Marxism-Leninism was assembled by Stalin after Lenin was already dead
The doctrine carrying Lenin's name became a distinct movement only after his death in 1924, when Joseph Stalin and his allies took over the Soviet Communist Party and fused Classical Marxism, Bolshevism and Leninism into an official creed. Stalin's 1926 work Concerning Questions of Leninism presented it as a distinct ideology.
Its core claim is that capitalism must be replaced in two stages. A vanguard party, run on democratic centralism, takes power on behalf of the working class and builds a one-party state that owns the means of production and suppresses opposition, supposedly clearing the way for a classless, stateless communist society. Stalin also broke with the Western Marxist idea that socialism needed a world revolution first, arguing instead for socialism in one country, a transition signalled by the opening five-year plan and a new constitution in 1936.
The pattern of one-party rule began earlier. In the election for Russia's Constituent Assembly the Bolsheviks won 23.3 percent against 37.6 percent for the Socialist Revolutionaries, and on 6 January 1918 a committee dominated by Lenin, previously a supporter of multi-party elections, issued a decree dissolving the assembly.
After the Second World War the model spread through Sovietisation, with new communist states copying five-year plans, rapid industrialisation, centralised power and repression. It also fractured. Following Stalin's death in 1953 came adaptations including Titoism, Maoism, Guevarism, Ho Chi Minh Thought and Hoxhaism, and the rivalries produced the Tito-Stalin, Sino-Soviet and Sino-Albanian splits. Albania's Enver Hoxha accused Mao of drifting from orthodoxy, partly over China's dealings with the United States. North Korea went its own way entirely; its Marxism-Leninism has been fully replaced by Juche since at least 1974, blending socialism with national feeling and Confucian tradition.
The ideology still guides ruling parties in China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. Scholars disagree about what its economies actually were: some call the Soviet system under Stalin state capitalism, others bureaucratic collectivism, state socialism or a unique mode of production. Critics point to political repression, collectivisation, state atheism and labour camps, while historians argue over whether that record flowed from the ideology itself or from other causes.
Source: Marxism–Leninism
