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POLITICAL IDEOLOGIESSTALINISM

JOSEPH STALIN 1879-1953Russian revolutionary and leader of the Soviet Union, 1924–53. Stalin, the son of a shoemaker, was expelled from his seminary for revolutionary activities and joined the Bolsheviks in 1903.He became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1922, and after winning the struggle for power following Lenin's death he established a monolithic command–administrative system, sustained by widespread terror and a cult of personality.

SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRYSoviet communism was no less deeply influenced by the rule of Joseph Stalin than that of Lenin. Indeed more so, as the Soviet Union was more profoundly affected by Stalin's ‘second revolution’ in the 1930s than it had been by the October Revolution. Stalin's most important ideological shift was to embrace the doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’, initially developed by Bukharin. Announced in 1924, this proclaimed that the Soviet Union could succeed in ‘building socialism’ without the need for international revolution. This clearly distinguished him from his rival for power, Leon Trotsky (and, indeed, from Lenin and Marx), who maintained an unswerving commitment to internationalism.

THE FIVE YEARS PLANAfter consolidating himself in power, however, Stalin oversaw a dramatic economic and political upheaval, commencing with the announcement of the first Five Year Plan in 1928. Under Lenin's New Economic Policy, introduced in 1921, the Soviet Union had developed a mixed economy in which agriculture and small-scale industry remained in private hands, while the state controlled only what Lenin called the ‘commanding heights of the economy’. Stalin's Five Year Plans, however, brought about rapid industrialization as well as the swift and total eradication of private enterprise.

ECONOMIC STALINISMFrom 1929 agriculture was collectivized, and Soviet peasants were forced at the cost of literally millions of lives to give up their land and join state or collective farms. Economic Stalinism therefore took the form of state collectivization or ‘state socialism’. The capitalist market was entirely removed and replaced by a system of central planning, dominated by the State Planning Committee, ‘Gosplan’, and administered by a collection of powerful economic ministries based in Moscow.

NOMENKLATURAMajor political changes accompanied this ‘second revolution’. In order to achieve power, Stalin had exploited his position as general secretary of the Communist Party by ensuring that his supporters were appointed to influential posts within the party apparatus. Party officials were appointed from above by a system known as the nomenklatura, rather than being elected from below. Democratic centralism became less democratic and more centralized, leading to a ‘circular flow of power’ in which the party leader acquired unrivalled authority by virtue of his control over patronage and promotion.

NKVD - SECRET POLICEDuring the 1930s Stalin used this power to brutal effect, removing anyone suspected of disloyalty or criticism in an increasingly violent series of purges carried out by the secret police, the NKVD. The membership of the Communist Party was almost halved, over a million people lost their lives, including all surviving members of Lenin's Politburo, and many millions were imprisoned in labour camps, or gulags. Political Stalinism was therefore a form of totalitarian dictatorship, operating through a monolithic ruling party, in which all forms of debate or criticism were eradicated by terror in what amounted to a civil war conducted against the party itself.

STALIN’S DOCTRINEDespite his voluminous writings, Stalin was not a significant theoretician, Stalinism referring more to a distinctive politico-economic system than to a body of ideas. His ideological heritage flows from the doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’, which dictated the drive for industrialization and collectivization, justified by the need to resist capitalist encirclement and to eliminate the kulaks (rich peasants) as a class. Stalin thus fused a quasi-Marxist notion of class war with an appeal to Russian nationalism.