Stalinism

Stalinism

How far was Stalinism the outcome of Leninist political practice?

The political system which existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin was a system of terror. The purges of the 1930s sent millions of Russians to their deaths or to the Gulags, the population was scared of the secret police, the NKVD, the forced collectivization of agriculture had wiped out a part of Russian society, the Kulaks. The show trials of the thirties had firmly established Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union. What requires investigation is how far was this regime of terror a new entity in the Soviet Union or how far it was a continuation the state set up by Lenin after the Russian revolution in 1917.

The regime set up by Lenin did have a secret police, the Cheka and it was authoritarian, especially in the the years after the revolution and the civil war. There was forced grain requisitioning during the period of War Communism and political enemies were exiled. That is by no means in question. The difference is that during the Leninist years there was not the wholesale slaughter of millions of Soviet citizens as there was under Stalin in the 1930s. It can be argued therefore, that Stalinism was partly the outcome of Leninist political practice because there were many similarities between the two regimes. However, the Stalinist system was by no means the inevitable outcome of Leninist political practice when one considers the differences between the two regimes and Stalin's personality compared to that of Lenin. One must also remember that Stalin's path to power was not a simple accession to power when Lenin died and there were other candidates for leader. Stalin had to out manoeuvre figures such as Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev to ...

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...ere is no way that this could have had its basis in Leninism.

The final point about wether Leninism lead to Stalinism was that Lenin, through his testament, made it very clear that he did not see Stalin as fit to lead the Soviet Union. This is of vital importance because it can therefore be argued that because Lenin did not want Stalin to get power the outcome of Leninism should have been anything but Stalinism. The fact that Stalinism did come into being shows that Stalinism was different to Leninism because Stalin was feared by Lenin.

Therefore Stalinism shared some of the same attributes of Leninism. However because of the extreme nature of the terror, Stalin's personal psychological make-up and the fact that Lenin did not want Stalin to succeed him, Stalinism was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the inevitable outcome of Leninist political practice.