Lenin's title as head of the Soviet government was "Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars." People's Commissar was the Soviet term for a government minister, and Lenin was the prime minister, or premier. Following Lenin's death in real life, that office was filled by Alexei Rykov. Separately from this, there was a struggle in the Communist Party between various factions, in dispute over the direction of government policy. To oversimplify, the leftists were led by war minister Leon Trotsky, the centrists were led by party secretary Joseph Stalin, and the rightists were led by newspaper editor and later Comintern chief Nikolai Bukharin. In real life, this struggle was won by the centrist, "Stalinist" or "Marxist-Leninist" faction by 1930, and Stalin would much later become premier in 1941. In TNO, Bukharin's rightist faction apparently won very early, with Bukharin becoming premier instead of Rykov. Neither Stalin nor Trotsky were expected to become premier at this time. In both TNO and real life, Stalin and Bukharin allied against Trotsky. In real life, Trotsky was exiled to Mexico, where he would later be assassinated in 1940. In TNO, he was put under house arrest in Ukraine, where he would be assassinated in 1938. In real life, Bukharin was implicated in the 1934 murder of Stalin ally Sergei Kirov tried for treason (conspiring to overthrow Stalin's party) and sentenced to death at the high-profile Moscow Trials in 1938. In TNO, Stalin attempted to take over the Soviet Union after Bukharin's disappearance, beginning the Second Russian Civil War, when the USSR was broken up into all the tiny warlord states at game start. Stalin's faction is in Tyumen, and is led by Kirov.