a superb street politician, and quite a thug. He used the obstreperous nature of the Petrograd Soviet to keep the Central Committee in an uproar, while planning the ultimate demise of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Litvinov, and he also planned to destroy the Social Revolutionaries and the Peasant Party. By the time Lenin died, Stalin had long lost any interest in implementing Lenin's NEP, and was solely focused on his own rise to power. Trotsky, who had made the Red Army into a mighty force in the badly destabilized world of eastern Europe after 1919, was to be driven from the Central Committee. The powerful members of the Petrograd (now renamed Leningrad) Soviet were to be dealt with (many had been sent west on economic missions to France and England, providing Stalin a basis for eventually challenging their orthodoxy before the Central Committee--he would allege that they had betrayed the revolution). The Social Revolutionaries/Peasant Party and the peasants demanding private ownership of land were to be dealt with--he instinctively understood that once land is distributed to the peasants, they want the revolution to end (look up Kulaks+Stalin).

By the time Lenin died, he was simply no longer a significant player in the vicious and largely behind-the-scenes political power struggle going on in Russia. His increasing drift into theoretical realms and economic planning as his health deteriorated after 1918, while Stalin and others fought for control of the Central Committee, further marginalized him. By the time of his death, Lenin simply no longer mattered in the power politics of the Soviet Union, and none of his theoretical constructs meant anything to Stalin and his hatchet man Beria than convenient means to indict opponents for revolutionary betrayal.

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You can find most of the detailed information you will need online. However, picking up and reading actual, hold-in-your hand books is still useful, too. So if you are not just trying to dispense with an annoying assignment, and truly wish to know something of a fascinating and crucially important phase in the history of the world, then i cannot recommend to highly Ten Days that Shook the World, John Reed, New York, 1922. Reed was The New York Times correspondent (stringer, really) for revolutionary events, and he was present in Petrograd for the October Revolution. He is an invaluable source in a brief and highly readable format for all the key players and the political parties in 1917. Ayn Rand was also in Petrograd then, but she was there as a photographer, and she grew up to become a politically conservative hack writer, so she hasn't much worthwhile to read on the subject.

It is really rather meaningless in context, because Stalin's intent was complete personal power with state control of all aspects of life. The Social Revolutionaries and the Peasant Party had been largely successful in distributing sufficiently large tracts of land to agrarian peasants for the purposes of commercial agriculture. Stalin recognized that when either the peasant or the middle class have a propertied stake in society, they want revolution to end. The term "kulak" is a propaganda term--it means "fist," it is older than the Bolshevik revolution, dating back, in fact, to before the 1861 emanicipation of the serfs. It means "fist" as in tight-fisted, and was a term used to paint land-owning peasants as greedy skinflints and usurers who were becoming the new capitalist oppressors after the fall of the Imperial government and the aristocracy. It was propaganda directed at the urban population, and that portion of rural populations which had, even if only grudgingly, accepted collectivization. The quote you have from Stalin is really a signal to the Central Committee that any attempt to resist his policy toward those land-owning peasants who would not cooperate in collectivization would be considered a rejection of orthodox socialist doctrine. The members of the Central Committee, and of all the regional soviets, were smart enough to know that he had already and would again use an allegation of the betrayal of socialist orthodoxy as an excuse to eliminate anyone. That quote puts party members on notice, it has nothing to do with those alleged to the "Kulaks," per se. It was in 1930 that millions of peasants were either killed outright, alleged to have violently resisted collectivization, or were deported, often to death by starvation. Stalin and Beria didn't give a damn what the peasants thougth, their only concerns with socialist orthodoxy was with its use for their own personal, political ends, and by 1929, the members of the Central Committee and the regional soviets well understood that.

Edit: My remarks are unclear--yes, it eventually has to do with the alleged "Kulaks," but it is a statement made for the ears of the party faithful, and not the peasants.

thanks,so you can confirm it is more to do with Collectivism than anything this statement??