Stalin reportedly brushed off the word Stalinism as dangerous flattery
When his associate Lazar Kaganovich proposed swapping the slogan Long Live Leninism for Long Live Stalinism, Stalin reportedly called it excessive, suspecting such praise could one day be turned against him. He was right: Nikita Khrushchev, an eager user of the term, later led the campaign of de-Stalinization.
Stalinism describes the way Joseph Stalin governed the Soviet Union from 1927 until his death in 1953, and the satellite states from 1944. Its features included a one-man police state, breakneck industrialisation, forced collectivisation of farming, a personality cult, and the demand that foreign communist parties put Moscow's interests first. Stalin had been general secretary of the party since April 1922.
Its intellectual core was socialism in one country, which Stalin developed in late 1924 after Lenin's death. Most Bolshevik leaders had seen the 1917 revolution as a springboard for world revolution, but revolutions had failed elsewhere, even in former imperial territories such as Poland, Finland and the Baltic states. Stalin argued socialism could be built inside Russia alone, though its final victory still needed the defeat of capitalism abroad. The idea blended Marxist, Leninist and nationalist themes, and served as a weapon against Leon Trotsky's rival doctrine of permanent revolution. At first colleagues across the party, from Zinoviev and Kamenev on the left to Bukharin on the right, regarded it as close to heresy; once the Bukharin faction was defeated, Stalin faced no organised opposition.
Industrialisation was justified by the country's economic lag behind the West and the perceived threat from enemies at home and abroad. It came with mass urbanisation that turned villages into industrial towns, and Stalin pragmatically imported Western and American expertise and workers to speed it up. Collectivisation of farms accompanied it.
The human cost was immense. The regime targeted anyone it branded an enemy of the people, from political dissidents and non-Russian nationalists to better-off peasants known as kulaks. Mass arrests, show trials, executions and forced labour in the gulag camps followed, most notoriously in the Great Purge and the campaign against the kulaks, alongside persecution of religion. Historians still disagree over whether Stalinism was a natural outgrowth of Leninism and Marxism or a break from them.
Source: Stalinism
