/marx/ - Marxism

First, addressing the second image, the decision to embalm Lenin's body was supported by many persons, not just Stalin, so it's fairly dishonest to attribute it to him. As far as building a cult around Lenin went, Zinoviev was far more guilty of this than anyone else at the time, outright comparing him to Christ and the Bolsheviks as his Apostles.

Second, addressing the first image and your claim that "Stalin liquidated nearly everyone who was in the head of the party in Lenin's time," one needs to ask what the actual *deeds* of these people were, not what positions they happened to occupy. Can you name the "founders" of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party? Those few delegates who, in an apartment in 1898, technically laid the foundations for its subsequent activity? Very few can, and for good reason: most of them degenerated politically not long afterwards or were themselves on shaky ground to begin with (one delegate was from the Bund, a petty-bourgeois group.) No one would think of upholding them just because they were "old Russian social-democrats" or whatever.

Likewise one needs to look at some of those in that first picture: Trotsky spent the better part of two decades attacking Lenin as a dictator and, in Lenin's words, posing as a "leftist" while helping the right. Zinoviev and Kamenev were denounced by Lenin as strike-breakers of the revolution for leaking out plans for the insurrection to the press. Rykov also opposed carrying out the revolution and was associated with the right-wing of the party before and after 1917. As for Shaumyan ("Shomyan"), Smilga, Nogin, Dzerzhinsky and Uritsky, they died either in 1918-1919 or a few years aftewards, Stalin had nothing to do with their deaths (in fact Dzerzhinsky, in ill health, died shortly after delivering a speech denouncing the Trots.)

History is full of people who degenerated politically. Plekhanov went from being the "Father of Russian Marxism" to ending his days as an opponent of the Bolsheviks, although this did not negate his earlier work as both Lenin and Stalin recognized. The same was the case with Kautsky (the "Pope of Marxism" at one point) and with many others who appeared revolutionary in one period and reformist, opportunist or even outright counter-revolutionary in another period.

As for Katyn:
"Millions of Poles were killed in German death camps throughout the war, and with considerably less sustained outcry from the London government. Indeed, only that very month the Germans were annihilating some 50000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion, and far less was heard from London on this matter. Katyn was an infinitely more sensitive issue because the men killed there, as Polish underground leader Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski described them, 'had been the elite of the Polish nation . . .,' that is to say, the friends and family of the exiles in London. Whoever destroyed the officers at Katyn had taken a step towards implementing a social revolution in Poland, and on the basis of class solidarity, the London Poles felt one officer was worth many Jews or peasants."
(Gabriel Kolko. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945. New York: Random House. 1968. p. 105.)

Many of those shot were also accused of having been behind the mistreatment and/or killing of Soviet POWs during the 1920 war. It's a silly "moralistic" attack that anti-communists always make, just like you're supposed to cry out for the "young patriots" of Batista's army who were "slaughtered" by the insurgents upon liberating Havana.

As for "chang[ing] the parties structure so much that the development of bureaucracy was a natural result" Lenin, Stalin, and other Bolsheviks were already alert as to the dangers of bureaucratic inroads and regularly complained about them from the first days of Soviet power. The purges themselves, as noted by Getty, Thurston and other historians, had an anti-bureaucratic character. As Lenin said in 1921, "It will take decades to overcome the evils of bureaucracy. It is a very difficult struggle, and anyone who says we can rid ourselves of bureaucratic practices overnight by adopting anti-bureaucratic platforms is nothing but a quack with a bent for fine words."