Essay Database

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 …

…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.